If he used his hands, the result was obvious. He also didn't exactly have tongs on him.

'Maybe that's what they were thinking when they gave me this mission?'

A thought popped up in Sylas' head and he reached out with his telekinesis.

That was when something unexpected happened, something even Bloom had likely not thought of either.

Sylas's method of applying his telekinesis was incredibly unique, he just didn't know it.

Rather than controlling a part of an item, he enveloped the entire thing with his Will. It gave him the greatest amount of control.

In the past, he had tried to envision a hand wrapping around a weapon, but it lacked stability so he had abandoned this path. This was also part of the reason he found weapons balanced for flight so much easier to control, because he wasn't fighting against their natural instinct.

This time, Sylas acted no different. But when his telekinesis coated the disk like a second skin, it dove into several crevices, spreading out across a body covered in what looked like complex runes.

Sylas felt like his mind had been instantly imprinted with every one of these characters.

He didn't know what they meant, but when his Will and Charisma overlapped with this visualization, his mind went blank.

All at once, his focus hit rock bottom. It felt no different than when he used Madness for too long, like his mind had been drained.

Fatigue hit him in waves as the world around him trembled.

The portal distorted. In the air, a secondary domain seemed to clash with the original disk.

Sylas was moments from fainting, there was no way he had the mental capacity left to understand what was happening. But clearly he had inadvertently created a disruption to the disk, causing the portal to lose its shape.

Before getting this far, Sylas had already deduced the purpose of the portal. Just from his experience with Paradise, Sylas knew that portals weren't meant to stay nearly so stable, nor so small.

The fact this fire-spitting portal had should be a result of this disk. Taking it would be killing two birds with one stone. First, it would destabilize the portal and make the government have to play catch-up to deal with a fire-spitting portal on the move to swallow half of one of their most important cities. And second, the disk would likely be useful to the Browns as well.

However, through some unknown method, Sylas had disrupted the stable output of the disk. And, rather than this just resulting in the portal beginning to grow and expand as normal, the worst case happened instead.

The portal fluctuated, becoming an amorphous blob that bent and twisted beneath its own might.

Sylas was just about to forcefully activate <Maddened Enlightenment> even at the risk of exposing it when the portal's ripple swallowed him up.

**

The pain awoke Sylas first. His body nudged at him, flashing warning signs that he could very well die soon, being the only thing that snapped him awake.

The first thing he saw was an endless red.

The second thing he saw was the surrounding pools of lava he had fallen into.

No matter how calm Sylas usually was, his heart couldn't help but skip a beat and fear threatened to grip and rule his mind.

He should have been dead already. If not for his overly thick skin of Aether, he would have already been fried to charcoal.

But that was also part of the problem.

His mind was still foggy, but he could clearly feel that the last barrier between himself and this lava was only a few seconds from collapsing. Over 90% of his thick Aether skin was gone.

Sylas tried to split his attention but got a splitting headache in return. Without a choice, he could only choose to deal with the most pressing problem first: strengthening his Aether Skin.

Unfortunately, with his focus shaken, the process went terribly. The Aether skin was misshapen and lopsided. To make matters worse, even though he tried to reserve some of his Aether, he ended up sucking it dry.

He wasn't very familiar with the technique to begin with. But with his mind feeling like he was running on no sleep, his control was even worse than the first time.

'There's not enough time.'

Sylas struggled to get up. At the pace his Aether skin was dissolving, he had half a minute at most to get to somewhere safer.

The lava was denser than water, but it still wasn't land. Sylas realized the only reason he was floating on top of it was because of his Aether skin. Even so, walking on it felt like trying to run across an incredibly soft mattress. He couldn't get any traction and his balance was constantly being thrown off.

Sylas looked around and found that the closest piece of land was about 200 meters away. With his current Physical, making it there should have been a breeze, but the wobble beneath his feet screamed otherwise.

The beating of Sylas' heart was increasing. He wanted to think of a way, but his mind wasn't cooperating.

'Aether, I need Aether.'

He seemed to have forgotten about <Maddened Enlightenment>, or rather it had been pushed down his list of priorities. Even if he used <Maddened Enlightenment>, it would take more time than he had to set things right.

So instead he pulled with his intention, trying to take out an Aether Rejuvenating Elixir.

The good news? He succeeded.

The bad news? When he brought it to his mouth there was a pesky and comically thick shield of Aether in the way.

Sylas stood frozen. If it wasn't for the danger he was in, he might have stayed that way for a long while.

He started running.

It was the only option he had left.

He ran and tried to trigger <Maddened Enlightenment> at the same time, but he soon realized that that was impossible.

<Maddened Enlightenment> was ultimately a Skill. Although it could rapidly replenish Aether, doing so required a certain amount of Aether to already be present first in order to catalyze the start of the process. There was no Skill in the world that didn't rely on Aether at least in part.

And Sylas had used all of his up.