Everyone felt like One was maybe the most handsome man they had ever laid eyes on. His proportions were perfect, his hair perfectly combed without a single strand out of place, his smile bright and straight.

Sylas saw something else.

One was as plain as could be. Not exactly ugly, but painfully average. In a world where you could manipulate your Genes and advance your body in ways mortals couldn't fathom, it was almost odd for someone with so much talent to look like this.

But that One was. Average.

It was something One was sure that Sylas couldn't have possibly seen through, but Sylas not only did, he had from the very beginning.

That was the thing about having a powerful Will. You weren't so easily swayed by external matters, even if said external matter was an Aether that seemed capable of bending reality itself.

Even now, Sylas couldn't hear the true name of One's Aether. It was obscured beneath so many layers of complexity that he couldn't quite get there.

But he would have been half dead and not a single thing would have been able to manipulate his Will, let alone manipulate it to think another man handsome.

Sylas found One to be one of the most pathetic people he had ever come across, and he had killed a few Madness Disciples by this point, so that was saying a lot more than One seemed to know.

Sylas finished adjusting his tie and then ran a thumb across his lip. Blood was wiped away with a flick of it, an exhale of his breath shifting the air.

One might be a hack, but he had learned quite a lot about the truth of Aether and what it meant to truly have Willborne Intelligence.

Every time Sylas thought of his Willborne Intelligence, he saw it through the lens of his Will, and that much was correct. That was the point.

But while One was wrong with how he viewed the world, there were still some aspects to how he viewed things that poked a few chinks in Sylas' own armor.

If his way of viewing things was so correct, why did his Aether feel so weak?

He had perfect Aether. At the F-tier they had had a perfect 100 Foundation. At the E-tier, they had had a perfect 10,000 Foundations. Now that he was at the D-tier, it had only taken him a thought to find their perfect 1,000,000 Foundation versions.

While he didn't know the true name of One's Aether, what he did know was that it wasn't as perfect as his own. It seemed that having a perfect Aether at the E-tier was probably the limit of mortals. By the time you got to the D-tier, even geniuses like One could only get close, but not quite get there.

A perfect C-tier Aether should have one billion Foundations. Yet, One's only had around 700 million or so. He wasn't even close.

At least that was the way Sylas saw it. To those of the Mortal Realm, One was an absolute monster. Even being able to cross around half a million was already considered shocking for a mortal. There were several Legends that had only managed this and still lived lives of great success.

But Sylas… was obviously no mortal anymore. And even if he had been, his Rune Mastery was too great to allow such a pitiful thing. Though, whether his body could handle it would be another matter.

This was all to say that his own body should be storing Aether of vastly more potential than what he was seeing done here, and yet his Aether was… Decent.

He too was a Cryst Emperor, and yet nothing he did seemed to matter. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

Sylas understood why the moment he began to fight Four at her truest power. His problem could be summarized in a single line.

His Pride was too great.

How could he ever allow the Will of an Aether to dictate anything about his combat style? It was a tool, and tools were meant to be wielded and used. He never actually listened to the Will of his Aether because there was nothing to listen to. Whatever had been of it was snuffed out every time it came into close proximity to him.

He thought that was what made Willborne Intelligence so powerful.

But that wasn't the case.

What made it so powerful was how the Will of an Aether and a person could meld until the Aether gained life itself through proxy of its user.

One had it backwards in the same way Sylas did. The difference was that while Sylas gave his own Will precedence, One gave his Aether so much precedence that it had consumed him, even changing every aspect of his reality until it began to affect how others saw him.

Both were wrong.

Intelligence was a stat separate from Will. Even if it was Willborne, it meant that a bridge was formed, not that there was a reordering of its precedence.

What made this all the more amusing was that Sylas had arranged his Classes such that they could control one another better because he didn't understand his Aethers enough to truly control them by his own Will instead.

That was ultimately a worthless endeavor.

Sylas' neck cracked and he exhaled another breath. He thought of the Glassvolt Throne, its lofty perch at the pinnacle of the skies. His lips pressed into a line as he focused on that intent, seemingly forgetting that he was in the middle of a battle. But it seemed that One had forgotten as well, so stunned by Sylas' words he didn't know how to react.

'I see.' Sylas thought, and something seemed to shift in him.

This battle, he had yet to use Rune Mastery to any great extent. Ultimately, he had planned on using that to secure victory, but now he saw a much more interesting path.

Sylas looked at his hands and lightning began to crackle between them.