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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5919: Infinite Nightmare I
Chapter 5919: Infinite Nightmare I
This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl
More of them fell!
Noah let them fall, and then he raised them.
Threads came down out of the great black eye, thin and glittering, obsidian and gold, hundreds of them, each one finding a fallen Immense One of the Iron Psalm where it drifted in the fog. The threads left their bodies alone and went in through the eyes.
Gently, almost carefully, they lifted every fallen Immense One up off the snow and the air and the Elsedimensions where they had landed, and hung them in the sky.
They hung in rows beneath the eye, like moths pinned to a board. Their arms dangled. Their heads tipped back. Their open eyes were black and wet and full of the sandy light, and every one of them was still dreaming, dreaming the lives they had left behind, all of those lives at once, and their faces moved slowly through expressions none of them had worn in Ages.
A Newly Risen smiled at something only it could see. An Established One wept soundlessly. Two of them, hung side by side, reached toward each other very slowly, fingertips stopping a breath apart.
The Iron Psalm looked up at what was hanging over them, and for the first time since they had torn the Legacy’s sky, their ranks moved with hesitation.
Noah looked at the nine.
"Newly Risen and Established Immense Ones," he said. "Yours. Bound to you. Sworn to your King. Do you care for them?"
The eye above him stared, unblinking.
"If you do, pull back. Leave this Legacy as you found it. Take your Totems and your sky, and I will let them wake as what they were." He paused. "If you do not, they will close their gates forever."
The nine stayed silent.
So Noah reached up and tugged on one thread.
At its end hung an Established One, a broad, heavy woman with grey braids and verses still faintly glowing on her shoulders. When the thread moved, her body moved with it.
Her limbs began to turn, slowly, the wrong way, her arms curling back across her chest, her legs drawing up beneath her, every joint bending backward against its own shape, until she was curled in on herself like a dead spider. Her Immensity went with her. It collapsed inward, a great grey weight caving into a smaller and smaller space, twisting as it went, until it was a knot no bigger than a fist.
The thread drew her up.
Up past the rows of the hanging. Up through the fog. Up into the black of the eye, where she was swallowed in perfect silence, and was gone.
|An Established Immense One of THE Iron Psalm has been drawn into your Nightmare.|
|Her gate has closed forever.|
|She will dream inside it until it ends.|
...!
The silence across the Legacy was enormous.
Noah kept his eyes on the nine. He wanted them to see him watching.
It was cruel. He knew it was cruel. It was also a door, and he was holding it open, and he had told them exactly what it would cost to walk through.
At that moment, beside Brunhild, the veiled ninth Unfathomable stepped forward.
It moved slowly. It had walked at the back of the nine since the army first came out of the dark, and Noah’s Unlidded Eye had slid off its robes and found only emptiness beneath. Now it stood at Brunhild’s shoulder, and lifted its veiled head, and looked at him.
And it saw him!
Past the Nightmare face, past the crown and the fog and the eye in the sky, it saw him. Noah felt the look land on his existence as a hand lands on a shoulder in a crowd, precise and certain, finding exactly the place where he was.
Around the veiled figure, faint and still as glass, lay a thin film.
Shinjitsu.
|You see beneath its robes.|
|Aethon Pyrrhaeus, THE Ember That Sets Down Its Smoke.|
|Unfathomable Immense One. Ninth Hand of THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate.|
|Shinjitsu Assimilation Rate: 4.7%.|
|Immensity: THE Immensity of Fire.|
...!
Noah looked at the prompt for a long moment.
Four point seven percent. Lower than his own five. And yet that small number sat on top of an Unfathomable Immensity, and the two together made something that turned his gaze very still.
Aethon lifted its veil.
There was no face beneath it. There was only fire.
It was a small fire. That was the first thing Noah understood, and the most frightening. It was the size of a hearth fire, a single pale flame where a head should be, steady and almost colorless, with no smoke at all. Quiet and still, it simply burned, and it burned so cleanly, so completely, that the air around it seemed thinner just for being near it.
It was fire, and only fire. Everything borrowed had been set down. Only the truth of burning remained.
Aethon raised one robed hand, and opened it toward the fog.
The flame spread!
It went out across the sandy cloud in a single quiet wave, pale and smokless, and wherever it touched, the Nightmare burned. It burned as paper burns in a clean hearth, with no crackle or roar: instantly, completely, curling into nothing. The obsidian-gold fog went up in sheets. The threads hanging from the eye caught and blazed and snapped. The plasma guttered out like candle wicks in a draft.
The fire came for Noah.
He felt it before it reached him. It was nothing like Brunhild’s Immensity, which had come down like a mountain and found nothing to grip. This fire needed no grip. Immensity or Root or nothing at all made no difference to it. It only asked one question of whatever it touched, the question every fire asks: will you burn?
His robe of dreams and nightmares caught at the hem.
Gold and black threads blackened and curled. Heat climbed his legs. The crown above his head cracked, a single bright line running across the obsidian, and his Shinjitsu, still and clear and glass-bright, came up hard against the pale flame, and held, barely, like a window holding against a fire on the other side of it.
For one instant, it all nearly burned.
The fog, the threads, the hanging rows, the Nightmare itself. Gigaparsecs of it, gone in a breath, and Noah standing in the middle of the ash with his robe smoking.
Then Aethon closed its hand, and the fire stopped.
What was left of the fog drifted, thin and ragged. Half the hanging Immense Ones had fallen free and lay in the snow below, waking slowly, groaning. The eye in the sky still stared, but its edges smoked.
Aethon lowered its veil again.
"You are weak," it said. Its voice was quiet and dry, like coals settling. "Your weavings are strange, and they are thin, and they would not survive a second touch of my fire. You are also strong. You have Shinjitsu, more than mine. You have something that is not Immensity, and it took nine of us to stop it."
The veiled head tilted. "Our King would like you. Very much. He collects things that are true." It held out its hand, palm up, the small pale flame faintly visible through the cloth. "Join us."
Noah looked at the offered hand.
He saw it clearly. Four point seven percent of truth, wrapped around an Unfathomable fire, held out to him by something that had knelt to a King and found the King worth kneeling to. He saw what Aethon was. He saw what Aethon had set down to become it. He saw, too, that it meant the offer. There was no trick in it!
That made it worse.
His Shinjitsu pulsed.
"No," Noah said.
The single word went out across the burned fog and the waking soldiers and the nine standing at the Legacy’s corners.
"You set down everything borrowed, and then you picked up a gate," he said. "You burned your way down to the plain truth of what you are, and then you handed that truth to someone else to hold. I have seen a great deal of foolishness in a short time. That may be the largest."
His robe was still smoking at the hem. He ignored it. "I do not join. I do not kneel. Every being I have ever met who offered me a place under them is either under me now, or gone."
His Shinjitsu pulsed again, harder.
And the Nightmare came back!
It came back almost at once, because it had only been interrupted. The question still waited, unanswered, and as long as it waited, the Nightmare stood. Sandy light poured out of him again, obsidian and gold, rolling over the burned places and filling them, threads lowering again from the smoking eye, the fog closing back over the Legacy like water over a stone thrown into a lake.
"I will bring down Infinite Nightmares of your existences," Noah said quietly. "Every one of you. Every Immense One under that gate, every Root Bearer, every one of you nine. I will find the roads you left behind and I will open them all at once over your heads. To take hold of this place, you will lose a great deal."
HUUM!
He looked at the rows of the fallen, still hanging, still dreaming.
"It seems you do not care for your people," he said. "So."
He closed his hand.
Every thread tightened at once.
The hanging Immense Ones of the Iron Psalm twisted. All of them, every row, every one still caught in his Nightmare, curling in on themselves as the grey-braided woman had, limbs bending back, Immensities caving inward into small hard knots, and the threads drew them up, all of them, in one long silent rush into the black of the eye. Dozens of them. Then all of them. The rows beneath the eye emptied in a single breath.
The eye stayed open. It only grew, very slightly, darker.
|The fallen of THE Iron Psalm have been drawn into your Nightmare.|
|Their gates have closed forever.|
|They will dream inside it until it ends.|
...!
H extended the Nightmare outward.
The fog went past the empty rows and down into the remaining ranks of the Iron Psalm, the Newly Risen who had held on and the Established Ones who had swayed and steadied and the thousand Root Bearers standing behind them all, and as it reached them, the shadows rose again, one in front of each, obsidian-crowned and quiet.
"Which of us is dreaming the other?"
The ranks began to break.
High above, the nine Unfathomables came together.
They did it unhurried. Brunhild moved first, and the others drew in toward her from the corners of the Legacy, the bell-faced one and the boy and the old man with keys in his beard and the woman of white stone and the twins and the chain and the gate-chested giant, and Aethon at her shoulder, until all nine stood side by side in the torn sky above Noah, their Immensities rising together into a single grey and white and burning weight.
They looked down at him, and their faces were very cold.
"So," said Brunhild Varr, "you have chosen death."
HUUM!
Their might came down.
It came down all at once, nine Unfathomables together, gates and fire and iron and bells and chains, one blow, and it struck the Legacy like the fist of something that had gone its whole existence unrefused!
The fog shattered, and the threads with it. The eye in the sky split down its middle and burst, and the sandy light went out in a single blinding flash and was gone. Every grain of obsidian and gold across Gigaparsecs was crushed flat in the same instant, the whole vast Nightmare smashed out of existence like a lantern under a boot.
Around Noah, the Immense Ones of the Legacy were thrown down.
Moriarty went first, spitting blood, his body torn to rags, slamming into the side of an Elsedimension so hard the mountain cracked. The others followed him, a hundred old beings struck out of the sky at once, falling and falling and smashing into the snowbound Elsedimensions below, their Immensities guttering, a quarter of their strength and then less than that. Somewhere below, Theon cried out.
Noah stood in the wreckage with his robe burned to the knees and his crown cracked through, and watched his Nightmare die as stellar obsidian blood gushed from him endlessly!
His Nightmare lay in pieces around him, ash and nothing more.
Then it rose again.
It rose out of the ash, slowly at first and then all at once, obsidian and gold, sandy and glitering, threads lifting, the fissure in the sky tearing open again a little wider than before, and through it, slowly, the eye.
It opened.
Its gaze fell on the nine.
|Your Nightmare has been destroyed.|
|Your Nightmare has risen.|
|Its condition remains uncleared. No one has answered the question.|
|Until its condition is cleared, it cannot end.|
|It will continue to rise.|
|It will continue to spread.|
...!
