Chapter 887 Thank
Aki didn't have the time to think or even to be shocked once again. He unleashed a roar, his power pouring out in waves.
In that moment, the third eye—a closed, wrinkled slit on his forehead that had shown no signs of movement until now—opened.
A blood-red light filled the air and the blades slicing through the wind froze in place.
Sylas felt a powerful aura envelop his body, a Will the likes of which was suffocating to an extreme. He understood at that moment that this was Aki's unique ability.
In the beginning, he had felt a Will powerful to an extreme. His conclusion back then was that Aki must be beyond that F-Grade, and maybe that was still true.
But the reality was that even if Aki was beyond the F-Grade, the amount of strength that he could tap into should be highly limited when filtered through Professor Broussard's body.
There had to be another reason he could display a Will that was so powerful.
And here it was. A special ability of the Thryskai. Their third eye.
Sylas ripped through its veil.
His crown shimmered above his head, its momentum strong and relentless. His own Will, at the Shaping level, seemed to have undergone some sort of metamorphosis, touching a peak that it wasn't meant to.
At least here, in this place, he didn't care about the Thryskai's third eye at all.
Even with his blades frozen in place, Sylas saw an opening. His perception slowed to a crawl, and he grasped every small detail, every little shift and change with the most shocking of speeds.
[Glassvolt Shift].
A frozen blade behind Aki rippled, its form changing. Grasping its myriad of changes, Sylas tapped into the Mesh of Reality, pulling on it and slightly tweaking the Glassvolt Runes he had originally formed; he forged it into his Gene Skill.
Sylas turned into a bolt of lightning, appearing out from the blade behind Aki as though he had always been there.
The intent in his eyes blazed, stomping a foot on the ground so hard that cracks and splinters jetted out in all directions.
SHIIIIING!
The radiant howl of a blade was all Aki could hear as the Blackened Claws manifested on Sylas' right arm.
A pair of golden slit eyes appeared on Sylas' back. In that brief instant of time, the strength of all of his Contracts increased by a factor of six, jetting up by +500%.
Sylas hadn't killed all of Aki's army even though he could have. In the end, he only killed the majority of them, leaving quite a few stragglers.
Aki likely thought that this was just a product of Sylas' limits. He had already killed so many in a short time that it didn't make sense that he would be able to so easily kill more if he could.
The Thryskai couldn't have been more wrong.
Sylas purposely left many of them behind, and what Aki didn't notice until it was too late was that the majority of them were Serpentes creatures.
The moment Beast Totem appeared, Aki felt his Will torn to shreds. One after another, the creatures he had had absolute control over were stripped from him.
His mind howled with pain, his Will Core taking lashes as though a countless series of whips were lashing against it.
The Thryskai's mind went blank for a moment, the light in his third eye dimming.
The eyes of the Basilisk King pulsed with life.
[King's Bind].
First it was the mind.
Then came the body.
Aki felt like he was frozen in time. With the backlash rampaging across his Will, he wasn't able to resist [King's Bind]. His entire Will was suppressed, and at that moment, the countless blades in the skies that he had once frozen in place were released.
CHI! CHI! CHI! CHI! CHI! CHI!
In one moment, they had been hanging in the skies. In the next, they ripped through Aki's body one after another.
Through his chest, his limbs, his gut. They sliced and diced his bones, his flesh, his inner organs.
One after another, they pierced through him and then the ground, pinning him down in so many directions that he looked more like a pincushion than any sort of living being.
But it wasn't over.
It was far from over.
The Blackened Claws were still on Sylas' arm, the Beast Totem still to his back. The power in his arm was so enormous that veins popped across his biceps, triceps, and forearms, the limb growing one size and then another as it pulsed with more strength.
At that moment, Sylas didn't care about anything else. It didn't even matter to him if he lost his entire arm.
His entire Will, his entire being, was focused on nothing but the Thryskai before him.
No… he was focused on nothing more than Aki's death.
[Psychedelic Punch].
Sylas' Glassvolt, Madness, and Mixed Martial Arts Comprehensions layered onto one another, his Aether bursting with such strength that his pathways combusted, his arm shattering into a rain of blood that left nothing behind but bone and sparse pieces of flesh.
And yet, a green glow wrapped around it, carrying it forward.
If his flesh couldn't withstand his strength anymore, then his Will would just have to.
A blaze of white-green lit his blades and punched right through Aki's back.
Sylas didn't even notice when he began to roar, nor did he notice when it suppressed the Basilisk King's howl and caused the very core of the Earth itself to tremble.
Aki's body didn't even get the chance to react.
A hole was blasted through him, the fragile state of his bone collapsing.
The Thryskai burst into a rain of gore, his eyes opening wide in shock.
He couldn't believe it had ended like this.
BANG!
He shattered apart and Sylas stumbled through him, the momentum of his fist so strong it tore a trench through the ground and into the blood lake in the distance.
The bloody waters separated to the bottom, echoing out into the distance as tsunami-like waves poured out in both directions.
Sylas shuddered to a stop, looking down at his bony arm, his vision swimming.
He… he had done it.
He collapsed to his knees, heaving out breaths.
He… had done it…
A scorching pain came from his throat, his body on the verge of shutting down. His Aether was dry, and even if it wasn't, he had practically torn his Aether Passageways apart. His Will was an empty well, his Mental swimming with illusions of reality because it couldn't even make sense of the world anymore.
He hacked up a mouthful of blood, but it came out as nothing more than a bloody mist. His blood itself seemed to have vaporized, the pressure difference between the inside of his body and the outside being so large that it couldn't even remain in liquid form any longer.
But it didn't matter.
He had done it.
For now, Earth should be safe. His family should be safe.
So why was his Luck still sending blaring warning signals to his head? His Mental was so depleted he hardly noticed it, but he could feel the annoying nagging that should have otherwise been sirens of alarm.
He craned his neck up to the skies, barely tilting his head to see the skies split.
A figure stepped out.
Then there was another split, and yet another figure appeared.
One Dogon after another appeared high in the skies.
The first looked down, a smile etching across his ashen face.
"I guess we should thank you, no?"
Sylas' Mental was depleted, but he could just barely sense it…
E-Grade.