Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5259: Overcome All Adversity! III

Noah’s smile was growing.

One second.

"Persevere!"

The old flames had not finished settling before new ones rose to replace them, the second utterance’s billowing warmth overlapping with the first’s residual heat, the nest around him blazing with the compound expression of a letter being used by someone who had confirmed there was no cost to using it and had drawn the logical conclusion about what to do with that confirmation.

|Persevere- Third Utterance.|

|Foundation: elevated from second utterance baseline. The compound reinforcement is measurable. Continued utterance will produce continued elevation with no identified ceiling thus far.|

|Infinity: cost paid. The fraction paid per utterance remains consistent. At current Infinity density, the sustainable utterance rate is effectively unlimited.|

He was almost laughing.

Almost. The tyrannical composure held the almost in place, but only barely, the amusement pressing against it from the inside with more force than it usually pressed!

The Galdr Source beasts he had hunted through THE Strand of Broken Scales had each deployed Persevere across cycles of diminishing return, the letter spending them as it empowered them, the tragedy built into the mechanism. He had watched them become stronger, the empowerment real and the depletion equally real.

He was paying with Infinity.

"Persevere!"

Again. The flames were continuous now, the utterances close enough together that the rise and fall between them had become a single sustained expression, the nest and the ancient tree and the surrounding canopy all bathed in the multicolored light of a man confirming something about himself that he found deeply satisfying.

Eon was watching with shining eyes.

She knew the word. He could see that she knew it in the expression she wore, the specific recognition of a being who had encountered the word in another context and was now watching it emerge from someone she had not expected to possess it. The word the Relictus uttered. The word that those who had access to THE Primordial Source reached for when their existence required something from the deepest available layer of what they were.

Something the Gilded Ones had been reaching toward for many Ages...veginning to fall within his grasp in THE Strand of Broken Scales, on top of a flying dinosaur’s nest, within an hour of his arrival.

"You may want to slow down." She said it with the measured concern of someone who had observed a pattern and drawn a reasonable conclusion from it. "You don’t want to exhaust your Source by using that letter every time you feel like it."

She had no idea.

He looked at her face in the light of the continuous multicolored flames, at the genuine worry behind the reasonable concern, at the innocence of a being who had watched the Galdr Source beasts spend themselves on that word and had reasonably assumed the same mechanism applied here.

He had been managing the amplified emotional environment of THE Source Lands with discipline, which was the correct approach and which he had maintained because the correct approach mattered. But he had also, in the same period, integrated a Primordial Tongue letter, survived the Advent Wall crossing, hunted five Galdr Source beasts, and confirmed that THE Primordial Tongue cost him Infinity.

Discipline had limits. The appropriate response to an event of this magnitude was celebration, and celebration could not be indefinitely deferred.

He moved toward her.

Eon saw him coming through the continuous multicolored flames wreathing his figure, saw his eyes, and her Source did something her composure noted and did not entirely manage to suppress. Something in her expression that had been composed shifted toward attentive.

His flaming hands found her face with a gentleness that the flames did not contradict, the multicolored warmth of Persevere’s continuous utterance pressing softly against her cheek as he held her and looked at her with the calm unhurried attention of a being who had decided where he was and had no interest in being anywhere else.

"Persevere," he said.

BOOM!

She would need to as this time, he would not be stopping at having her lips.

The multicolored flames expanded outward and rose and covered the nest in every direction, obscuring the upper canopy, the bloom light, the surrounding trees, and any possible line of sight from anything that might have been watching a man celebrate the beginning of something terrifying.

---

<Ubergulden Dietrich>

THE Source Lands had opinions about pride.

Dietrich had formed this assessment rather quickly into his crossing of THE Advent Wall, when the stripping had begun and the thing that remained had discovered that the thing that remained was not substantially diminished by the stripping.

But right now...

He was bleeding from three locations that mattered and several that did not, his Custodes Mira moving beside him with her left arm held against her body in the careful way of someone who had made peace with a temporary limitation and was reserving their attention for more immediate concerns.

They had ran away from and survived the first Galdr Source beast encounter through the combination of his Source expression and her strategic instincts, and the second encounter through sheer refusal, and the third had left them both in the state they were currently navigating.

The deep forest of THE Strand of Broken Scales had no interest in his House’s name.

He was reconsidering this when the three figures emerged from the tree line ahead.

All three of them wore scars, the marks of engagements this place had required of them distributed across their arms and shoulders and the planes of their faces with the specificity of a history that was still being accumulated.

Their Sources burned with the steady warmth of beings who had been here long enough to find their footing and had not spent that time resting. Their eyes were bright!

Dietrich recognized all three of them at once and felt something in his chest that was, in fact, relief.

"Sororis Prima Lana." He stepped forward and did not try to make his voice smaller than it was. "Ubergulden Shatta. Ubergulden Riyanna."

He looked at each face in sequence and found each face exactly as he had hoped to find it. "I have never been happier to see faces like yours in this forsaken place."

Ubergulden Shatta raised a hand in the gesture of someone about to say something that required a quieter delivery than the greeting had used. He was broad across the shoulders, his golden hair worn loose, his Source expression carrying the denser warmth of an existence that had been feeding well.

"Now, now. Keep the volume down." The amusement in his voice was genuine and not unkind. "The more of us together, the better, and strength in numbers has mattered in very few places as much as it matters here."

He looked past Dietrich briefly, assessing.

"We were told others entered this time and to come to the periphery of the strand and find you. You didn’t manage to locate any of them? Are they still alive?"