He wasn’t one to celebrate victories or achievements. Sometimes he felt that the proportion of pride he felt when he did do something great was just an admission that he thought of the possibility of failure at some earlier date.
Was it only natural to account for failure? Of course it was.
But Sylas hadn’t even celebrated the complete Summoning of Earth. After everything he had been through, after all the trials and tribulations, he had always felt better just moving on to the next challenge, the next mountain to climb.
He stood as victor not only because of his blood and sweat, but because it was only natural. If there could only be one winner, then it only made sense that it was him.
The Dungeon rumbled with fury around him, its Runes whizzing about in a violent torrent that seemed to want to suppress Sylas again and again, however all such attempts fell completely on deaf ears. It was as though the Dungeon had lost its ability to exert its influence.
This was the last thing that Sylas had noticed.
If the Dungeon was purely only here for training, it was odd that it would allow five to enter. It felt that such a Dungeon was more naturally left to a one-person entry limit, that way it could tailor everything properly.
So why five?
Or, rather… the more important question to ask is: if it insisted on having a five-person entry limit, what changes would it have to make to its foundation to accommodate that?
The Dungeon had to constantly twist and change things around so that the level of difficulty of two opposing parties was equal. It wasn’t until it started bending its rules that it could attack Sylas at all and make his journey far harder than it was for the others.
But the final clue was the void that formed around Sylas, and why Mixed Demonic Arts was the perfect counter to it all.
The Dungeon was reading their Wills in order to understand what was happening and react accordingly. Then it was balancing the changes to its environments so that the strains on their Wills were equal and opposite.
But if there were no opponents left for it to balance Sylas against, it was as though a hole had formed in its foundation, constantly leaking energy away.
Without an opponent to thrust Sylas up against, it didn’t know how to calculate things anymore, and it certainly couldn’t go as far as breaking its rules and simply killing Sylas, as that wouldn’t be allowed in its programming.
In the end, there was only one person that stood on top, and it was Sylas’ final move that had sealed the deal.
What was the most powerful trump card in Sylas’ arsenal? Maybe one might say his Scorned Wraps? Or maybe it was Glassvolt Throne that allowed him to ignore the limits of his Aether? Maybe Primal Fury that allowed him to strengthen himself based on his Rage?
No.
In Sylas’ estimation, his absolute strongest trump card was actually his Warlord Poison, his self-created 100 Foundation Glassvolt Rune.
That Poison… it wasn’t just a cancer to people, or just their Wills, but instead the world itself. It imposed Sylas’ Will onto the world in ways that it could not fathom, suppressing it and crushing it in one go.
The moment it appeared, the Dungeon couldn’t save the Thryskai even if it wanted to. The only way the Dungeon could have stopped it was by attacking his Scorpion Warlord Armor itself. But because Sylas had hidden the Layers…
When would it have had the time to react to it? He had acted too fast, too decisively, and just when the Dungeon thought that he was struggling with finding a path to kill Voryx and as such had tried to turn to Jala instead…
He killed both of them almost simultaneously.
And now, with his tail flickering and swaying, he stood as the lone victor.
’Will it trap me in here?’ Sylas thought, looking up.
It was hard to tell. This Dungeon that had such a main focus… there would be no rewards or BOSSES to fight. How ironic would it be if even after all of this, he still ended up getting screwed over?
As far as Sylas was concerned, this was already the second time he had claimed victory here; it was just that the first time he had done too well and ended up destroying the Clan above the Kaelthar instead of the Kaelthar themselves.
Compared to that, another setback felt like nothing at all.
But as though sensing his thoughts, the Dungeon finally stopped rumbling, as though it realized that it couldn’t do anything to stop or change the situation any longer.
After a long while, large swaths of green energy flooded into Sylas—a reward he hadn’t gotten since the very first of the rounds he won. But this time, it was overwhelming.
’I see…’
It had pushed the difficulty up to the point that even Sylas could hardly handle it. Then, after the others had already been killed, it tried to spike the difficulty again several times, but there was no way for it to latch onto Sylas properly, so it had run to the end of its abilities.
As Sylas had said, it could twist and bend its rules, but it couldn’t break them. Even while it was targeting Sylas, it was mostly doing so within the confines of its laws.
And now, it was time to pay.
Sylas found the injuries to his body were rapidly healing, and at the same time, his foundation was being profoundly deepened in ways he didn’t expect to happen… not in this galaxy, and certainly not after he had only recently become a member of a D-Grade Race.
But as the energy continued and the Dungeon withered away, Sylas realized two things.
First… this just might be related to his new Luck.
And second… after this finished, he would likely not just be any normal D-Grade Race, but amongst the very best of them.
