Sylas couldn’t even cough up the mouthful of blood pooling in his mouth. Expanding and contracting his chest felt like nothing more than a dream at this point, but he still reacted quickly, trying to pull on his Will.
But then he found the issue.
The higher you flew into the atmosphere, the more difficult it was to use one’s Will. The limit of one’s telekinesis was often a measure of just how strong one’s Will was.
It had to be remembered that Will could only display its might in relation to something else. If there was nothing to apply force on, it was like trying to swim through the void of space. If there was no world, there was no telekinesis to be used.
The Dungeon had chosen to counter Sylas by essentially dropping him in a void where his Will had nothing to exert itself on. There were no Runes to forge or manipulate or Spark because there was…
Nothing at all.
The Mesh of Reality was nothing more than the interaction of Runes and the laws of the universe causing the spontaneous formation of people called life and nature. If there was no world, there was obviously none of that to observe, and as such, Sylas was cast into true darkness.
Time seemed to slow for Sylas, and the scent of death filled his nostrils. It felt helpless in ways that were hard to describe, a complex dark web of feelings pressing their sticky feelers onto his heart and soul, latching on and cancerously spreading through the cavity of his chest.
It was a feeling that he had felt more than once before.
But ever since that first time—that moment in the volcano that forced him to face the most pathetic parts of himself—he had been looking to stamp it out.
When he ran into those feelings now, he didn’t feel fear. He felt a desire to crush it in his palm, to bare his teeth and shred it apart, to sink his claws into it and rend it into pulp and flesh.
This was the sort of credit that Sylas would never give himself, credit that he never felt like he deserved.
He wanted to be perfect, he wanted to be flawless. He didn’t want to have weaknesses he had to overcome because he didn’t want to have weaknesses in the first place.
It was why he ran from Cassarae. It was why he deemed the world boring without even attempting to reach its peak first. It was why Ulrik had enraged him so much, and why—although he spoke the words he did to Israeal for no reason other than to suppress his Will—
They had come from the depths of his heart nonetheless.
This was the true Sylas—the Sylas that Cassarae could see but he couldn’t. The Sylas who saw a challenge and sought to overcome it. A Sylas who could chisel out his own weaknesses rather than allowing them to cripple him.
A Sylas that found a light at the end of the tunnel even when others might think themselves to have hit the end of the road.
His Progenitor Flames Abilities were useless. Glassvolt Throne wouldn’t work because there was nothing for his Will to latch onto, nothing for his understanding to comprehend. His telekinesis wasn’t working for the same reason, and his body wasn’t moving well enough for his Aether or his Skills and Gene Talents to make any sort of meaningful difference.
Everything had been stripped from him and he had nothing left to give.
Almost nothing.
Sylas summoned his Hibernation Realm, the sudden change forcing the laws of the Dungeon to acknowledge it.
At the very same instant, he pulled on the Runes that came from it, his Rune Spark Mastery working in overdrive as his Scorpion Warlord Armor took shape once again.
The First Layer, and then the Second—each one happening so quickly it seemed like the panels of the armor had slipped through the void of space to slap themselves onto Sylas’ body.
BANG!
There was a flicker in Sylas’ eyes the moment he felt a blow slam into his head. He couldn’t see, but he could feel. The blow rushed into him, nearly shattering his head, only for the abilities of the armor to kick in, dispersing it through all of its bits and pieces.
The first time Sylas had summoned his Scorpion Warlord Armor, not only had he done it just for the briefest of instances, but he had only used the First Layer, only using a minimal amount of the Second so that [Earth Escape] would work.
This time, he went right to the Second Layer, overloading the Dungeon and leaving it taken aback. It thought it had already understood Sylas’ full range of abilities, but it didn’t.
In fact, even as it quickly adjusted now, it still didn’t.
All of a sudden, Sylas went from being unable to even stand to slamming a palm against the ground, flipping through the air, and landing on his feet away from a follow-up attack on Voryx’s part.
Sylas still couldn’t see a single thing, but he anchored himself into the ground, activating Mixed Demonic Arts. A sixth sense formed in his mind, and though he couldn’t see Voryx… he could almost feel him.
He latched onto Voryx’s Will, using his Comprehension as a proxy to understand and predict his movements. And in that same instant of time, Sylas found a new use for Temporal Delay.
The pressure of the Dungeon increased as Voryx’s third blow approached. Sylas was almost forced to his knees again.
Almost.
Just as the Dungeon was about to adapt, Sylas swapped out his Scorpion Warlord Armor in the blink of an eye. The first time, he drew the First and Second Layer to 85% Mastery. This time, he drew it to 86%.
The suppression of the Dungeon failed, and Sylas slipped out of the way of Voryx’s attack, slamming a fist into his gut and quickly shifting to an elbow across the face.
Voryx’s head snapped to the side, a tooth flying out from his mouth.
