“You understand the situation now, right?” Sylas said calmly, his gaze not paying much attention to the darkness ahead, but instead to the bars before him.
He found that these bars were much more difficult to deal with than the chains he had just shattered. They were embedded into a system that was formed from the entire dungeon, not just the pieces of forged metal before him.
That meant that any structures he disrupted here would be compensated for quite quickly.
‘An interesting system. There’s a flow to it. If I try to disrupt the flow, it’ll react like an elastic band, snapping back at me. Even if I avoid the backlash, the main problem will be the following failure.’
There were two obvious approaches.
The first was to try and shatter the Runes that formed the bars themselves. But as Sylas had already established, that would be compensated for.
The second was to try and remove the bars themselves from the foundation that connected them to the entire dungeon system. But there would be great resistance to that.
It was like trying to remove the middle chain in an anchor holding an entire cruise ship. The tension within it was ridiculous, and even if by some miracle you managed to avoid being turned into a blood mist by the resulting backlash, you would almost certainly fail.
But…
‘If you loosen the chain first, then it’s just a matter of cutting it out and allowing a new connection to be formed between the chain links you just separated it from.’
The words Sylas said made sense, but the actual execution of it was far more difficult.
If Sylas was correct, this prison was meant to hold even D-Grades in captivity. The foundation that this cell was linked to was beyond his imagination. How could he “loosen” something like that?
That was like a normal mortal trying to unwind a rope anchor all on their own. The only way would be having the strength in your arms to pull the ship toward you to loosen the tension, but if you had that sort of strength, you could just snap the chains all on your own in the first place.
Sylas obviously didn’t have that strength.
However, when Sylas had this seemingly impossible thought, his eyes began to glow.
His Will spread out further and further, sinking into the structures and weaving through them.
Every time he came across a D-Grade or E-Grade Rune, there would be a snip at his mind. He was well and truly riding on a razor’s edge right this moment.
Back when Sylas first saw a Gene Rune, his mind had almost been drained. It felt like he was staring at the sun.
This was very similar to that, but amplified several times over. He was walking a tightrope where the drop below was into oblivion.
But he relied on his Rune Spark, feeling out the Runes that were receptive to him ahead of time, and avoiding the ones that didn’t even respond with a nudge.
His Rune Spark was most effective against F-Grade Runes, though he had noticed that there was some minor movement in E-Grade ones. Deciphering the difference wasn’t difficult for Sylas.
In three minutes, Sylas had mapped out the entire dungeon system, making out every F-Grade Rune within. He still didn’t know what his Wisdom stat was at right now, but what he did know for certain was that the UniForm had bumped it up a ridiculous degree. There was simply no way that the former Sylas would have been capable of this.
‘Now, it’s just a matter of… massaging things…’
Sylas just needed a little give, a little push. The structures were far too robust for the entire dungeon to fall. If he tried to shatter the F-Grade Runes now—let alone the fact that that would alert the Sylphs before he wanted them to be—the backlash would be even more severe than just trying to remove his own cell from the structure.
Instead, what he needed to do was exactly what he said—loosen them a bit.
Every Rune had transformations and changes to them. In fact, in the matrix test of the Rune Secret Realms, Sylas had learned about this. Back then, he had to change a formation of Runes so that they would spontaneously collapse into one another.
What Sylas was doing now was the opposite of that. He was changing the configuration of the F-Grade Runes so that they would be in a slightly misaligned position, loosening the structures just enough that he could…
‘Success.’
It seemed as though nothing happened, but Sylas felt his cell almost “power down.” All of a sudden, the bars before him became little more than normal metal.
But now he faced a different problem. The Runes that protected it were gone, but the metal structures that formed it were too sturdy. If they were able to withstand the support of D-Grade Runes, it was only natural that they’d be quite strong as well.
However, as with the F-Grade Runes, there was a weakness.
Sylas’ eyes shifted from the bars to the stone that they connected to. He raised a foot and slammed it down.
After noticing that they were being ignored, the Clypsians stopped asking questions. When they saw that Sylas was actually about to do something so ridiculous, they called out to try and stop him. If Sylas acted too willfully, they would definitely send someone down here. At that point, they’d notice that he broke free and put him in an even more impossible situation to pull himself out of.
But…
CRACK.
The stone broke. Runes spiraled around Sylas’ feet, his Scorpion Warlord Armor forming the First Layer, then the Second, and then the Third.
His body trembled with power as he reached forward.
He grabbed one of the bars and roared, a reverberating might shaking the cell to its very roots.
The Scorned Wraps twitched.
Flames burned to life, and the bar instantly became ash.
D-Grade metal? It didn’t seem to matter at all.