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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5153: Calamity! IV
Chapter 5153: Calamity! IV
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It felt odd to be killing Primordial Architects.Hours ago, these beings had been so distant, so abstract, so far above the classifications. The Primordial Architect as a category had carried weight in his mind.
That had been hours ago.
Now they were folding under his attention like wet paper, and the folding felt distantly wrong.
He had been waiting to test the extent of his new power before he took on THE Quintessential Ego of Superbius V1 himself. He had wanted to feel the ceiling of his current Hadean configuration before he added another layer onto it. The idea had been reasonable- a calibration pass across the mid-tier Primordial Architects of THE Wyld, to establish a clean baseline measurement of where he stood.
So far, the calibration had been fucking abysmal.
Not as a reflection on his power. As a reflection on the Primordial Architects’ power. Every designated combatant he had reached through Emotive’s list had folded within a handful of seconds of his arrival!
The Calymmian ones did not even qualify as calibration. They qualified as confirmation that his current floor sat well above their ceilings.
Maybe he needed to find one at Ediacaran.
An Ediacaran Tier Primordial Architect with a properly engineered Ego amplification might, possibly, provide enough friction to reveal where his current capacities actually topped out. Possibly. He was no longer confident that even that would be sufficient!
Would he need to face THE Deliverance himself to see the scope of his power?
That was beginning to look like the answer. The ceiling of THE Wyld’s hierarchy sat with THE Deliverance and the three others of his stature, and none of the beings beneath that ceiling were going to give him the data he wanted.
Fucking scrubs.
He and Emotive stood on top of a massive Primordial Tree.
The tree rose from the ambient substrate of THE Wyld with the vast patient grandeur of something that had been growing since before most Civilizations had cohered into their current forms.
The peak of the tree held a broad platform of living wood, shaped across millennia into a natural terrace for whichever Primordial Architects had claimed this territory.
Five of those Primordial Architects lay pulverized across the platform.
Between his personal run and whatever Naldine and Midas were working through on their coordinated hunt, the count so far had to be more than thirty dead Primordial Architects.
More than a third of the designated eighty-one already scratched from the ledger.
In less than a few minutes.
As he was thinking all of this, Emotive cursed in shock beside him.
"Oh fuuuuck."
Her voice was uncharacteristically flat as Noah looked at her coldly.
"What?"
Her hair had cycled into a worried violet streaked with black. She turned to him with her eyes wide and her hands raised slightly in the air, the posture of a messenger who had just received bad news and was not entirely sure how the recipient of the news would respond.
"I have been keeping track of THE Creature’s battle on THE Gilded White Mountain. In the background, anh, alongside everything else, just tapping into the emotional residue of the engagement to monitor the progress. The emotions coming off that mountain have been extraordinary for my cultivation, by the way, just so you know, every Primordial Architect who died up there contributed something to my accumulated intake, and I have been eating very well across the last hour..."
"Focus."
"Right, right, right! The latest burst of emotions from the mountain was large enough and structured enough that I caught a few lines of conversation alongside the emotional signatures. Between THE Creature and Philemon Aristos. The two-headed one. One of the Four of THE Wyld, the four who stand at the same level as THE Deliverance."
Her violet hair deepened.
"THE Creature killed him a few nanoseconds ago. They were speaking before THE Creature pummeled him. They spoke about how Philemon’s death would call down a Gilded One. THE Creature... went to that mountain for that exact purpose. To kill Philemon so that Philemon would summon his Gilded Master down from...what the fuck did he call it? Oh, THE Braneworld Observable Existence. A Gilded One may be getting called down right now, To THE Wyld!"
...!
Noah heard this and frowned.
He had his own plans with Ubergulden Adelheid. Gilded Ones turning their attention this way was an impossibility under normal circumstances. Her whole explanation of the aquarium, of the casual disinterest of the upper tiers in whatever happened below, had been predicated on business proceeding normally.
Gilded Ones would not notice anything he did across THE Wyld because Gilded Ones had better things to do than watch fish fight each other in small glass boxes.
What THE Creature was doing was not normal.
What THE Creature was doing was pulling a Gilded One down deliberately!
But Noah could understand THE Creature.
He could understand him very well, actually.
His partner desecrated in front of him. Engineered against her will and then killed. The specific cruelty of being forced to watch the defining act of violence against the being he loved most, and then being left alive to carry the memory across eons of climbing.
Noah asked himself, quietly, what he would do if such a thing happened to Adelaide. Or to Barbatos. Or to Athena or Anna or any of the women who had become woven into his own existence. If some being descended into his corner of reality, refused refusal, engineered one of them against her will, killed her in front of him, took what was left as a souvenir, and then departed...
BOOM!
All of surrounding existence shuddered at the thought alone.
The Primordial Tree beneath Noah’s feet groaned against a subsonic pressure that rippled outward from him in a single wave. The bodies of the five pulverized Primordial Architects shifted slightly in their arrangements. The ambient air for several gigaparsecs around him thickened!
He thought for a moment.
Then he asked calmly.
"Where... is THE Creature?"
---
Space fluctuated at the base of THE Gilded White Mountain.
Noah and Emotive appeared within the fluctuation as it resolved.
Noah took in the mountain immediately. The devastation across every tier. The rows of corpses arranged with patient neatness. The ruined temples. The scorched friezes. The slow streams of residual flame burning in the dimming Hearts of Civilization scattered across the lower balconies!
The mountain had been broken across the last hour in ways that would not be repaired in any meaningful timeframe.
He turned his gaze to see Anaximander at the base of the mountain.
Anaximander stood alone on the pale stone, his tall angular frame holding the quiet scholarly composure he always carried.
His attention had been turned toward the peak of the mountain before Noah and Emotive arrived, and now it shifted to Noah. A smile crossed Noah’s face. Anaximander’s eyes lit up in recognition.
Noah floated over toward him with a smile.
"It feels like a long time has passed, and yet not so long. Somehow only days. The feeling is strange..."
Anaximander’s sighed quietly, the sigh of a being who had been sitting with heavy thoughts for longer than he would have preferred.
"It is good to see you, Osmont."
"But the circumstances this time around are very heavy ones. Heavier, I believe, than either of us would have preferred at our next meeting."
As he said this, both of them looked up toward the peak of the mountain.
THE Creature sat at the top, burning with multicolored flames, his gaze fixed upward toward the open sky above THE Gilded White Mountain. He was waiting!
His posture held the patient intensity of a being who had set a trap and was now waiting for the specific prey to arrive inside it. His flames flickered steadily but did not rise.
Noah gazed at the devastation across the mountain one more time.
Then he began to fly up.
Anaximander remained at the base of the mountain. He did not move to follow.
When Emotive tried to follow Noah upward, Noah said calmly.
"Stay."
A small whimper sounded behind him. He ignored it and continued up.
---
He arrived near THE Creature at the peak of the mountain.
THE Creature turned to see him and nodded. A smile was barely visible through the terrifying multicolored flames that wreathed his face.
A moment later, THE Creature frowned.
Surprise and confusion crossed his features. He squinted at Noah with the concentrated attention of a being trying to resolve a discrepancy between what he expected to see and what he was actually seeing.
"Ho."
His voice carried genuine puzzlement.
"You... have changed tremendously. Something about you has changed completely since our last spar. The last time we stood near each other, I could read your configuration with reasonable clarity. I knew approximately what you were and what you were becoming. Now... I cannot quite put my finger on what you have done to yourself."
His flames flickered with amused curiosity.
"What have you been up to, Youngest?"
Noah stared at THE Creature without answering the question directly.
He looked at Philemon Aristos’s corpse on the balcony beside them.
Noah flicked his hand.
The remains scattered outward like trash being cleared from a workbench. Bones, organs, dried crimson-gold blood, fragments of violet robes, all of it swept away from the balcony in a single casual motion. A small sea of his Infinity pooled in the cleared area, cleaning the stone beneath, refreshing the space where Noah wanted to sit.
He sat down beside THE Creature.
He leaned back against the cracked railing with the comfortable posture of a visitor settling in for a long conversation.
Since his last spar with THE Creature! If he really wanted to feel the extent of his power right now, then THE Creature was actually someone ideal to spar with.
But this was sadly not the time.
He answered the earlier question instead.
"Yes. I have changed somewhat. I didn’t know some things, and I know a little bit now."
He paused.
"And...I am sorry. About the vile things done to you in the past."
At these words, THE Creature smiled.
He looked up again, his gaze returning to the sky. His flames steadied into a slower rhythm than they had been holding a moment before. When he spoke, his voice was softer than it had been.
"The past is the past."
His eyes stayed on the sky.
"And yet it forms the future. I stand where I am today because I was obsessed with what happened in the past. Every capacity I now wield, every tier I have climbed, every foundation I have rebuilt from ash, all of it traces back to the grief of that single afternoon eons ago. The obsession became the engine. The engine brought me here. So the past was not a thing I needed to move beyond. It was the fuel I needed to process properly. And I... have processed it."
His flames flickered with a quiet resignation.
"It is not so bad, to tell you honestly. I no longer carry the grief as I used to carry it. I carry it as a steady heat rather than as a burning one. The heat fuels the climb. The climb... has almost reached its destination. Today, on this mountain, I may have the conversation I have been climbing toward for longer than many beings have been alive. That is, in its way, a kind of completion I was not certain I would ever reach."
He turned his head slightly toward Noah.
"But you do not have to be here for this, Osmont."
His voice carried genuine consideration.
"This is my Causality. My choices. My Cause. Whatever unfolds here in the next hour is between me and the being I have summoned."
BOOM!
"..."
At such words, Noah’s reply came grand.
"Existence... is a collection of choices."
"From the smallest mortal flickering through a brief span, to the grandest Civilization resolving its fundamental axioms across eons, every being across every realm is doing nothing more and nothing less than making choices. The choices accumulate. The choices braid into each other. The choices become Causes, and the Causes become the shapes of the realms we move through. Nothing in existence exists that was not chosen by something, at some point, under circumstances that made the choice available to be made."
He let the observation settle.
"Most choices are small. They pass. They are absorbed into the substrate without leaving much trace. The choice of what to eat on a particular afternoon, the choice of which direction to walk through a forest, the choice of which word to use in a passing sentence. These choices matter individually only to the being making them, and they dissolve soon after they are made. Existence is made mostly of these small choices, because most of existence’s moments are...well, small moments."
His gaze returned to THE Creature’s profile.
"But some choices are not small. Some choices are so pivotal that they reshape the substrates they occur within. The choice to rebuild a shattered foundation. The choice to climb an impossible gap. The choice to summon a Gilded One because the debt owed to you is old enough and deep enough that no other settlement will suffice. These choices...do not dissolve. They settle as fixed points in Observable Existence, and every subsequent choice that happens near them is shaped by their presence."
He paused for the slow beat his next sentence required.
"Some choices are so pivotal that they have to be witnessed. Because some choices can change everything. You choice today...will change far too many things..."
His voice steadied.
"It will change things whether I am here or not. The least I can do is be here to witness it. So I am here, and I will stay."
WAA!
His gaze lifted to the sky alongside THE Creature’s.
"You have climbed a long time for this. Let me be among those to witness...what will happen."
BOOM!
