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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5824: Immensity! II
Chapter 5824: Immensity! II
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
The green tendril reached the purple coat around the mountain, found a seam in it hidden from everyone but her, and pulled!The coat opened like a curtain!
Snow blew in through the gap, and with the snow came the scent of spring. Wet earth, new leaves, flowers that had bloomed and fallen and bloomed again for Ages. The torches along the cavern walls leaned toward the opening, then away from it.
THE Verdant Regard stepped through!
She came as a tall figure of soft green light. The body walking into the cavern was one of several. Far away, in her ever-spring domain, the rest of her sat on a bed of moss with her daughter’s head in her lap, and this body was a branch she had sent out from that place, as a tree sends out a root toward water. Even so, its depth went down past his sight.
Green below green below green, spring after spring after spring, an Immensity built from every season that had ever ended and come back.
She knew every path in this Legacy. She had walked them as a friend for longer than most Legacies had stood.
Three more came through behind her!
The first was a woman, tall and stooped, her body corroded bronze from crown to heel, her robe a single sheet of flaking verdicts that rustled when she moved. Where she passed, the stone at the cavern’s mouth went brown and crumbled. The torchlight that touched her came away dull, aged, its color rusted out of it. She walked slowly, with the patience of something that had outlved every enemy it had ever made and expected to outlive a few more.
|THE Rusted Matriarch.|
The second was a beast. Lean and grey, the size of a range of hills pressed down into the cavern’s mouth, its shoulders hunched as it squeezed through. Its eyes were two open doorways with nothing behind them. It stopped just inside the entrance and sniffed at the air, at the walls, at the torn coat behind it, with the deep pleased interest of a hound that has found the most interesting door in existence.
|THE Hound of Thresholds.|
The third was a young man in gilded armor, handsome, golden-haired, his Immensity glittering on him like fresh gold leaf. He swept in with a smile already on his face and looked around the cavern as though he had come to inspect a property he was thinking of buying.
|THE Gilt Heir.|
Noah read them with his gold eyes, one after another. The Gilt Heir was the shallowest, and the loudest; only a few Ages deep, and still more depth than Noah could reach the bottom of. The Hound went deeper, far deeper. Deepest of the three, the Rusted Matriarch’s depth slid away from him entirely, rust on rust on rust, down into a dark beyond his following.
Then the fifth one came, and the cavern changed!
It began before he finished arriving. The purple torches along the walls flickered, and their fire turned crimson gold. The prayer mats darkened at their edges into his colors. Even the snow drifting in through the torn coat stopped in the air, every flake of it, and each one turned slowly to face the entrance.
Noah felt why. Wherever this one’s attention rested, existence began to become his, owned rather than destroyed. The torches still burned, but they burned for him now! The mats still lay on the floor, but they were his mats. He owned what he touched, and he owned a little of whatever he simply looked at.
THE Sleepless Fiend stepped into the cavern!
He came as a tall figure in dark robes, his face barely perceptible, his presence a weight that made the mountain groan. Noah could see more than that now. A great deal more. But the Fiend kept all of that turned away from him so far.
The five of them spread out around the Thinker.
The Thinker stayed on his knees. He knelt on his prayer mat exactly as he had knelt for Ages, his beads clicking slowly through his fingers, his weeping eyes half closed. Behind him, Noah sat on his own mat, his gold eyes calm.
He felt them read him!
He felt each of them look at him and see what he had let them see: a dream of a lifeform whose Root, by every account in the Legacy, had formed days ago.
The Gilt Heir laughed out loud! The Hound sniffed in his direction once and lost interest, and the Rusted Matriarch kept her eyes elsewhere entirely.
THE Sleepless Fiend smiled!
"Old friend," he said to THE Thinker.
His voice was warm. Reasonable. It was the voice of a man arriving late to dinner, sorry to have kept everyone waiting.
"It has been a very long time. I wish we were meeting over something gentler." He spread his hands. "I regret the method. Truly. The coat, the Legacy, poor Moriarty. None of it was what I would have chosen. But the snow is deep, and getting deeper. The door is shut. You know what that means for all of us who still breathe. Keys must be found, and kept, and used. For the good of everyone."
His gaze settled on THE Thinker, gently.
"Step aside. Let us take the boy. You will not lose anything you cannot afford."
THE Thinker’s beads clicked once.
|"I have thought through a great many probabilities,"| he said, without opening his eyes. |"Across a great many Ages. In none of them is a gift from THE Sleepless Fiend paid for by the one who receives it."|
|"I decline."|
The Fiend sighed.
THE Verdant Regard took a step forward.
Her soft green light dimmed as she moved, and when she spoke, her voice was nothing like the Fiend’s. It was tired, and raw, and grieving.
"My daughter has not woken," she said to the Thinker. "Her Root lies frozen on the moss beside her. The snow falls on her face and I cannot keep it off."
She looked at him, and her green eyes were wet. "You have a daughter. You know. Please. Understand."
The Thinker opened his weeping eyes and looked at her for a long moment.
|"I do understand,"| he said gently. |"And I am sorry. Truly."|
His beads stilled. |"Understanding changes nothing though."|
Her face closed!
The Fiend let out a long breath, the sigh of a father over a stubborn child, and lifted one hand.
"Then," THE Sleepless Fiend said, "we will simply take the boy."
HUUM!
Five depths of Immensity rose inside the cavern at once!
They rose out of the five invaders like tides coming in from five different seas. The Gilt Heir’s gold flared bright and brash. The Hound’s grey Immensity poured out low along the floor, sniffing. Rust spread from the Matriarch in a slow brown wave, aging the air itself. The Verdant Regard’s spring rolled outward, green and overwhelming, flowers bursting from the stone wherever it touched. And the Fiend’s ownership spread from him in every direction, quiet, total, claiming everything it reached.
All five came for the Thinker, and for the man behind him.
The Thinker stayed kneeling!
He opened his great hands, and the beads left them.
They rose into the air, one after another, boulders of dark stone the size of hills, and as they rose, each one caught purple fire. They began to orbit him. Slowly at first, then faster, a ring of burning moons wheeling around a kneeling giant in the heart of his mountain.
One moon swung out and met the Rusted Matriarch’s rust. The corrosion washed against it, and the bead’s purple fire held it, rust and fire grinding against each other in a slow, endless push. Another swung out against the Gilt Heir’s gold and stopped it dead, the young lord’s Immensity flaring and straining and going nowhere. A third met the Verdant Regard’s spring, flowers blooming and withering against its burning surface. A fourth swung out to the Fiend, and the Fiend’s ownership spread across it, and the bead stayed the Thinker’s own.
Four Immense Ones. Four beads. The Thinker held all of them at once without rising from his mat.
The cavern should have collapsed!
Noah could feel the weight in it, five depths of Immensity grinding against one another in a space of stone. The mountain stood because the Thinker had decided it would stand. His weeping eyes stayed half closed. His fierce almost-smile held perfectly still.
This was what depth looked like when it chose to act!
And the Hound found the gap!
It slipped between the orbiting moons at the one instant when two of them crossed, low and grey and quick, its doorway eyes fixed on Noah. Its Immensity poured toward him in a rush.
Out of that rush, a hand formed.
Vast and grey, woven out of the Hound’s Immensity, large enough to close around a mountain. It came down over Noah where he sat on his prayer mat and wrapped around him, fingers curling, and began to close.
The pressure was beyond anything in his life!
The Warden’s half-Immensity had been heavy, flickering, half there. This was whole. Finished. Deep. The grasp of a being that had pased through the door Ages ago and carried every Age since.
It pressed on every part of him at once, and the Tree in his chest shuddred under it, and for an instant he felt how small he was inside that hand.
Then his body answered!
The constellations under his night-dark skin began to move outward. Off his chest, off his arms, off his face, drifting into the air around him, spreading until he sat inside a moving sky of his own, stars of blue and gold wheeling slowly in the space between his skin and the Hound’s closing fingers.
The halo of time behind his shoulders turned faster, ticking. His horns of radiance flared bright enough to throw shadows across the whole cavern.
And his Dreaming Origin side surged forward.
Inside the reach of his dream, things became what he dreamed them to be. And he dreamed that the hand closing on him was closing on a dream of him.
The Hound’s fingers closed, gripping, squeezing with all the weight of an established Immensity.
They were holding a sky!
Noah stood up inside it.
He lifted his own hand, slowly, laid his palm flat against the inside of the Hound’s grey fingers, and pushed.
The Immensity moved!
...!
It moved away from him a hand’s width. Then an arm’s length. The grey fingers bent back, and opened, and the Hound’s whole Immensity slid back from him across the cavern floor like a tide going out, and Noah stood alone on his prayer mat inside his sky of drifting stars with his hand still raised.
...!
|...!|
"...!"
The cavern went silent!
Every Immense One in it was looking at him.
The Gilt Heir’s smile had gone, and the Hound had frozen mid-step, its doorway eyes narrowed to slits, and the Rusted Matriarch had finally turned her head, and her rusted face held something that might have been interest. Even THE Verdant Regard had gone still, her green light flickering.
The Gilt Heir spoke first, and his voice cracked on it.
"The fuck?"
How...could something so unfathomably weak rebuff an Immensity? This was the singular question orbiting all beings here!
The Thinker’s orbiting beads paused for exactly one heartbeat.
Then they moved on!
|An Immense grasp has been rebuffed.|
|Predation: residue of an Immense One’s reach.|
|Sap risen toward the First Bough: 20%.|
...!
Noah lowered his hand.
His arms were trembling, he noticed. Faintly. The push had cost him: the lit ring at the base of his Tree had dimmed a shade, and it would take a few nanoseconds to burn bright again.
The enemy’s Immensity was many times more powerful than Ling!
Inside his dream, an Immense grasp became a grasp on a dream of him, and he could open it. Holding one off for long would drain him. Holding off two at once, he had no wish to test yet.
And THE Sleepless Fiend, for the first time since he had entered the cavern, turned and looked directly at him.
Every torch in the mountain burned crimson gold at once!
