Genetic Ascension

He looked in the direction of the BOSS monster. It was as though he could sense it all so clearly, but when he exploded forward, his body was jerked backward.

A light of madness glowed in his eyes as he looked at his arm. His fingers dug into the bark of a tree just adjacent to him. He held onto it with everything he had, blood pooling from his nails and particularly nasty streaks of veins pumping along his forearm.

His body wanted to go in one direction, but this arm alone seemed to have a mind of its own.

He pulled hard and a few of his nails chipped as he ripped himself free. He rushed forward with his greatest speed, only for his arm to latch onto another tree.

This time, he fell back hard, a stinging pain coming from his shoulder. From an outside observer, it looked as though he had just tried to tackle a tree. The fact he got away with only a stinging pain was a miracle to begin with.

"I SAID ENOUGH!"

The roar came out of just one side of Sylas' mouth, one half of his lips quirking in an attempt to speak, and the other wanting to continue growling and baring his fangs.

He felt as though he was trapped inside of his own mind, just the smallest hint of sanity keeping him together. If he allowed himself to run to that python, the only path for him remaining would be death.

This wasn't the ending he wanted.

He was in control of nothing if not his own mind, his own thoughts.

There was true fury stirring within him, but it was only making the situation worse. The debuff, the curse, or whatever this influence was, latched onto it and stirred it up, pulling out parts hidden so deep that even Sylas didn't know they existed. And yet, he was forced to face them.

Why had he come here? Why did he put his life at risk? Why did he look his loving mother and father in the eye, his adorable little sister, and lie to them?

It wasn't just for some excitement, that was too small a part of it.

It wasn't because he was dissatisfied with his life. That was too small a part of it.

It wasn't even because he cherished his own last name so much and refused to be a Grimblade, and that was despite the fact he still called himself Sylas Brown to this day, regardless of what this damned system said.

It was because he couldn't stand the idea of being under someone else's heel. It was because he didn't want to be just a cog in the wheel. He wanted to be the wheel itself, the carriage that rolled on it, the treasure that was being escorted from place to place in luxury.

He had childishly come to throw his life away in a world he knew next to nothing about, all because he couldn't keep his ego in check.

That was the part he had been ignoring. That was the part of him that he had buried deep, the part he had ignored because he considered himself a logical man above such boorish and manchild-like ideals.

But he wasn't.

He was still a hot-blooded young man in his twenties. He wasn't free of those dreams all young men had. To be a hero, a knight in shining armor, Rambo in a forest with a machine gun tucked under one arm and a machete in the other.

[Title Unlocked]

[A Flexible Will]

[Your Will is truly one of a kind, but it is immature and still changing. Continue to forge it, young man.]

[+10 Will]

[+10% Will]

Sylas hardly registered the notification.

The red slowly receded from his eyes and he coughed heavily, waves of pain hitting his body, especially from his right hand. Looking at it shakily, he had completely lost one nail, and two others were split right in the middle. It might have been even better if he lost them completely.

At the very least, this seemed to be his worst injury. The rest was just aches and bruises.

[You have survived the Madness]

[Your Comprehension of the Madness has deepened]

[+1 Will]

Finally, Sylas got a grasp of what was going on.

He slowly rose to his feet, his eyes widening when he saw that he was actually standing at the very edge of a familiar clearing. Just another half meter and he would have been in the BOSS' territory.

The thought was frightening, but for some reason, he calmed down much quicker than he felt he should have.

He looked at his stat menu.

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[Name: Sylas Grimblade]

[Species: Human (F)]

[Affiliation: Grimblade Lineage]

[Level: 0]

[Titles: A Flexible Will; A Patient Stalker]

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[Physical: 8]

>[Strength: 5]

>[Constitution: 5]

>[Dexterity: 13]

>[Speed: 8]

[Mental: 6]

>[Intelligence: 5]

>[Wisdom: 10]

>[Charisma: 2]

[Will: 24]

[Luck: 1]

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[Skill: —]

[Comprehensions: Madness (-)]

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[Gene State: Soft]

[Fragmented Genes: Grimblade Lineage (F); (2) Dexterity (F)]

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[Gene Talents: Blade Aura (Mutated - Weakened)(-); Sudden Burst (Dormant)(F)]

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'That's a slightly different color…'

It was very subtle, and only by a shade or two, but Sylas felt that A Flexible Will had a deeper color than A Patient Stalker.

His grandfather had said that Titles with percentage boosts were rarer, so maybe that was part of it. But he once again found it peculiar that he didn't have grades associated with Titles. Was the slight color change supposed to be the replacement?

He wasn't sure.

'Hm?'

Sylas' attention was drawn to the Comprehension portion. He hadn't seen anything but a dashed line there before, but now there was Madness. In addition, it had a familiar line through the grade tag, much like his Blade Aura Gene Talent did. Sylas took that to mean that his comprehension was too lacking for it to be properly ranked.

What was more surprising than that was that he had actually come across a Comprehension at all.

According to his grandfather, Comprehensions were about the only thing that could compete with Gene Talents in terms of usefulness. Skills could fall into that category as well, but there were a wide range of Skills, many of which could be entirely useless.

Gene Talents and Comprehensions, however, almost never were.

This was his grandfather's understanding, anyway.

Sylas frowned. 'Madness… do I need to lose my mind to use it?'