Lady Mov felt as though her entire head shattered. She knew quite well, since the feeling was so surreal, that it was more of an illusion than anything else, but that only made it all the more potent to her.
To suffer at the hands of an F-Grade like this, she never thought she would see the day.
She had heard that Yvette lost to Sylas, and quite frankly, she didn't believe it. But even then, not only was she stronger than Yvette, but hadn't that previous battle taken hours to complete?
How had she ended up in this situation, then?
What she didn't know was that Sylas was being overly cautious in that previous battle, extending it from the skies and slowly chipping away at Yvette until she had no more Will or ability to fight with left.
At the same time, he was using his time to understand several things.
The first were the Runes of this world, adapting to them, and learning how to use them more efficiently.
The second were the combat methods of the Petals of the Seeing Thorn. He wanted to etch their combat methods into his psyche and understand them better, making his Mixed Demonic Arts even more brutally effective.
And third, he wanted to understand the Runes they used personally.
The largest gap in strength Sylas would have to face here wasn't the fact his opponents were E-Grade. He was already used to most around him having better stats and strengths.
The biggest issue was actually Treasures.
Treasures added huge boosts to strength, and now that he wasn't on Earth, that gap would only become more exaggerated.
Though Earth had a huge concentration of Treasures precisely because it was a Summoned World, many of those Treasures had yet to be properly leveled up, and their uses had yet to be fully maximized.
At the same time, though Earth had such an advantage, Jala was a prime example of how said advantage was concentrated. It was all in the hands of the most supremely powerful families and organizations, and Earth was also at a stage where most of those Treasures were stored away so that plans could be made for how to maximize their use.
Because of Sylas, too many matters of Earth had been accelerated, and the end result was that this advantage didn't have a chance to truly bloom.
In the outside world, though… it was a different matter entirely. It was like every opponent Sylas faced actually had +10 Levels of advantage compared to what their stat screen showed. They had boosts to their Physical and their Mental stats, and they even had Treasures that made individual Skills stronger.
On Jala's person, Sylas was pretty sure he had even seen a Treasure that linked to his Comprehension and rose it up a Grade as well. In fact, going through Gogo's memories, that was all but confirmed.
As many variables as there had been on Earth, there were even more here. And Sylas was flying in blind.
Every new thing he found was like an added stimulant, and he had to take advantage to learn when he could.
Using his Unraveling Pupil on Treasures was far harder than it was to use them on free-standing Runes. Runes were often etched into the very surface of the item, so they couldn't just be dispelled like normal.
Maybe there was a higher level of the Pupils where this was possible, but it definitely wasn't possible for the current Sylas.
And even more so, it was impossible to do so for E-Grade Runes as his Profession only worked on F-Grade ones.
This meant that he had to aim for an incredibly small window of time where the Runes weren't just etched into the Treasure, but also just about to activate. On top of that, he had to aim for the Runes that were F-Grade rather than E-Grade.
It was because he spent so much time observing Yvette that he knew this was even possible in the first place. Otherwise, he wouldn't have even tried it. The risk would have been too high and could have easily cost him an arm.
But who would have thought that the workmanship of these Treasures would be so shoddy?
Sylas couldn't imagine why an E-Grade Rune Master would ever settle for a creation that incorporated F-Grade Runes in the first place, but everywhere he looked, that seemed to be commonplace.
They were hard to catch at first glance even for him, so he could imagine that a layman in the Profession wouldn't spot the difference at all.
But those vulnerabilities were exactly why Lady Mov had fallen so easily. She thought that she could trust her armor, only to find that she had no such luck at all.
Sylas, Luck, though…
He didn't know how he felt about relying on it so much, especially since there was no guarantee that he could always keep it at such a high level in relation to those around him. But even so…
He had found that it had many uses in battle aside from the range of his visualization. Just on its face, pulling out the ability to foretell the future and gamble on it was enough to drive an opponent crazy in battle.
While it seemed like he was only relying on his Mixed Demonic Arts to do that, his Luck played a huge role.
By the same token, when he activated his Progenitor Flame Ability to read where the F-Grade Runes were going to appear in Lady Mov's armor and act on it, his Luck helped him narrow down the prospective locations and made that small window of opportunity feel as wide as the ocean to Sylas.
If this battle taught Sylas anything… it was that focusing on his individual stats wasn't nearly as important as making sure everything worked so well together.
He wasn't just strong because he was strong.
He was strong because his weaker stats could rely on one another to build one another up until something far greater than their individual parts.