Genetic Ascension

[100 GTs Bonus]

But that was also what made the strike so powerful.

He felt the bones of the creature crack, and even with the Scorned Wraps separating them, he could practically feel its organs deforming beneath his strike.

It was the perfect blow. His hand was perfectly aligned with his wrist, which was perfectly aligned with his forearm. It was like he was driving a spear right into the beast.

Sylas pulled back with an inhuman level of Speed, just dodging the descent of the bear.

It barely managed to stay on its feet for a moment before it collapsed. Shards of bone and broken flesh tore into its abdominal cavity, leaving it weak and almost lifeless. It couldn't gather up strength at all.

From the side, Sylas' leg suddenly rose high into the air, his heel driving down with a tremendous amount of force right onto the bear's skull.

The crush was resounding.

Sylas pulled back, shaking out the ache in his left hand and his heel. He could feel his battle style becoming smoother, but he could also practically feel his weakness as well.

He could do well when he only had to focus on one enemy, but would that always be the case?

He collected the Genes of the bear, but he was much less enthusiastic. It turned out collecting four Common Genes of a kind was his limit. When he tried to collect a fifth, it always failed.

At the same time, there was a limit of ten Fragmented Genes. This didn't seem to be a personal Genetic Limit, but rather something that was universal. It was either you upgraded your Fragmented Genes to Common, or you wasted them.

This made sense intuitively to Sylas. Even disregarding the human body, you couldn't pack a computer with an endless number of files. It would eventually run out of space. You'd have to either zip those files into a smaller size, or summarize the files you felt were important into something more manageable.

He assumed the human body was similar. There were only so many things that you could pack into it before it tapped out.

That gave him an excuse to pour more into the Madness Key, though. So for now, it wasn't all bad. Plus, he could offload some of them into the Gene Crystal as well.

Sylas looked back toward the group not far away. By this point, they were more used to his displays.

"Damn, Psycho Syl, you really minced that bear up," Alex chuckled. "No wonder we can't read your stats if you take them down that easy."

Alex said the quiet part out loud. It was indeed the thought they all had.

This was already the third beast they had come across, and Sylas took it out with the same ease. He didn't even look tired, and it didn't look like he was using Skills or Gene Talents either.

Sylas shook his head at the man's antics, but he didn't mind it.

"How much?" He asked Olivia.

"This one is much bigger than the other two. I can give you a full fifty coins. If you want, we can give you some armor instead of the money. It's your choice."

Sylas shook his head. Olivia clearly thought that he had rejected Cassarae out of something like pride, but that couldn't be further from the truth. He quite literally couldn't wear armor even if he wanted to.

He'd just have to focus on not getting hit or tanking it when he did.

"The money is fine."

Olivia didn't press, her deep brown eyes lighting up with joy. Between the fox, wolf, and bear, this bear was worth the most of them all. It was a huge, completely intact corpse.

It was just unfortunate that her storage treasure had already run out of space. This would be the last creature she could have Sylas kill for them. They couldn't take on burdens on this trip, and she had to save the rest of the space inside just in case things went south and they had to hide a gnoll corpse.

The transaction finished quite quickly.

A new line had appeared on Sylas' stat screen right beneath his Titles.

[Coin: 70 (F)]

"We're in range of gnoll territory now. According to their patterns, they set out to hunt early in the morning right about now. Follow my lead…"

Olivia's voice trailed off and her eyes narrowed.

"Something wrong?" Morgan asked.

Olivia hesitated, but eventually decided to tell the truth. Their team came together for benefits. Lying or concealing the truth would only fissure them.

"Like I said, the hunting party set out. The problem is that there's usually three in the party, but today they sent out five for some reason."

"Will they separate?" Morgan followed up.

"No," Olivia shook her head, "they're humanoid hyenas, and they act much like the real ones. They target the weak, they always stick together, and they're very bloodthirsty."

"There are seven of us. We can take 'em," Alex puffed out his chest.

Olivia looked toward this man somewhat speechlessly. She found it hard to believe that he had made it so far with that attitude.

"We need to be more cautious than that," Lauren said with a frown.

"It's a shame none of us are archers," Morgan sighed.

Being an archer in this world would be asking for punishment. Who could procure arrows here? While being able to safely shoot from a distance sounded nice, you'd quickly come to regret it if you ever ended up in a battle where distance wasn't an option.

Even so, in this case, an archer would have been invaluable.

Olivia shook her head. If anyone would have an archer, it would be them. But Cassarae had wisely chosen militiamen as her base soldiers, and they hadn't been able to spare the funds to unlock archers.

Plus, if they did, they would face the same problem a real archer would have. Funding armor repairs was bad enough without also having to stock up on arrows too.

Sylas' gaze descended and landed on Olivia's hip. She sensed the gaze and frowned, but Sylas had already spoken.

"I might have a solution. But I would need to borrow those daggers."

Olivia raised an eyebrow.

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