Chapter 2420: Priming

Sylas had already noticed that the rat knights weren’t truly growing stronger every time he attacked them. Their Wills continuously leaked into the surrounding world, spreading across the distorted space like a sensory net, and whatever information returned through that contact was immediately reflected through their bodies with something strangely similar to Telekinetic Martial Arts.

That was why every attack met exactly enough resistance to survive it. The rats weren’t adapting after Sylas struck, they were sensing what was coming before the attack properly formed, then using the feedback of the world itself to drag out the level of strength they needed. They were using the attacks they faced as a blueprint for how their bodies should interact with the modern day system and world, as though they had lost the thought processes on how to do that themselves.

If Sylas had to guess, every one of them was already a Legend. Not the sort of Legend Fanelei had been on the Mortal Plane either, but something that had reached that standard on the God Plane and stood at the very peak of it. Their current bodies simply couldn’t express all of that power under ordinary circumstances, so every time their Will touched the world and sensed a greater threat, more of what they already possessed returned.

Trying to overwhelm them with raw strength was pointless.

Oddly enough, Sylas was doing something similar himself. The Void wrapped around his existence and blurred the boundary separating him from Fanelei and Cheri, allowing the three of them to temporarily function more like overlapping layers of a single existence than separate people.

Through that connection, Sylas could draw on Fanelei’s raw A-tier power while reaching even deeper into Cheri, touching the God Aura buried within her and pulling pieces of its weight into himself.

Anywhere else, the process would have ripped them apart. Hell made it possible precisely through what made it so strange, existing between states while somehow resting upon a foundation of absolute stability.

The contradiction gave Sylas room to blur boundaries that normally couldn’t be touched, while the Genesis Forge Ore in his palm anchored those changes through the principles of Hell Rune Creation.

That was the real reason he had brought the two women with him.

Sylas wasn’t a fool, nor had he suddenly become convinced that nothing in existence could threaten him. His brief loss of interest in the world hadn’t come from believing he possessed more raw power than everyone else, but from the much simpler conclusion that he knew enough, understood enough, and had gathered enough resources to deal with whatever situation might come next.

Sylas Grimblade was probably the furthest thing in existence from anyone’s village idiot, and he certainly wasn’t so hungry for women that he needed a few members of the fairer sex following him wherever he went.

He had spent months travelling alongside an old man and a child trapped in the body of a grown man, so he was fairly certain his self-control had survived greater tests than this.

His eyes flashed as the next attack came, but this time his attention wasn’t focused on stopping it.

The rat knight’s Will reached outward first.

Sylas felt the exact moment it touched the world, and rather than blocking that connection, his Will slipped into the same space ahead of it. Lines of emerald light spread across the air, thin at first before curving into complex glyphs that locked together one after another, their edges developing teeth until several enormous Rune formations rotated like interlocked gears.

Will Priming.

Sylas didn’t need to stop the rat from reading the world, he only needed to change what the world told it.

The incoming spear registered as far weaker than it truly was, and the rat knight reacted accordingly, drawing out just enough of its buried strength to deal with what it believed was coming.

A second layer of Runes remained folded beneath the first, hidden behind a false interaction and void so complete that even the surrounding laws seemed convinced the attack carried no greater weight.

Creating something like this should have been absurd.

Sylas wasn’t merely hiding power, he was recreating the relationship between an entire body and the system around it for the briefest instant, accounting for Aether, Will, physical strength, spatial resistance, and the way all of them were interpreted together, through every layer there was. He needed to leave enough room inside that false construction to forge an actual attack as well, yet after rebuilding his own body down to its smallest cells, the problem felt more tedious than impossible.

The real strain came from maintaining Fanelei and Cheri at the same time. Fortunately, he no longer needed most of their power.

Sylas cut the connection down to a fraction of what it had been, and both women immediately felt the pressure on them lessen as the Rune formations around him multiplied. Hundreds of glyphs spread outward in concentric layers, gears rotating within gears as each one attached itself to a different section of the battlefield.

The first rat knight thrust.

Sylas twisted two fingers, and the spear disappeared into folded space before emerging beside another knight whose Will had already been primed to expect an attack far weaker than what was coming. Its shield rose without urgency, the weapon punched straight through it, then continued through armor, ribs, and spine before erupting from its back in a spray of dark blood.

The wounded knight barely had time to understand what had happened before Sylas changed the Priming again.

A second rat swung its axe, but the world told the knight opposite it that almost no power existed behind the strike. The defender caught the blade with one hand, only for its arm to explode at the elbow as the axe continued downward and split through its shoulder, chest, and waist.

Blood fell toward the swarm below.

The surviving knights reacted, their Wills spreading wider as they tried to gather more information, but that only gave Sylas more surface area to work with. His Runeweaver Eyes flashed continuously while emerald and black formations layered across one another, every new attempt to understand him feeding the rats another carefully constructed lie.

Three attacked at once.

Space twisted between them until the first spear entered a rotating ring of glyphs and reappeared beneath the jaw of its own ally, while the third rat was fed an exaggerated reading that made its body pull out far more strength than it needed. Its sword came down with enough force to shatter the surrounding space, missed Sylas entirely, and cleaved through two of its companions when another Rune gear turned half a rotation.

The remaining rats finally began pulling back, but Sylas had already understood too much.

Black rings appeared around the battlefield, each one formed from tightly compressed spatial Runes whose glyphs spun faster until their individual lines blurred together. The centers collapsed inward one after another, forming small black vortices that caught armor, limbs, and weapons before stretching them toward points too narrow for flesh to survive.

One rat lost an arm, another disappeared from the waist upward, while a third was dragged headfirst into a vortex that closed before the rest of its body could follow. Sylas continued changing the Priming beneath them throughout it all, ensuring that each creature sensed just enough strength to respond incorrectly until their own greatest advantage became the reason they died.

The last knight rushed him directly, abandoning every attempt at caution as its Will flooded the world.

Sylas let it read everything it wanted.

A small, simple Rune formed between them, carrying so little power that the rat didn’t even raise its weapon to defend, while hidden beneath it a second formation rotated into alignment. Space compressed to a single point in the center of its skull, then expanded again before the creature could understand the difference.

Its head burst apart, and the body continued forward for several steps before falling toward the sea of rats below.

Sylas watched it disappear into the swarm, then let the rotating Rune formations around him slowly fade.

He looked up toward a distant point, his eyes indifferent and his Will and aura cold. If this was how every challenge in Hell would be... then it would be no challenge at all. if Scurrying Madness wanted to deal with him, it would have to come out personally. But Sylas had a pretty good feeling that that was impossible.