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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5797: The Convocation of Roots! II
Chapter 5797: The Convocation of Roots! II
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
They all stood grandly and the thrones settled, and for a long moment nothing on THE Firmament Mountain moved but the snow.
It fell over the Plain of Accord, over the ring of golden clouds and the strange figures standing on them, over the Keepers waiting a pace behind each cloud. It drifted up toward the floating thrones of black glass and colossal bone and living leaf, and on the Immense Ones seated there it simply vanished, like flakes landing on hot stone.
Then Sir Moriarty rose!
He rose from his throne of polished instruments without any ceremony at all, eight tentacles uncurling, small neat spectacles glinting, and yet the whole plain turned toward him at once, every Root Bearer and every Keeper, as though he had rung a bell.
"Welcome," Moriarty said. It carried to every corner of the plain without seeming to try. "Welcome to THE Convocation of Roots. A Root that never meets another Root grows crooked, and one that never tests itself grows soft. So we gather you here, on the oldest mountain in the Legacy, and let you find out what you are. The rules are few."
A tentacle lifted. "First, no one dies. A bout ends when one of you yields, is carried from the Plain, or a Keeper steps between you. Do not argue with your Keepers when they do. Several are considerably older than they look."
Behind Noah’s cloud, Verys did not blink!
"Second, there is no order of bouts. There is only the Challenge. Step into the center and name who you wish to face. The one named may refuse, once, in the whole of the Convocation. A refusal is remembered. The Legacy has a very long memory."
One refusal. Spend it, and everyone watching would know exactly who had made you flinch! Noah thought of this and set it aside. He did not intend to flinch from anyone here.
"Third, and the one most of you came for. Favors. Any Immense One seated here may grant a Favor to whoever impresses them. A sliver of their Immensity. A lesson. A Relic from their keeping. A door opened that you could not open yourself." His spectacles glinted.
Above him, the thrones stirred!
|THE ASHEN CANTOR shifts on its throne of black glass. Embers fall from its shoulders. It appears bored.|
|THE HOLLOW CHOIR murmurs in a thousand low voices. It is taking bets. It will not say on what.|
|THE SALT-CROWNED MATRON has already chosen three favorites and intends to be proven right.|
|THE DIMENSIONAL DEVOURER, POONA, is very excited, and would like everyone to know it.|
Noah almost laughed. He sat very still on his golden cloud instead, and turned the rules over one by one.
A tournament, then, where the audience were the titans of the Legacy and the prize was their attention. Winning was worth pride and standing. But a Favor was worth more than every win on this plain put together.
Okay!
He kept his Provenance drawn tight and his dreams still. First he wanted to see how the others fought. Information first.
"Then let us begin," Moriarty said. "Who steps first onto the Plain?"
The cloud marked Dravos sagged as the figure on it stood.
He was huge! Dark armor covered him from throat to heel, scorched and dented and glowing dull red along evry seam, as though the fire inside had never gone out. He stepped down onto the plain, and the ground beneath the snow dented into a shallow crater under a single step.
A Physical Root, Progeny of THE Ashen Cantor, built to be heavier than anything in his way!
On the throne of black glass, the embers stopped falling for a moment.
Dravos walked toward the center, each step a slow crater, and the whole ring of clouds watched him go. He clearly meant to go first, and felt no need to wait for anyone’s opinion on it.
Yet at this time...
"Wait, wait, wait!"
Every head on the plain turned!
Someone was running up the last Conduit, actually running, feet flying along the glowing path with no Keeper in front of her! She came over the edge in a spray of snow, skidded to a stop with a hand on her knee, and grinned around at everyone.
She wore a silk dress of deep blue embroidered all over with gold, high collar closed at the throat, slits cut high up both sides so nothing would ever get in the way of her moving.
Her black hair was wound into two tight spiraled buns tied with white ribbons, half loose from the run.
And her legs!
They were the first thing anyone noticed and the last thing anyone would forget.
Thick, powerful thighs heavy with muscle, the thighs of someone who had spent her whole existence kicking things that did not want to be kicked, and calves drawn tight as strung bows beneath them, bare but for white wrap-bands at the ankles and soft cloth shoes!
Every shift of her weight moved them with a coiled, springing ease that promised a great deal of violence.
She was thick!
Her face was round and cheerful, eyes crinkling at the corners with a smile Noah suspected never left.
She bowed to the thrones, too fast and almost slipped on the snow.
Noah’s sight opened her.
|SHEN HUALING(LING).|
|VERITAS: 1. PROVENANCE: 1. POTENTIA: 1. PONDUS: 1.|
|ROOT OF IMMENSITY: ??????|
...!
Noah’s smile faded.
One in everything!
And every hair on Noah’s body lifted at once!
It was not pressure. Minerva pressed on him like a weight from afar. This girl pressed on nothing at all, and standing near that absence felt like standing beside a mountain that had decided to look like a pebble.
His packed, compressed existence, unbothered by beings at eight hundred, went quietly still.
Across the ring, Minerva had gone very still too.
The girl brushed snow off her knee and waved at everyone.
"Sorry for being late! But I was promised to go first!"
Moriarty was quiet a moment. "Promised by whom, young lady?"
She tipped her head back and smiled, not at Moriarty but at one of the hazy thrones, where an Immense One sat so deep in its own Dimensionality that no one could see it at all.
"Oh," she said cheerfully. "You know."
The hazy throne did not answer!
In the center of the plain, Dravos turned his helmeted head slowly toward her, and the red at his seams brightened.
"The Plain," he said, like a furnace door grinding open, "is mine first."
She looked him over, the armor, the craters, the glow, and her whole face lit up!
"Big fucker, you need an opponent anyways. Loosen the fuck up! Come on!"
She hopped down off the Conduit and walked out onto the Plain of Accord, soft shoes leaving small neat prints beside his craters. She stopped a few paces in front of him and bounced on her toes, once, twice, rolling her shoulders, the great muscles of her thighs flexing and settling.
"Ready? I am Ling, big fucker, and I...love to fight!"
Dravos did not answer her as he was actually a but angry!
He planted his feet, and his Provenance came out of him!
It poured off his body in a red-black flood that did not stay a flood for long. Hardening, it set in plates and ridges and interlocking scales, layer on layer, like molten iron setting on an anvil, until he stood inside a second suit of armor built over the first, taller than before, broader, every seam of it running with a dull forge-glow.
His Provenance had a name, and it announced itself in the heat rolling off him: THE Provenance of THE Unquenched Forge. Whatever touched it would be hammered. Whatever struck it would be struck back.
He took one step toward her, and the Plain of Accord shook!
The crater under his foot was deeper this time. On the golden clouds ringing the plain, Root Bearers who had been lounging a moment ago sat up straight, and more than one of them gripped the edge of their cloud as it rocked!
This was a Progeny of THE Ashen Cantor, a Fiend-path Root, and he was genuinely grand.
"Yield," Dravos said. "I do not hold back well as it would be a shame for there to be an accidental death. You feel...ridiculously weak. Do you even have any Provenance?"
Ling bounced on her toes, ribbons swaying, and looked him up and down with open admiration as if she had never seen someone so fucking stupid.
"I came here to test myself against the truly grand," Dravos went on, his voice grinding out of the helm. "Not to break a girl who ran up the stairs late. Step off the Plain."
"Aw," Ling said. "That’s sweet!"
And she stepped in.
WUU!
She did not use a single authority. Noah watched for one, a weaving, a flicker of Provenance, anything at all, and there was nothing. She simply took one step forward, turned her hips, and kicked.
Her shin met his breastplate.
BOOM!
It rang like a bell the size of a Dimension being struck! The sound rolled out across the whole Plain of Accord and up into the thrones and away over the snowing mountains of the Legacy, and in the middle of it, THE Provenance of THE Unquenched Forge caved in around the shape of a single girl’s leg!
Dravos went backward!
He slid, feet still planted, carving a trench through the snow and the stone of the oldest mountain in the Legacy, a hundred paces of it, before he stopped.
"...!"
The plain went dead silent!
Then Ling was on him again!
It was not a fight. It was a performance, and she was having the time of her life! She kicked from the knee and from the hip, snapping strikes that cracked the forged plates wherever they landed. Her open hands swung out like hammers and the armor buckled under her palms. Then up his chest she ran, launched off his shoulders, came down heel-first on his helm, and landed laughing.
Then she threw a flurry of kicks so fast they stopped looking like kicks at all, only a blur of thick powerful legs and flying white ribbons, and every strike sprayed blood and red-hot flakes of shattered Provenance across the snow!
She laughed the whole time. Bright, delighted, cheeks flushed, and getting less sane by the second.
Dravos roared, and his Root answered.
Noah felt it happen! Across the ring, the forge-glow of THE Ashen Cantor’s throne flared in answer to its son. The Physical Root inside the armor bore down on itself, and Dravos grew heavier. Denser. The plain groaned beneath him as his weight doubled, doubled again, until he was a being simply stronger than the rules of the fight, the Fiend-path made flesh, too heavy for any blow to move!
And yet..
Oh, and yet!
Ling kicked him, and he moved!
It did not matter. None of it mattered! However heavy he made himself, she was heavier still, a girl with 1 in every measure, and his weight meant nothing at all to hers.
Noah let his Provenance unfurl, just a little. Just enough to look properly.
And he saw it!
Her existence had abandoned everything else. There was nothing in her but one thing. No layers, no borrowed weavings, no Causes or Intents or grown foundations stacked on top of a Root, as everyone else carried theirs. Her Root did not sit inside her. It was her, from her skin to her core, all of her. The Root and the girl existed as one.
She was a Root of Immensity!
...!
Above the plain, the thrones broke their composure.
|THE ASHEN CANTOR rises half out of its throne of black glass. Its embers have stopped singing.|
|THE HOLLOW CHOIR falls silent, all thousand voices at once.|
|THE SALT-CROWNED MATRON leans forward. "...What is that child? Whose child is it? Is she one of the new entrants?"|
|THE DISSECTING SCHOLAR is writing very quickly. His spectacles nearly slipped.|
|A hazy throne ripples. It appears pleased.|
Ling ducked a haymaker that would have flattened a mountain range and came up grinning, blood on her smile.
"More!" she shouted. "More, more, give me more! Are those big muscles for show? Is all that Provenance for show?! Lots are watching- dodge this at least!"
HUUM!
She swept his legs out from under him. His guard dropped. She stamped once, hard.
The Plain of Accord cratered!
The ground caved inward around her foot in a bowl wider than a city, and Dravos went down into the bottom of it in a crash of shattered armor, and the whole mountain shuddered from peak to root!
On its throne, THE Keeper of the Unbroken Vow pulsed once.
It was over!
A Keeper was already at the bottom of the crater, an old grey-bearded figure in black and fur who had not been there a heartbeat before, standing over Dravos with both hands raised and his face perfectly calm. Dravos lay in the ruin of his own forge-armor, alive, barely, plates scattered across the snow in smoking pieces. His Root flickered weakly inside him like a banked coal that someone had stepped on.
Ling stood at the rim of the crater, breathing hard, ribbons hanging loose, blood speckled across the gold embroidery of her dress, and beamed.
Noah sat back on his cloud, and let his Provenance settle tight against his skin again.
A Physical Root, crushed. Not by a greater Physical Root, not by an Empyros rewriting the fight, but by something that had thrown away everything that was not its Root, until there was nothing left of her to be anything else. Dravos had carried his Root. She simply was hers. And a being that is entirely one thing cannot be split, or weighed against itself, or found wanting in any part, because there are no parts!
So that was what the 1s meant. Not weakness. There was only one of her, and it was all Root!
How did a being even get like that? And what had she given up to do it?
He did not know. He wanted to!
|THE ASHEN CANTOR speaks, and its voice is a forge.|
|"The child lost. I grant him a Favor regardless. Let him remember why he needed it."|
Down in the crater, Dravos went very still. Somewhere under the ruin of his helm, Noah suspected, a young giant was trying very hard not to weep.
Because that was a fucking humiliation.
A Favor to its own defeated son. A mercy, and a humiliation, and the whole Legacy had just watched it land.
|A hazy throne speaks. No one can see what speaks.|
|"A Favor to the girl."|
Ling looked up at the haze and bowed, too fast again, bouncing on the snow. Then she turned and walked back along the ring of golden clouds, humming.
She passed right in front of Noah’s cloud, and looked up at him.
She winked.
"Big boy," she said cheerfully, "I want to see how you would do between my thighs! I’ve heard a little about you! I’ll let others take the ring for now but afterwards...you and I need to have a go..."
...!
She skipped off before he could answer and sat down on the very edge of the Plain, with no cloud of her own at all, swinging her legs over the drop and humming to herself.
Noah watched her go, and for once he genuinely did not know what to say!
