Free Web NovelSylas immediately shattered the Will that threatened to kill him. His body flickered and he appeared out of the space he had been in just moments ago.
Just where his heart had been, an illusory palm squeezed over it and then vanished from existence.
Had that just… overridden his Will and acted in his body? Impossible. He hadn't even felt it until it was just about to take his life. freeweɓnovel.cѳm
"Oh. I might have gotten a bit too overeager." The Monkey King said coldly. "You think you understand what level my Will is just because you saw a version of it stretched across time and space? You have no idea just how small a sliver of myself that had been."
Sylas wasn't even looking at the Monkey King anymore. Instead, he was gazing at something that had appeared impossibly far off in the distance.
It almost felt like he was watching the head of a god peek into the universe, so large and all encompassing it treated everything they knew as people, as the living, as a bowl to take a look at.
Sylas had seen that head before. It was the image of the knight that stood at the end of everything, the representation of Champion Will.
For a moment, Sylas didn't understand at all.
From his understanding, Champion Will was like the better version of Primus Imperium. Essentially, Primus Imperium was a fragmented, incomplete Title that the impotent system tried to form as a replacement for the far better version the Madness System had created.
Champion Will was momentum incarnate. The more you won, the more confident in yourself you became, and the more likely you were to win again… and again… and again… But seeing it now, Sylas seemed to realize that Champion Will wasn't as he thought. No, his definition of it was correct, for the most part. The problem was that Champion Will wasn't actually from the Madness System like he thought, but instead from an even earlier system.
Sensing it now more clearly than ever before, Sylas realized that the Pride Seed the Monkey King had created was actually partially reliant on Champion Will itself. In fact, the well of Pride the Monkey King pulled from had its foundation as Champion Will in the first place.
Something suddenly clicked for Sylas and the Monkey King began to laugh. He laughed so uproariously the skies shook.
"FOOL!"
The Monkey King's voice boomed as Pride flooded into his body, blooming larger, greater, until his power seemed on the verge of snuffing out Sylas' momentum entirely.
It became clear that the Monkey King wasn't just waiting out Sylas' transformation. He could have just waited until Sylas' body ate itself alive, but he wanted Sylas to know in the end that it would have never mattered in the first place.
"You are so very arrogant, I admit it. You are more insufferably arrogant than even I, and maybe your form of Pride just might be stronger as well.
"But it is an unbreakable, unbendable form of a Pride, one that will eat itself alive and spit itself out. A Pride without flexibility is destined to be your downfall.
"When I realized this, I also realized that the method of defeating you was oh so very easy, Sylas Grimblade."
The Monkey King's staff bloomed as his strength maintained to skyrocket.
Sylas didn't look at the Monkey King. His eyes were still on that knight in the far off distance, that gaze he could remember.
The first time he had seen the knight, it completely ignored him. But Sylas' presence had eventually forced it to turn to him, to acknowledge him, and then it responded with bearing down with its pressure.
Sylas could tell back then that the knight was only allowing small slivers of its existence to slip through. Every time someone tapped into Champion Will and strengthened their Royal Line, it was there, existing in silence. It couldn't possibly pay attention to just anyone.
But those it did pay attention to… those people were quite special in more ways than just one.
The Monkey King's booming laughter rocked the air. His golden hair gained tinges of crimson to it, the world peeling back as though it couldn't withstand the Monkey King's presence at all.
The crimson pooled out from his eyes, Madness filling him as his Will increased by leaps and bounds.
The Monkey King's staff began to change at the same time. From a simple staff, it gained pummels in the shape of elaborate ornaments, almost like the trimming of pillars that shimmered in heavy motes of gold that carried the heft of worlds.
The pressure Sylas was facing increased by leaps and bounds.
"What will you do, Sylas Grimblade?!"
Sylas had ignored the Arcane Madness pool of Pride, feeling himself to be above it. He didn't need the Pride of others, and that was fine.
But he had still yet to break free of the universe completely. He had apparently yet to completely break from the system either, otherwise he wouldn't have gotten a notification for breaking through to True Infinite Will in the first place.
He was more than 90% of the way to the latter, clearly. But as for the former, he wasn't even close. Otherwise, he wouldn't have struggled so much to grasp his Spacetime Path as much as he had. If he didn't have to worry about the universe, he wouldn't have to worry about the clash of space and time.
That was all to say that even when Sylas ignored the universe and built his Pride Seed with his own Pride… that didn't mean that he could block the vice versa.
To make a complicated matter simple…
Sylas didn't take from the universe's pool of Pride.
But the universe took from his own whether he wanted it to or not. And the fact he had the Virtue of Pride Seed attached to him meant that it could take even more than it could from the usual person.
And if he built his future path of Pride as he surely would have, it meant that for the Champion Will Knight, it was projecting not just the Will of present Sylas… But also of future Sylas. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
And there was no person better equipped to take advantage of that than the creator of the Virtue of Pride Seed in the first place.
Choice one… keep his Virtue of Pride Seed and die beneath the momentum of his future self. The Monkey King was able to target his heart just now because his own body would never reject his own Will. Meaning, that attempt to shatter his heart… Was just the start.
Choice two… abandon his Virtue of Pride Seed.
However, that would shatter his Pride, not only figuratively, but literally. It would be admitting he made a mistake, it would mean abandoning his own Pride because he had run into something he couldn't beat, it would mean shredding to pieces everything he pondered he was.
The Monkey King had realized that Sylas was so Prideful that he wasn't even willing to lose to the future version of himself.
And no matter what choice he made, the end of the road was death.
"WHAT WILL YOU CHOOSE, SYLAS GRIMBLADE?!" The Monkey King's voice boomed again.
