Chapter 2452: Heaven’s Answer (3) [Bonus]

[Bonus thanks to TheHonoredOne69 <3]

The Omnimous disappeared from beside Alex and Nathan and reappeared within his telekinetic grasp before whatever lesson it had been giving them could finish. Its surface awakened as it registered the environment around Sylas, but he didn’t waste time explaining anything when Astral Stutter could communicate what he needed with far greater precision.

The Sacred ability reached into the sky and began reproducing what his Runeweaver Eyes saw, and then reaching into the future.

Astral Echoes formed around the Omnimous in dense layers, preserving each Rune’s exact position relative to the structures surrounding it while Temporal Delay supplied the sequence of their changes through time. Sylas wasn’t describing the lightning or reducing it to some simpler language. He was transcribing its structure almost exactly, allowing the Omnimous to receive a model of relationships too numerous for his conscious mind to organize alone.

The construct caught the flow and began working through it immediately.

Patterns raced across its surface as repeated structures were grouped together, dependencies isolated, and thousands of apparently separate interactions compressed into families of related changes.

The processed information flowed back toward Sylas through their connection, slipping beneath deliberate thought until his subconscious began pairing the Omnimous’ organization with everything his Runeweaver Eyes already understood.

Something inside him aligned. Sylas didn’t stop to consciously understand the answer. With his new speed of thought, his subconscious was more than enough.

His Unravelling Pupils changed focus as the Wills buried inside the descending lightning separated into distinct structures before him, and his own Will surged upward through the weaknesses exposed between them. Dozens of critical Foundations collapsed almost together, fractures spreading across the enormous strike until the white-gold mass split from one horizon to the other.

The heavens broke apart above him.

What had been one world-ending pillar became dozens of vast rivers of lightning, violet and crimson flashing along the torn edges while their unified Will collapsed with the structure binding them together.

Each fragment still stretched for kilometers and carried enough power to erase cities, but the singular pressure that had made the original strike feel inevitable had finally been destroyed.

The first fragment crashed into Sylas before he could finish shifting his weight, Dragon scales exploding from his shoulder to his hip as heat tore through the flesh beneath. Pain followed the damage a fraction later, deep and immediate, but the second strike arrived before his body could process the first, punching through his ribs and forcing every muscle across his torso into a violent contraction.

Then the rest reached him.

Lightning entered wounds that hadn’t begun healing yet, flooding exposed nerves until pain became a continuous presence.

Bones shattered beneath one impact only to grind against half-reconstructed joints during the next. Blood boiled inside ruptured vessels. Torn muscle pulled hard with what strength they had left, only to tear themselves free from bone.

What remained of his damaged Phoenix wing disintegrated beneath the storm, and the other survived only long enough to spread halfway before another river of lightning tore through it.

Sylas barely remained conscious while his body was thrown across kilometers of ruined land, crashing through a mountain already softened into blackened Glass before another strike caught him in midair and drove him toward a different horizon.

Somewhere in that violence, an arm disappeared beneath the elbow. His mind was too much of a foggy haze to tell which it was. Left or right? He really couldn’t grasp the difference right now.

Most of the flesh covering his chest burned away soon after, exposing portions of his rib cage while current passed directly through the organs beneath. His heart stopped beating once again, and Selfwrought Emperor had no choice but to act once more. But by this point, there was too little flesh remaining to even bother pumping blood through.

Eventually, there was no next impact.

Sylas came back to awareness lying beneath a sky stained grey by ash and smoke, every breath dragging through lungs that had only partly finished rebuilding. The remote region where he had chosen to evolve no longer resembled anything that could reasonably be called the same continent, its mountains flattened into black shelves while molten rivers filled new valleys and the horizon wavered beneath enough lingering heat to blur the land into indistinct shapes.

His own condition wasn’t much better.

More bone than flesh remained visible across large portions of his body, sections of his skeleton burned dark while Selfwrought Emperor slowly laid fresh muscle over them in thin, wet fibers. Every nerve that returned brought another portion of the pain with it, and Sylas could feel the reconstruction itself now, the tug of tissue knitting across open wounds blending with the deeper ache of fractures still being forced back into alignment.

At least he had made a habit of choosing remote regions whenever he evolved on Earth.

Considering what remained around him, he might have been responsible for a large number of deaths otherwise.

Sylas rested there only until enough of his neck had rebuilt for him to move his head comfortably, then allowed his gaze to climb toward the heavens as a new glow began gathering above the wasteland.

The clouds had never dispersed after the last strike, and now the remaining white-gold currents were folding inward through them instead of spreading into another storm.

The lightning compressed toward one point until stray arcs stopped escaping its surface, its radiance growing denser until light itself seemed to take on substance. White-gold deepened toward a pale metallic sheen threaded with violet beneath, smooth and polished despite the staggering amount of power continuing to pour into it.

A humanoid shape emerged from that condensation.

Shoulders broadened as lightning packed itself into arms, a torso narrowed toward a defined waist, and long legs extended beneath it while the final currents gathered into a featureless head. By the time the clouds had emptied the last of their light into the figure, its body looked like divine metal forged from a storm, every surface perfectly smooth while the destructive power Sylas had just endured remained compressed somewhere beneath it.

The figure lowered its head toward the ruined continent. Two white-gold eyes opened, pulsing with a might that seemed to contain more power in them alone than the entirety of the last strike.