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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5994: OINK II
Chapter 5994: OINK II
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The OINK did not fade.
It went out from the pig in a single deep pulse, and Noah felt it pass through his walls without breaking any of them. Under the pig’s hooves, the moss turned gold!
It spread outward in a slow ring, root and moss and black soil all hardening into hammered gold, until the pig stood at the center of a gleaming circle five meters wide. The great golden hide on its shoulders seemed to drink the light of the golden beam of light above it. Its white wings shifted once, very slightly.
Information rose out of the place before Noah could move.
|Introductory Narrative of Existence: begun.|
|Essara 1 Abomination. Narrative: THE Charge That Gilds the Ground.|
|Condition: endure it, or end it.|
|While this Narrative lasts, acclimation is accelerated.|
|Acclimation: 4%.|
...!
Endure it, or end it. So that was what an introductory Narrative was. The place had set something of his own designation in front of him and was going to watch what he did with it!
The pig charged.
It did not gather itself first. One instant it was standing on its gold, and the next it was simply in front of him, its white wings snapped open behind it for the single beat that carried it across the gap, and its brow hit his walls at a speed his eyes never followed.
BOOM!
Four walls broke at once. Not all the way down, out of existence; Roxanna had done that, and this was something else. These broke the ordinary way, shattering inward with a sound that shook the constellations in the nearest trunks, and the fifth wall bent and held. The pig’s tusks slid off it with a shriek of gold on Narrative.
Noah’s feet slid back two meters through the moss. Then the Endless Retelling caught up, and the four broken walls rose again behind the fifth before the pig could draw back.
|Narrative Walls broken: 4. Restored: 4.|
|Narrative Walls standing: 67 of 67.|
Four walls in one blow, and all recovered! The sensation...felt grand!
The pig stepped back onto the place where it had stopped. The moss under its hooves turned gold. The ring of gilded ground behind it was still there, and now there was a second patch, and a line of gold between them where its hooves had touched in the charge. Noah looked at that line and understood the Narrative a moment before the pig used it.
It charged again, from gold to gold, and this time it was faster.
BOOM!
Six walls.
It wheeled, struck down with one forehoof, and the ground under Noah’s feet turned gold. It struck again from the new gold.
BOOM!
Seven walls!
Every place its hooves struck became its ground. On its own ground it was faster, and heavier, and every charge laid more ground down for the next one. The longer this went on, the more of the forest would belong to it. Noah could already see a rough golden circle spreading around the two of them, twenty meters across and growing, the beams of light catching on it from above until the dark around them glittered.
He held his ground, and he let it come.
It came again and again. It came from the left and from above, wings snapping open for half a heartbeat to throw it across the gold, and from straight ahead with its head low and its tusks up. It never made a sound except the hooves, and the gold ringing where they struck, and the walls breaking. Six. Eight. Five. Nine. The Endless Retelling rebuilt them three a second, and the pig broke them faster than that, and the count of standing walls dropped for the first time.
|Narrative Walls standing: 58 of 67.|
Noah did not step back!
He let the Bleeding Nightmare unfurl.
It had been seeding itself the whole time, a dark seed rooting in the pig wherever its tusks and brow had struck his walls, a dozen of them by now, and he woke every one of them at once. The Devourer’s Hemorrhage bloomed in the pig’s golden hide.
It bled. A thin dark thread ran from its shoulder and from under one eye, and for an instant, the charge faltered.
Only for an instant. The thread thinned to almost nothing and stopped. Whatever the Nightmare had found to bleed out of it, there had not been much.
The Return, then. He pulled on every seed at once, reaching for whatever the pig had taken to become what it was!
Almost nothing came. A faint trickle, gone in a breath. The pig had taken nothing. Its gold was its own, and its hunger was its own, and its Narrative was something it had grown out of itself in a place where nothing borrowed survived the door. Of course the Return found nothing to send home!
He called the Abominations anyway, to know.
They climbed out of the Nightmare seeds in the pig’s hide, gold and winged and wrong, long arms unfolding, faceplates splitting to pour their light. Three of them. They took hold of the pig’s shoulders and its wings and leaned their light into it, looking for anything taken to tear out and return.
There was nothing. Their hands scraped across its golden hide and came away with a few flakes of gold, no more. Then they faded, because there was nothing in the pig for them to do!
"Hmm...." Noah’s eyes shone brightly
The pig’s eyes, for the first time, changed.
They had been calm until now, small and intelligent and almost curious. Now something behind them caught. It had felt the Nightmare and the Return and the long golden hands, every one of them reaching into it uninvited, and it did not like it.
"OINK!"
The pulse was filled with its terrifying narrative as it hit his walls this time.
Eleven broke at once. The pig came through the gap behind them with its head low and its wings wide, and its tusk went through the twelfth wall and stopped a hand’s width from his chest.
BOOM!
|Narrative Walls standing: 49 of 67.|
Noah looked down at the tusk. Then he looked at the pig.
It was so close that he could see the grain of the hammered gold across its brow and smell it, warm metal and moss, and the clean, pure air of the place moving around it. It was not a monster. It wanted to break him, and it was using everything it had ever grown to do it.
"Not yet, big guy. Show me more." Noah said quietly.
The Endless Retelling filled the gap in front of the tusk, wall after wall, three a second, until the tusk was pushed back out of him by the sheer weight of what kept rising. Noah planted his feet in the moss and let the walls rise. He stood there in the middle of the golden ring with his hands loose at his sides and his hat still on his head, and every time the pig hit him, he was still there afterward.
The pig hit him for a very long time.
Somewhere in the middle of it, he noticed the dark had changed.
At first he thought the golden beams had widened. They had not. He could simply see further. The soft blankness at the edge of his sight had moved back, from forty meters to fifty, and the trunks beyond it were standing out of the dark one by one, black glass and slow constellations, where a moment ago there had been nothing at all. The air felt lighter in his chest. The pure existence against his skin no longer pressed on him. It simply surrounded him now.
|Acclimation: 17%.|
The fight was teaching him. Every charge he took, every breath of this place he drew while something tried to kill him in it, the place was settling into him, and he into it!
|Acclimation: 26%.|
Sixty meters. Seventy. And at the far edge of what he could now see, behind the pig, something moved.
Gular came back out of the dark.
His left arm was gone below the elbow, and a long crack ran down one side of his carved face, and the light across his skin had dimmed to a sullen glow. But he was walking while smiling. He came along the edge of the golden ring without a sound, and the eyes along his remaining knuckles were open, every one of them, fixed on the pig’s back.
He met Noah’s eyes across the gold.
"I’ll need just a little while to complete my attack." Gular said, very quietly.
So Noah held it.
He stopped merely enduring and started giving the pig a reason to keep looking at him. He let his walls sit a little forward of himself, a little too thin on one side, and when the pig went for the weakness, he shifted his weight and took the charge on the thickest part of his walls instead. He took the next one standing still. When it reared and came down on him with both forehooves, gilding the ground he stood on, he lifted his face to it and smiled.
The pig’s eyes narrowed.
Behind it, Gular raised his one hand and reached.
Noah saw it happen and could not have said how. Gular’s hand did not touch the pig. It went into something else, into the place behind the pig where its first instant still was, buried deep under everything it had ever grown, and the eyes along his knuckles blazed white as they searched. A few seconds passed!
The pig charged and charged, and the walls broke and rose, and Gular’s hand went deeper.
|Narrative Walls standing: 38 of 67.|
More seconds passed!
Gular closed his hand, and...
The pig’s left wing was gone.
It had not been cut. It simply had never grown. One moment it was there, white and enormous and folded along the pig’s back, and the next there was only smooth golden hide where it had been. The pig stumbled. Its left tusk went the same way, a long pale curve that had never been. The gold under its hooves dulled, then cracked, a long line of ordinary black soil showing through.
The pig went down onto one knee.
It swayed. Its great golden head dipped toward the ground, slowly, the light going out of the hide around its shoulders, and for a moment Noah thought it was finished!
Then its eyes blazed.
They lit from within, a hard white-gold, far from the calm curiosity they had held before. There was no thought left in them. There was only the Narrative it had grown out of itself, everything it was, pouring back up through it in one last answer. It came up off its knee with one wing and one tusk and a sound tearing out of it that was not an OINK at all, and it charged.
Straight at Noah. Faster than it had ever come! Every patch of gold it had ever laid rang at once under its hooves, and the whole gilded ring blazed, and he knew, in the clear cold part of himself that knew these things, that this charge was going through whatever was in front of it.
Everything slowed.
Noah breathed in.
The pure air of this place went into him, and with it, everything he had felt since he arrived. The richness. The purity. Soil before anyone had planted in it. A place that took everything borrowed and fed everything that was truly yours, and had just spent a whole fight teaching him to breathe it.
What could he do here, in a place that was not his?
Not the Return. Not the Abominations. Not more walls. He could see the charge coming, the one wing, the one tusk, the maddened white of its eyes, the gold blazing under every hoof. Where did it get its strength? From the ground. From the gold it had laid down. From turning this place into its own.
He blinked.
And he smiled.
It was the same thing he had done for a while now. It was the only thing he had ever been completely sure of. Somewhere deep in him, his Dream turned over once, quietly, and told him to try.
Noah sent his authority across his whole existence and down, through his legs, into the soles of his feet.
And he gave.
His authority flooded out of him into the ground of THE Center!
It poured into the pure soil under the moss, into the gold the pig had laid and the black earth beneath it, outward in every direction at once, warm and vibrant and without measure, exactly as he had given to every field he had ever loved. He did not know if it would take. This was not the Fallow. Nothing here was his, and the place had never once been asked.
But his Dream had told him to try!
