Dimensional Descent

"The flashing eyes pulsed one final time before solidifying. The moment they did, an eruption of violent Force surged out like a raging tide. At first they weren't very controlled, splashing out like a spray of water from a hose, but very quickly, the Oryx seemed to get a grip on their bearings, reining in the trembling blast of Force and concentrating it into countless red lasers that covered the skies.

The force was devastating. It crushed everything in its path, disintegrating it. Many died without even time to scream out for help, and the so-called walls of Gold-Grade were crushed like paper, collapsing without any sort of resistance.

Seeing this scene, Leonel couldn't help but think about the first time he had come across an Oryx. Back then, the Oryx in question had had an Ability Index almost exactly like this, but that man had just been one of many. And since it was an Ability Index, it couldn't just be casually passed down from Oryx to Oryx, Ability Indexes weren't hereditary from Leonel's understanding of things.

However, what was so crucial about this memory was what it told Leonel about the Oryx race. The eye was an incredibly fragile thing. As crazy as it was for Leonel to have formed a Node in his brain stem so long ago, forming one in your eyes was seen as equally crazy if not even more so.

Nodes had to be connected to one another, so running a Nodal Pathway from your eye to other parts of your body only gave you, really, two choices. The first was to go through your face, and the second was to go through your brain.

The first might not seem so bad, until you realized that there were only two choices for succeeding in this path as well. The first was to disrupt the normal flow of your bone structure, or most accurately, your skull, and the second was to use the thin skin on your face. Both weren't very good options.

the skin and muscle of your face would limit how thick you could make it, unless you were alright with a large, vein-like snake running across your face, or you were alright with limiting your

were even more moving parts, and increasing

top all of this off, there wasn't usually much of a necessity or benefit to forming Nodes in your eyes to begin with. Those who had eye-related Lineage Factors could use their strength naturally without doing this, that was because the existence of one's Ethereal Glabella alone already created all the networks you would need in your mind. And those that didn't have such abilities would just be wasting their time for what was effectively just

wasn't just in place of their Ethereal Glabella, Leonel was actually quite certain that

were shocking because it went beyond just hoping for an Ability Index related to eyes was birthed within them. Instead, it was possible to take advantage of this such that they could

biological quirk that could be passed down through the generations? The problem was that the Oryx faced a similar problem to Leonel after he

improving them, Leonel took the crudest ability such

affinities of its owner? It was through the Ethereal Glabella that one gained access to their Ability Index. It could be said

said that almost from birth, they had already entered the