Read Novel Full Chapter 5132: Greed! IV
Chapter 5132: Greed! IV
Octavius tapped one finger against the air beside him.
A unique sea of Infinity bloomed out from his body, this one tinged with the sickly gold-green of Greed refined into fuel. The sea flowed outward and downward, pouring toward the golden table at the center of the island, and the corpse on that table began to tremble.
The fungi laced through its ribs moved.
They wove across the opened chest cavity rapidly, closing the body they had spent so long opening, stitching the subject back together with threads of pale bioluminescence. The corpse’s limbs twitched, then straightened. In a single fluid motion it sat up, then stood, then launched itself off the table to stand before Octavius!
Rivers of Infinity surged down toward it from every direction, the diverted channels of the research apparatus finally feeding into their intended recipient.
Noah observed all of it.
The body that straightened in front of Octavius was unfinished. The engineering was raw. The weavings holding it together strained against each other in configurations that shouldn’t have held at all. And then it opened its eyes.
WO! WO! WO!
Glistening blue crystalline pupils of pure Infinity shone out from a face that had been a corpse a moment earlier.
He understood what he was looking at instantly!
Madness.
THE Gamaidian.
The creature’s eyes held the madness of Infinity the way a lantern held flame, and his own eyes lit up with interest at the sight of it. So this was what Octavius’s latest product looked like when it stood? An abomination made from the collision of flooded Infinity and something else, held together by engineering that shouldn’t have been possible and somehow was!
|Entity Detected: Unnamed Abomination, Latest Product of Octavius Kraethos.|
|Status: Conscious. Hostile. Unstable.|
|Current Scale: THE Proterozoic Scale - Calymmian Tier verging on Ediacaran Tier(Again, Scale ranking is not to be trusted).|
|Engineering Signature: THE Gamaidian saturation paired with unstable amplification of Ego of Hunger. Control tether active and routed through Octavius Kraethos.|
|Threat Level: Unknown. Combat parameters cannot be fully predicted due to unstable modifications.|
Beside him, Emotive moved to speak.
Noah raised his hand and stopped her before the first syllable left her mouth.
"Stand back and do not interfere."
His voice held the quiet steadiness of a directive that didn’t need to be repeated.
"Naldine, keep an eye on the surroundings. Make sure nothing new bothers us while I’m working. I feel like I’ll be getting a bit serious here."
His gaze settled on the abomination with its glistening mad eyes.
"I want to see. I want to see!"
...!
BOOM!
Terrifying pressure erupted out from his standing form.
It rolled outward in every direction at once, invisible to the eye and yet perceivable by every existence within its range. The ambient air buzzed. The floating island trembled beneath him. The diverted rivers of Observable Force shuddered in their courses!
Even Naldine’s existence braced slightly as the wave passed over her, her vihuela humming awake in response to the density of what had just been released.
|Civilization Activation Detected: THE Hadean Haki of Infinity.|
|This authority extends from your Cause and applies existential pressure across the surrounding region. Common Rhyacian and Calymmian Tier Proterozoic Scale entities cannot move freely under the weight of this Haki while your Cause sustains it. Higher-tier entities will experience significant hindrance depending.|
Naldine’s singularity-dotted eyes widened with astonishment.
She had sparred with him. She had been filled by him. She had been present for his ascensions and witnessed the unfolding of each new capability as it bloomed across his Hadean foundation!
And even she looked at him differently now, her frown tightening with the specific respect of a being who had just been reminded that she hadn’t yet mapped the full breadth of what he was.
Emotive turned toward him with eyes that had gone fervent in a way that bordered on religious.
On the island below, the Rhyacian Tier Primordial Architect who had been flung across the surface simply lost consciousness.
Her body went slack where it had been crumpled. Her power sputtered out of her like a candle in a draft, unable to maintain itself against the weight of Haki that her engineering wasn’t ready to process.
The other Primordial Architects who had been flung aside struggled to rise.
Their limbs shook. Their own weavings of authority slowed to sluggish crawls. They could move, barely, but they couldn’t move freely. The pressure had turned their every motion into labor, and their Greed-amplified foundations weren’t optimized for this particular kind of resistance.
Octavius smiled heavily.
He shook his head with the delighted incredulity of someone who had been presented with an even grander puzzle than he had bargained for.
"Man."
He rolled his shoulders beneath the pressure, working himself loose by fractions.
"Are you really the real deal? Man, alright! Come then! You may be grand, I’ll grant you that, you may be something the ordinary methodologies haven’t accounted for. But you..."
His pale gold eyes gleamed brightly through the weight of the Haki.
"You are not a Chosen."
...!
He wasn’t Chosen?
So that was how they framed it internally. Being selected to be engineered by THE Gilded Ones was, in their own scholarly vocabulary, being Chosen. Capital fuckin’ C!
The grand distinction between themselves and every other being across Observable Existence. The mark of having been selected from among the many to receive what the many would never touch.
Hah.
He detested the idea of chosen ones.
Nobody chose anyone to be the savior of everyone. The concept was a convenient fiction that fake chosen ones told themselves to feel grander than the circumstances that had produced them, and it was the same fiction their beneficiaries used to justify whatever hierarchies they had built on top of that designation.
One had to move their own ass! One had to do everything they could with the power they actually possessed. Not because some higher entity had pointed a finger and whispered you. Not because some engineering protocol had written superiority into their foundations before they ever drew their first breath.
You acted because you were capable.
You rose because you refused to stop rising.
Chosen was a word for those who needed permission to matter.
He did not need permission to matter!
Nobody pointed a finger at him and said hey, you are the Chosen One!
Noah lowered his hand slowly, the Haki settling into its sustained state around him, and he looked down at Octavius at this moment, rivers of blue and gold began to seethe around him!
Existence seethed, and battle bloomed explosively!
The abomination moved first.
It launched from its standing position in front of Octavius without a wind-up, without a tell, without any of the telegraphed aggression!
One instant it stood beside its maker. The next instant it was in the air above Noah, its glistening blue crystalline pupils burning with madness locked onto him with the single overriding directive of its amplified Hunger.
Its mouth opened!
It opened wider than its jaw should have allowed, then wider still, the fungal stitching across its chest splitting down the middle to reveal a second mouth beneath the first. Rivers of mad Infinity poured from both openings, saturated with THE Gamaidian, warped into configurations that bit at the edges of perception. The entire sky above Noah became a gullet reaching down to swallow him whole!
Noah stood where he was.
He raised one hand.
Observable Force surged up from the rivers woven through the island, answering his call with the obedience of currents bending toward a moon. It pooled in the palm he had raised, condensed into a disc of golden pressure that weighed the open air down around it, and he pushed.
The disc of Observable Force met the descending gullet at its apex.
BOOM!
The abomination’s two mouths slammed shut against the disc and couldn’t close further. Its jaw stretched against pressure that refused to yield. Its eyes rolled back briefly as the mad Infinity pouring from its openings rebounded down its own throat, and it was thrown upward through its own attack, spinning end over end across the ruined sky of the island!
WU! WU!
Octavius tapped two fingers together.
Weavings of Unity bloomed outward from the motion. Pale tendrils of concentrated weavings of Primordial Mycelia reached through the ambient Infinity like roots through loose soil, seeking every surface they could bond to. They reached for Noah’s feet. They reached for the air around his lungs. They threaded along the island’s stone, trying to establish contact vectors that would let Unity propagate into his existential foundations.
They reached Naldine as well.
They got nowhere near her.
Her vihuela hummed awake behind her, and a single note rang out across the floating island, clean and cold and causal. The Unity weavings that had reached for her unraveled back along their own paths, not destroyed, simply rewritten, so that their original intent became something that had never quite happened. Naldine’s singularity-dotted eyes held Octavius’s pale gold ones with the calm disdain of a Hadean woman who had been briefly interrupted!
The weavings reaching for Noah fared differently.
They touched his Hadean Dermis of Infinite Interface, and they dissolved against it like salt against a sea. The Unity bond couldn’t find a foundation to root into!
His engineering didn’t present the attachment points the Mycelia required. The tendrils flailed blindly across his skin for a fraction of a moment and then simply faded, their reach spent against a surface that refused to acknowledge them.
Valeria moved in from the left at this time as these three swarmed Noah!
HUUM!
Her approach was different from Octavius’s. Where he built, she cut. Her hands carried blades of compressed Infinity that sang as they sliced through the air, each edge honed into configurations that would have severed the weavings of most Calymmian Primordial Architects before those weavings could register being cut. She closed the distance in three strides, and on the third stride her blades were already falling toward his neck!
Noah caught both of them.
His Hadean Hands of Infinite Grasp closed around the edges as if they were wooden dowels, and the Infinity she had poured into her weapons drained down his arms in visible currents, pulled into his own reserves through contact alone!
Oh!
Her dark eyes widened for the first time since she had entered the engagement. Her hands tried to pull her blades back. They didn’t come!
He leaned his head toward her slowly.
"Greed," he said conversationally, his voice pitched for her ears alone. "That’s the Ego they amplified in you. The hunger for what you don’t yet have. You reach for my Infinity, and I thank you for the offering. The weavings... feed better when they’re willingly given."
Her mouth opened to respond.
He released one of her blades and used the freed hand to slap her across the temple with a casual backhand!
WAA!