Chapter 5474: Elvarna! IV
Chapter 5474: Elvarna! IV
THE Creature descended, and Noah’s eyes narrowed.
Three hours. Less than three hours had passed, and yet this monster was clearly stronger than before!
Noah’s mind churned. He himself relied on the Osmontian Tongue, the Tide That Owes Nothing, and a bloodline that fed him boon after boon. Every increase in his power had a grand source behind it. But THE Creature possessed no such things. No Letters. No Distinction. No Genesis Tesseracts to devour.
And yet he had grown this much, in the time it took to draw a few breaths?
He wasn’t some hidden protagonist that Existence bent around, right?
He shook his head and set the thought aside. Now was not the time.
The two of them exchanged a nod, and their gazes swept across the burning Expanse together. Then Noah’s eyes moved past it all. Past the twisting mountains, past the torn and bleeding sky, past the Originals hovering above who were beginning to regret their descent. Past the countless chained prisoners with their faces turned up toward him.
Down. Deep into the mine. To the thing he had come to kill.
The Vessel.
Its aura pulsed against his senses, that unmistakable pressure of an ancient existence wearing the flesh of a lesser one. He had felt it twice before. He would never mistake it again.
His gaze rose, and he looked coldly across the crowd. Thousands of prisoners. Followers scattered atop the peaks, holding their positions, watching him.
"I have come for the Vessel you dogs have spent who knows how long feeding," Noah said. His voice was not loud, yet it pressed down on the entire Expanse. "Every one of you who dares call yourself a Follower, listen well, for I will say this only once. If even a sliver of Intent or Pantheon rises from you, you die. Any who stand between me and that Vessel, yet hold their tongues, may live long enough to watch." His eyes swept the mountains. "Any who desire a different fate. Step forward. Let us begin."
HUUM!
He lifted his hand, and THE Loyal Reach materialized within it, the split blade catching the crimson light, its quasi-True Intent thrumming softly. He began to drift downward, unhurried, and his flat, indifferent words struck the crowd harder than any roar could have.
Above, the Originals exchanged glances!
Every existence present could feel it. He was different! Almost none of them could explain why. They simply felt it in their bones, the way a beast senses a storm before the sky admits anything.
One among them decided that feeling was not enough. That dumb motherfucker.
A Warden. Massive, his body like a wall poured full of Infinity, glowing rivers of it carved down both arms, an Ego of Ira coiling around him thick as smoke. Mesozoic Scale, and among the stronger of them. Noah watched pride and terror make the decision in his place, the way they always did with the ones who cracked first. The Warden’s Olympian Intent began to erupt, crimson pressure stacking around him, a body of law rising to declare that he, at least, would not kneel in silence.
Noah had already decided how this would end. He did not reach for the blade.
He reached for the wings.
THE Pinion Vigil of the Unbroken Gaze burst from his back and unfurled, two vast wings spreading across the heavens, and every eye upon them opened at once. Hundreds of them, blue-black and gleaming, their lemniscate pupils rotating slowly in every direction. Some stared outward at the Expanse. Others, he knew, stared inward at himself. Along the membranes, countless tiny mouths began to whisper, a sound just beneath hearing that could neither be understood nor ignored.
The wings settled into place as though they had always belonged there. Because they had!
He allowed the Estuary Eye to open as well, high above him, the nine-pointed star turning slowly, hungrily, existence already bleeding toward it in thin streams.
And he left them both in plain sight for all to see. This was new for him. For a while, he had concealed the truest parts of himself, veiling this anatomy out of caution and instinct. But the Distinction had made something clear in the little while since it descended upon him, and the more he turned it over, the more it held. One could not stand as fully True while hiding the very things that made one True. Concealment was a gap between what he showed and what he was, and gaps were precisely what his enemy hunted. So he hid them no longer. Better to be seen and whole than veiled and lessened!
From now on, he would live true!
A nearby Original made a low sound in his throat and averted his eyes before he had decided to. A Follower two peaks distant simply froze as he looked away from the wings!
Noah turned every eye upon them toward the erupting Warden, all at once, and set the two abilities to work together, exactly as the prompts had laid them bare.
Sanity Flaying came first. The eyes poured Noah’s own Intent directly into the Warden’s mind. It did not strike the body, nor the Ego, nor the Pantheon. It struck the mind itself, flooding a skull that was never built to contain even a fraction of what Noah was. Most minds could not. This one could not. The overflow tore at him from within before any conventional defense could so much as brace!
HUUM!
Intent Perception Overload followed half a breath later, and this was the technique that ended it. The wings seized the Warden’s every sense at once, wrenching his sight and hearing and feeling from his own control, and forced him to watch himself die. Every possible way. All of them at once, layered atop one another with no gap between, an endless mountain of his own deaths crashing through a mind with nowhere to put them. Noah felt the blow land upon the man’s Trueness! Straight through the Volume and the Output and into the seam. For an existence could endure a great many things, but no identity survives being shown every single way it ceases to be.
The Warden’s Olympian Intent split down the center. His half-formed Pantheon, still taking shape, still unfinished, collapsed inward upon nothing before it could even be born.
He screamed, and he could not tear his gaze from the eyes. The Warden tried to look away. His own body refused him. The gaze had seized him, and it required none of his consent to keep him. So his hands rose instead, and he began to claw. At his own face. At his own eyes. At the rivers of Infinity carved down his arms, at his very records, ripping pieces from himself like a man digging at a splinter in his skull until he struck bone and still did not stop. Screaming the entire time, driven wholly mad, unmaking himself faster and more thoroughly than any outside force could have achieved.
Noah had witnessed countless deaths. This one he marked as an existence handed a mirror it could not survive gazing into.
Then the wings finished what the man had begun.
Filaments unspooled from their lower edges, slender tentacles reaching down through the scorching air, and the tiny mouths along the membranes opened wider than anything their size had any right to. They drew him in. Slowly at first, then all at once, and the last of the Warden’s scream cut off wet as the Pinion Vigil folded him up and devoured him whole. Noah felt the wings take him, felt the record pass through, and for the briefest instant held a sliver of the man before it went down.
The entire Expanse fell silent.
WAA!
All of them stared. Originals, prisoners, every Follower still standing, their eyes fixed upon the empty air where a Mesozoic Scale existence had stood a breath before. The only one who did not stare was THE Creature, who watched with that level, unmoved gaze!
Noah folded the wings halfway and looked out over them all.
"Move a single muscle," he said, "and you are next."
He raised his eyes toward the depths of the mine, toward the thing that pretended it could not feel him.
"Sealed One. Will you crawl out of that tepid cave of yours, or shall your Followers, these dogs who look up to you, die one by one before your eyes until you do?"
His gaze blazed as he spoke. And beneath the words, he felt the Tide stir.
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has been triggered. You have granted death to a being who could never have survived his own madness, and you granted it swiftly, before the unraveling stretched longer than it needed to. The Tide recognizes the mercy beneath the killing.|
|Boons delivered: +12,000 Osmontian Biomass. Before digestion completed, THE Pinion Vigil held a fragment of the dead Follower’s record, and that fragment has yielded one thing more: a partial map of THE Sealed One’s Follower network laboring across this Expanse.|
Noah absorbed it in a single breath, already turning the map over in his mind, and the ground answered him before he had finished.
The earth beneath the altar began to rise.
Slowly at first. Stone and crimson light shifting, sliding, as though something buried far below had decided to drag itself back into the air. Then a voice erupted from the depths, low and booming, laughing, and there was something wrong with that laugh, a madness within it that sank downward and never struck a floor. The laughter came wrapped in an Intent! Without the slightest warning, it rolled across the entire Expanse in a single wave.
And every existence below THE Mesozoic Scale collapsed to their knees where they stood!