Chapter 2387: Rare [Bonus]

[Bonus thanks to BobtheEngineer <3]

Yamero’s body gave a visible ripple as the spatial Runes composing his scales tightened, and then he began drifting backward without making any attempt to hide what he was doing.

He had known Sylas long enough to recognize the particular sort of silence hanging around him now, and whatever curiosity Yamero had about the woman disappeared beneath the much stronger instinct to be somewhere else.

"I’ll just... uh... I’ll just be up there..."

Space folded around him, and Yamero vanished before reappearing high above the lake, where he could observe without standing anywhere near the direction Sylas was facing.

Sylas didn’t acknowledge his retreat, nor did he answer the woman still standing at the center of the lake. Instead, he reached for the cuffs of his sleeves and began rolling them upward with slow, measured movements.

The Scorned Wraps responded soon afterward, loosening around his hands before unraveling themselves strip by strip. Dark cloth slid from his fingers and wrists until skin that rarely saw sunlight these days glistened beneath the strange radiance of the World of Spirits, while the wraps fell away and coiled near his feet along with their chains.

Sylas flexed his fingers once, studying the woman with the same calm expression he had worn from the beginning.

Yamero felt something constrict through the Runes forming his chest. He couldn’t explain why.

The forest below had already become a world of blades, thin lines carved into trunks, leaves, stones, and even the surface of the lake wherever the woman’s Sword Will passed.

Yet when Yamero focused on Sylas, he realized that none of those marks crossed within three meters of him, as though the Sword Will simply ceased to exist once it approached that invisible boundary.

Sylas’ calligraphy brush slipped from his back next, followed by the scythe, and both weapons buried themselves into the ground several meters away. The movement almost looked sentient and voluntary, enough that Yamero briefly wondered whether even they were scared too.

Sylas closed one hand into a fist, rotated his wrist once, and the quiet crack of his joints traveled through the clearing.

Sword Will recoiled from three meters to four as though pushed away by the echo. There wasn’t some violent collision that shook the forest, but instead a muted dispersal that seemed to wipe them from the world.

The sharpening pressure in the air thinned with them, and for the first time, the woman standing on the lake gave Sylas her complete attention.

He raised his fist... then punched.

There was no explosion, nor even the familiar boom that should have followed a movement carrying that much force. Everything inside the path of his fist instead went strangely still, the lake beneath it softening until its blade-like surface became ordinary water again, while the countless echoes of swords inside the cone of his strike fell silent one after another.

The woman seemed confused when the force reached her, so she just swung casually.

Her sword came down in a casual arc, meeting Sylas’ punch at a distance rather than through any obvious physical contact, and for an instant nothing happened at all.

Then the blade snapped backward violently enough to wrench her shoulder from its socket, the joint bursting free with a wet pop before the momentum continued through her arm.

Flesh tore from the inside of her shoulder outward. The skin beneath her gown split first, followed by muscle and tendon as the entire arm was ripped backward, bright blood spraying across the white cloth and scattering over the lake.

She never released the sword, and that stubborn grip only made the injury worse, leaving her arm hanging from her shoulder by several stretched ribbons of flesh and pale strands of tendon while blood ran down her side in steady streams.

The woman looked at the ruined limb and her head tilted.

There wasn’t even a flicker of pain in her expression, only a faint confusion as though her body had presented her with a result that contradicted something she had been expecting.

"You have Eternal Will." Her gaze returned to Sylas, and the surprise in it became more obvious. "That is... unexpected."

Shhhk.

A different sound entered the forest. It resembled steel dragged across a whetstone.

The Aether surrounding the woman twisted under her Will, losing its original nature as it condensed into countless threads of Sword Will that plunged directly into the mangled remains of her shoulder.

Bone shifted into place, severed muscle drew together, and torn skin closed beneath repeated echoes of sharpening steel until even the blood staining her arm seemed to be sliced away from her existence.

Sylas’ gaze sharpened slightly.

She wasn’t healing in the ordinary sense. It was like she was sharpening the damage out of herself.

The woman’s entire existence had been simplified until Sword Will had become both weapon and body, allowing her to treat injury as little more than an imperfection along the edge of a blade. There was elegance to the idea despite how extreme it was, though Sylas could already see its most obvious weakness.

If her Will lost, everything lost with it.

The woman seemed to understand the same thing, but rather than becoming cautious, the realization slowly spread a smile across her face.

"In that case, I don’t need to hold back for the sake of finding a decent battle."

Sylas finally understood how she measured strength.

Tiers meant almost nothing to her. If someone’s Will stood beneath hers, she cut them down, and that simple standard had likely made most opponents worthless long before she ever raised her sword.

Rather than overwhelm them immediately, she restrained her own Will and compressed its edge inward, giving weaker enemies enough room to entertain her before the inevitable end.

She wouldn’t need to do that now.

She began to grin wildly.

Her hair lifted from behind her and began dancing through the air despite the complete absence of wind, while the necklace around her neck shook violently against her skin.

A thick scent of blood spread across the lake as she raised the Executioner’s Blade before her, and somewhere inside her chest came the unmistakable ring of steel being drawn across steel.

Her Will rose.

Her Marked Will shattered beneath it almost immediately. Then Fragmented Infinite followed.

Then False Infinite.

Then True Infinite.

Yamero’s Runes tightened high above the lake as each boundary vanished almost as soon as it appeared, while Sylas remained where he was with his bare hands hanging loosely at his sides.

The woman seemed prepared to stop at True Infinite for half a heartbeat, but her grin widened instead, and another violent sharpening sound tore through the forest.

Her Will broke through again.

False Eternal.

The pressure exploded outward with enough force to flatten the lake into a perfect mirror and bend the surrounding forest away from her, as though an invisible detonation had erupted from the center of the world.

Her head tilted slowly to one side while her grin stretched into a crescent so wide that it almost seemed to split her face.

"Maybe even this won’t be as much fun as I want."

The Sword Will around her accelerated again.

"It is rare that I get to go all out."

False Eternal cracked.

True Eternal appeared for only an instant...

And then her Will tore through that boundary too.