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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5979: Si vis pacem, para bellum!
Chapter 5979: Si vis pacem, para bellum!
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For a little while, the war paused. It was not really a truce. Both armies drew back a few paces at the same moment to breathe and look at what was left of them.
On the eastern slope, the Shepherd’s Unfathomables who could still stand gathered among the craters. In the west, Kir One and Kir Two swayed in the starlit grass where Lifthrasir had stopped them, dark streams still running from their mouths into the soil.
In the middle of the field, Noah set the Hoe against his shoulder, as he did at the end of a long row, and looked up.
The sky over the Carcosa was dark and empty, and the snow still hung in it. Far beyond it, beyond everything he could reach, hung the banner. He had felt it every day since he first rose onto it: the long banner of the Narrative of Kings, stretched across all of existence, with his own name written on it among all the others.
He looked at the field, east and west, and asked himself the simplest question of the day. Why had every one of them come here?
Every one of them was fighting for someone else’s Narrative. The Unfathomables fought for the Shepherd’s banner, and the Shepherd fought for his place on the banner of Kings. Roxanna fought for the people she had chosen, under a King’s order. The silver-winged sisters fought for their father’s return. Lifthrasir fought for a promise.
Every story on that field had been built the same way: by taking, by drowning smaller stories under larger ones, by carving existence and bleeding it for Ichor and hanging the names of the strongest across the dark.
So the war was between his giving and everything that had ever been built on taking. And he was still standing on their banner, with his name on it and two seats in the Long Night to his credit, a small part of the very thing he was refusing.
He looked down the roads. On one, he kept his name on the banner and fought every King from inside their own list, forever.
On another, he kept it and grew quietly toward the top of it, and in an Age or two became the thing he had come to bury. On the third, he took his name off. That road ran on into the dark further than he could see, and every King in existence stood somewhere along it.
He took the third road.
A scroll unrolled in the air in front of him, pale and threaded with blue-gold and obsidian-gold, hanging in the middle of the battlefield among Excedere and kneeling Unfathomables. Noah lifted one hand from the Hoe and touched it, and the words began.
"There was a farmer who stood on no banner.
He carried no King’s name and held no seat in any court. He wore no story but his own, and he asked no one to wear his. He did not rule, and he would not be ruled. What grew in his field belonged to no one, and that was why it grew.
Wherever a Narrative had grown great by crushing smaller ones beneath it, he went, and he did not conquer it. He tilled it under. He turned it back into soil, and from that soil, smaller things grew again, and none of them knelt.
This is the field that kneels to no banner. Nothing that grows in it will ever be taken."
He lifted his hand. The scroll began to shine.
BOOM!
An influx of Pure Existential Essence flowed into him continuously, mixtures of everything he consumed from Existence and from the leaking Half-Unfathomables, Unfathomables, and Excedere Unfathomables here! All those who exploded from DOOM gave back everything they held!
|Fourth Narrative written: THE Field That Kneels to No Banner.|
|You have rejected every Narrative that is not your own.|
|Your name has been removed from THE Narrative of Kings.|
|Your seats in THE Long Night are empty.|
|No banner can be raised over you. No King’s will can be spoken through you.|
|Branch of THE Narrative Wall: Level 12 to Level 15. Each wall is now worth 240.|
|New Narrative Walls opened: 15. Filled at once.|
|Narrative Walls standing: 55 of 55. Around you: 54. Over the farm: 1.|
|Sub-Branch of THE Endless Retelling: Level 61 to Level 90.|
|Regeneration now exceeds the damage you are receiving.|
He felt his name go. Nothing was being taken from him this time.
Far beyond the sky, a small clean gap opened in the long list of the powerful and stayed open, and he found he missed nothing about the place.
All across the eastern slope, the Unfathomables who carried a King’s mark lifted their heads one after another. Ione Kalliste stared up at the empty dark where his name had been. Roxanna had gone very still. On the western ridge, Phaedra’s lips parted in astonishment.
Even her father’s name was still there!
Noah lowered his hand from the shining scroll and looked out across the field. And for the only time in the whole of the war, he raised his voice.
He did not shout, as he never really shouted. But his voice carried over the farm and the starlit grass and both ridges and out into the dark of the Carcosa beyond them, and every lifeform on that field heard every word.
"I...am coming for every Narrative that grows by crushing smaller ones," Noah said. "And for every King who rules them."
He settled the Hoe back into both hands. "I aim not to rule them, but to break them, to plant them, to make sure that at some point...some of the many out there are held...accountable."
...!
BOOM!
Noah thought about it gently. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If one wanted peace...they had to prepare for War!
He could wage wars. Oh, he could wage wars!
The silence that followed lasted a long time.
The silence then broke, all at once, and the war came back!
It came back harder than at any point since the first stroke. Roxanna came off the slope with her fist raised and the loosening Essara of Destruction blazing in her chest. Phaedra spread her silver wings and called THE Dawn That Does Not Ask, and then reached, with her teeth set, for THE Name Unspoken again!
Thessaly called THE Red Hour across the whole field until the snow hanging in the sky caught fire. The strongest of the Shepherd’s Unfathomables who could still stand rose around them. Only Kir One and Kir Two stayed where Lifthrasir had stopped them. Every other Excedere and Unfathomable on that field struck the farmer at once!
It was the largest assault of the war. It changed nothing.
The walls broke dozens at a time and rose faster than they broke. When Phaedra’s Name reached for him, Elpis hummed once in his hands, and the reaching slid off him and away. The Red Hour burned across his walls, and they burned and healed, burned and healed, and the fire found nothing to keep.
He left DOOM where it was as he tested the extent of his existence. He called the Abominations instead. Wherever an Unfathomable came at him with too much of other beings’ Narratives blazing at its back, the seed of the Bleeding Nightmare inside it split open, and gold climbed out, long-armed and winged and wrong, and tore what had been taken out of it, burned it clean, and let it fall as ash.
|THE Doom Abominations of Existence: risen from 9 attackers.|
|Targets erased: 6. Called back: 3.|
Six erased. Three he stopped halfway, once nothing taken was left in them, and the gold shapes folded back down into nothing at a single word. He still had not lifted the Hoe.
Around him, slowly, the field became his. The grey light of the Fallow rolled out across the starlit grass, and the black-gold soil crept past the furrow under the feet of the kneeling Unfathomables. Wherever the Harvest had emptied something, the ground grew rich.
On the western ridge, Thessaly called THE Thing Behind Every Door one more time. Her Fear rolled across the farm in a long dark wave, the oldest and surest weapon she had, and washed over the burning walls and the farmer at their center and the warm gold curve of the Farm Wall behind him.
And for the second time in her very long life, it found nothing there to hold!
Absolutely nothing!
He turned his focus on the nearby Roxanna. An Excedere Unfathomable Immense Lifeform with a Rare Essara of Destruction!
In the heartbeat before she stepped forward, Roxanna opened one of her records.
"Back," she told the army behind her. "All of you...get back from here!"
They went with unwilling eyes, and then Roxanna walked down onto the farm alone.
Noah watched her come, and down the possibilities he watched every way it could go. In one, she turned at the furrow and walked back up the slope and lived, emptied and cracked, for a long time. In every other road, she kept walking. He watched her pass the turning without looking at it.
She knew what he knew. The Essara in her chest was loosening with every breath, held in place by will alone, and the Return was pulling everything she had ever taken out through the thread in her chest. She had broken Immensities, and even a Legacy, for the Shepherd’s banner.
There were, after all, some fairly weak Legacies. She had cracked Dimensions open to reach what was hidden inside them. She had carved existence itself. She came across the black-gold soil anyway, toward the one being on the field who could finish her, because the people she had chosen were still out there waiting for her to come home.
She stopped a few paces from him and raised her cracked fist.
"Dreamer," she said.
"Mmm," he said. He did not raise the Hoe.
"THE Break...That Goes All the Way Down."
She struck, and a wall came apart, all the way down into nothing, and left a white hole in existence. The hole began to close almost at once, and before it had finished, the wall was rising into it again.
She struck again, and again. Every strike was an argument, and she made it with everything she had: that nothing was too great to break; that the strong took because the weak could not stop them; that if she was strong enough, no one would ever take anything from her again.
Every wall she broke rose again, an answer that needed no words. Everything that was taken goes home.
The cracks spread past her elbows to her shoulders, then across her collarbones and up the sides of her neck, and wherever they ran, her skin split and blood came through. It soaked through the burnt-gold plates of her armor and dripped from her fingers onto the soil, which took it gently. She kept her feet every time the breaking passed back through her.
"Who...are you protecting?" Noah asked her. He asked it just as he had the first time.
This time she answered him. "The ones I chose," Roxanna said. "And who chose me. After my family. After I watched a war take all of them because I was too weak to stand in front of it."
She struck, and another wall came apart, and rose. "I will never be that weak again. Not for anyone."
"I am sorry that such a grand dream...will have to end."
She looked at him through the blood running into her eyes, and he watched her refuse to believe him. Belief would have meant everything she had done since the Shepherd lifted her out of the ruins had been for nothing, and she could not carry that, not now. So she did not stop! She could not stop!
She gathered everything that was left in her, every Narrative she had taken and every Immensity she had grown, and put all of it behind one blow!
BOOM!
Eleven walls came apart at once, equivalent to a strike capable of killing 22 Unfathomable Immense Lifeforms all at once, and eleven white holes hung open around him.
|Narrative Walls broken: 11 (Destruction). Broken out of existence: 11. Closing.|
|Narrative Walls standing: 44 of 55. Around you: 43. Over the farm: 1.|
Eleven at once. Even now, she was one of the most dangerous thing on the field. Then Noah stepped forward, for the first time in the duel, and laid the flat of the Hoe’s blade gently against her chest, over the place where the Essara was.
The Bleeding Nightmare bloomed in her heavily. The seed that had been rooting in her since her first stroke opened all at once, and the thread pulled one last time. The Essara of Destruction let go. It slid out of her, a small kernel of snapping red-black strings, and sank down through the soil and away into existence, going home. Behind it went everything she had taken.
|THE Devourer’s Hemorrhage: bloomed in Roxanna.|
|Essara of Destruction: returned to existence.|
Roxanna went down onto her knees in the snow, and then onto her side.
The holes around him were already closing. Ione Kalliste was running down the eastern slope, ignoring the shouts behind her, staring at Roxanna with utter shock!
Roxanna’s black eyes found her. The bright streaks in them were very faint. "Tell them," she said. "Tell him... I tried."
BOOM!
Her Immensity fully and entirely fizzled out.
Then she was gone!
|Roxanna has fallen. What she took has returned to existence, and to you.|
|Broken out of existence: 0. Rebuilding: 11.|
An Excedere Unfathomable Immense Lifeform...fell!
Oh!
She had been too close to THE Farmer and too relentless! She had been...unflinching. She never took a single step back.
Every one of his roads went quiet at once.
He called nothing else up out of her. No gold, no Abominations, no DOOM. He knelt on her other side and closed her eyes, one and then the other.
He took the edge of his black, bloodstained sleeve and wiped the blood from her face until she was clean. He straightened the burnt-gold plates of her armor where they had come loose, and laid her cracked hands together on her chest.
Who was the "him" she had meant? Her King, most likely. Perhaps a son. He looked down the roads for the answer and found none. He hoped it was her son she was thinking of in the end of her life and not some King.
Then he looked back over his shoulder, across the field, to where his own son stood behind the gold curve of the Farm Wall.
"Henry," Noah said. "Start digging some graves."
...!
There was an Excedere Unfathomable Immense One to plant!
On the eastern ridge, Ione Kalliste stood up slowly from the soil and walked back up the slope without a word. At the top, Aethon was waiting for her. The two of them stood together in the hanging snow and watched the farmer kneel beside the woman who had broken eleven of his walls at once, and neither of them looked away as their face held unflinching incredullity!
