Genetic Ascension

The only place Sylas had seen Slot Machine rewards with any regularity was the Tutorial, long before he cleared the Summoning. He had seen one afterward as well, but after the Summoning itself they seemed to vanish entirely.

There had never been any obvious reason for that restriction, and until now Sylas hadn't cared enough to question it. But as his gaze settled on the words [Slot Machine Reward], something tingled at the back of his mind.

The Will surrounding the notification wasn't passive. It pulled at him, tempting him, encouraging him toward a very particular sort of decision.

It wanted him to gamble.

Sylas' eyes narrowed as something clicked into place.

Luck.

Of all his Stats, Luck was the only one that remained severely behind the others, and there had never been a meaningful, repeatable method of improving it. Even the Legendary Luck Gene he encountered hadn't seemed to possess any obvious relationship with the Luck Stat itself.

Its benefits had been enormous, of course. The foundation it helped Sylas establish had played no small role in the level his Rune Mastery eventually reached, and it had been equally important when he forged his three new Classes. Yet the Stat itself remained almost untouched.

So why had Slot Machines appeared so often during the Tutorial, only to disappear once that period ended?

Sylas might have ignored the question under normal circumstances, but the timing now was too peculiar to dismiss. The Karma of two entire Heavens had shifted, and the system had suddenly placed the outcome in the hands of their youth.

The Tutorial and this moment were separated by an enormous gulf, but they shared at least one obvious similarity. Both were periods centered around budding talents, periods where those with potential were still being shaped.

Even then, Sylas might not have cared if the Will surrounding the reward wasn't so blatant. The system wasn't merely dangling something potentially related to Luck in front of him, it was asking him to put something on the line for it.

That was how the Slot Machines had worked in the Tutorial. Performance earned tickets, better performance earned more, and those tickets became chances to gamble for rewards. But there were no tickets here. This was already the reward for completing a Quicktime Event, so what exactly was he supposed to spend?

His gaze shifted across the list.

'The rewards are the tickets.'

The realization settled easily.

The system wanted him to sacrifice the rewards he had already earned in exchange for pulls from the Slot Machine.

'Is that so...?'

A cold indifference settled into Sylas' gaze, and his decision came with just as little emotion.

Fine.

He would play the system's game to the very end. This impotent thing had already tested his patience enough. Its incompetence had played no small role in allowing the Milky Way World to fall into such dire straits in the first place, and when Sylas tried to find his own path beyond the structure laid out for him, it rewarded him with an impossible Quest carrying death as the penalty for failure.

The system was arrogant, but it was the worst kind of arrogant, the sort that came without enough skill to justify itself, convinced of its own superiority simply because it had held authority for long enough.

Sylas had every intention of breaking free of it. But before that happened, he would wring it dry.

He wouldn't just use the rewards from Gluttony of the Serpentes as tickets. When Heavens Clash ended, he would throw those rewards into the Slot Machine as well. He wanted to see how much the system could actually produce when forced to pay him everything he was owed.

Sylas cast one glance toward Sky Roaming. His family wasn't anywhere near his direct line of sight, yet that no longer mattered. He could see enough through his connection to know they were safe, and that was all he needed. With one step, he left the region around the Milky Way World, and with another he was already aboard the Hollow Ship as it shot across the stars.

His destination wasn't the battlefield. Not just yet.

Before that, Sylas needed a new pair of eyes.

**

Rhykan stood atop an asteroid of red dust and clay large enough to be mistaken for a planet, his hands clasped behind his back as he stared into the distant stars. After a long moment, he exhaled a sigh, then the sound slowly became a chuckle.

It truly didn't matter how much he calculated. Sylas always found another way to surprise him.

Rhykan had prepared for almost every other choice Sylas could have made, whether that meant refusing his timeline, twisting it, exploiting one of the strange resources hidden around Earth, or finding some entirely different angle through the Golden Grove or that old man's brush.

The one path Rhykan hadn't prepared for was Sylas simply finishing faster than he thought possible.

"It seems you've lost again."

An amused female voice echoed into his ears.

"Will you work with me now, or are you going to continue being stubborn?" she continued.

Rhykan's smile didn't falter. "Was that you, then? The one who finally convinced that idiotic garden snake to stop its rampage?"

The voice went silent for only a beat.

Gentrixaul.

The woman didn't bother pretending she hadn't understood who he meant. "How many people other than Sylas do you actually respect?"

"Two."

"And what do you think the odds are that they'll come take advantage of this situation as well?"

Rhykan's eyes narrowed.

Those two weren't from the Beast Heaven, so logically this clash had nothing to do with them. They had also already surpassed the C-tier, which should have removed them from consideration twice over.

Then Rhykan began to laugh.

The sound rolled across the asteroid until even the surrounding stars seemed to sparkle with greater luster.

"It seems that if Sylas is intent on making his debut, I should make mine too. I've been cooped up playing politics for too long, but politics does have its benefits."

He overturned a palm and within it, something shocking rested.

A Madness Key.

Green light flashed through Rhykan's eyes and the asteroid beneath his feet moved.

Red dust poured away in continent-sized sheets as what had seemed to be a dead mass of clay unfolded, revealing the back of a tortoise so enormous that even a world would have looked small beside it.

At that instant, every Sloth across the universe felt their souls shatter.

The woman's voice fell completely silent. But eventually, even she couldn't help herself.

"So all this time... you've just been lazy?"

Rhykan's laughter only grew louder.

"No, my dearest Ancestor."

Her Will sharpened the instant he spoke the title, but Rhykan didn't care.

"Many speak of the Rat and how it stole the place of the Scorpion, or the Boar and how it stole the place of the Hippo. But not many speak of the Sloth. Maybe that's because the name of the creature and the Sin it represents are one and the same."

His smile widened.

"But the Sin of Sloth has been bastardized too."

The stars began to dim.

"We aren't lazy, dearest Ancestor. We're slow to Greed. Slow to Wrath. Slow to Pride. Slow to Lust. Slow to Envy."

Rhykan's eyes burned brighter.

"We. Are. Patient."

A blooming Virtue snuffed out a sea of stars.

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