Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5327: A Flicker of Quintessence! I

The Blessing was still settling into him when the battle began.

Noah felt it as a constant rising tide rather than a single event. The Pure Primordial Essence within his existence, already vast past any prior measurement, was multiplying a thousand times over, and the rivers of fresh Essence flowing in from the resonance Seo-yeon had established poured into his foundations continuously, the blue and obsidian radiances pouring off his frame in waves that made the space around him difficult for lesser perception to look at directly!

THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian drank all of it in, integrating the amplified Essence into its compound expression, every component of his existence growing denser and grander with each passing second.

Because mind you, Persevere and Exelissomai, Prime versions, continued to be utilized every second!

He could have moved immediately as everything unfolded. He chose not to.

There was value in watching first. He had crossed into the threshold equivalent of the Fourth Scale, but he had never seen Fourth Scale beings fight each other at full expression, never observed the Akashic Civilizational Intent deployed in genuine combat by masters of it!

The Gilded memories he had devoured carried reverence for the tier but not the lived understanding of how it actually worked, and lived understanding and knowledge was the kind of thing that won fights later.

So he held Seo-yeon close, let the Blessing pour through him, and watched The Swords of Existence go to work!

Sir William led without raising his voice.

There were no shouted commands, no coordination called across the battlefield, no orders issued. Sir William simply moved, and the three other Source Lifeforms and the twelve Relictus moved with him, the entire formation operating in a synchronization that ran deeper than communication!

Sir William’s attention shifted toward a threat, and before he committed to it, two Relictus were already closing on the same point, and a Source Lifeform was already repositioning to cover the gap their movement created.

It was the most disciplined violence Noah had ever observed!

Sir William’s Intent erupted first.

Noah watched it closely, because Sir William’s was the third rarity, the Titan Intent, and it was the one he most wanted to understand.

The obsidian phantom of regality unfolded around Sir William as it had against Luxanna’s silver Intent earlier, vast and dignified, but now Noah saw what it actually did rather than just its clash with another Intent.

It was a record made into force. The full weight of Sir William’s existence, every standard he had upheld and every duty he had honored across eons, imposed onto the space around him as a demand that existence conduct itself with the dignity he embodied!

It said be dignified! Be honorable! Obey! OBEY!

BOOM!

Where the Intent spread, the Fourth Scale Gilded Ones who pressed into it found their own expressions faltering, their Acedia and Superbius and Ira records pressing against a record grander and more uncompromised than their own, and the grander record won the contest of imposition!

One Superbius Ragnar, these manufactured fuckers, at the Fourth Scale drove toward Sir William with a spear of condensed Existential Radiation, its own second-rarity Intent blazing around it, and Sir William’s Titan Intent simply overwrote the space the Ragnar moved through.

The Ragnar’s Intent guttered! Its pride, which should have carried its strike forward with the full conviction of a Superbius existence, found itself standing in a region where dignity was the governing record and crude domination was not permitted to express cleanly.

The strike landed without its full force. Sir William drew his blade in a single clean motion, the obsidian phantom moving with him, and opened a wound across the Ragnar’s foundations that sent the Fourth Scale being tumbling backward, bleeding Existential Radiation, forced to retreat to keep from bleeding more!

BOOM! BOOM!

Existence fractured and split apart where he was thrown!

The other three Swords of Existence carried second-rarity Intents, the Nereid tier, and they expressed them through their Armaments.

The one with the obsidian sniper rifle moved to high ground that existed only because he willed it to exist, his Nereid Intent flowing into the rifle as he sighted down it. When he fired, the shot was not a projectile in any conventional sense.

It was his record, his accumulated existence, compressed into a single point and delivered across distance with his Intent backing it, and where it struck an Ira Gilded One charging toward the formation, the Ira being’s chest detonated outward in a spray of crimson-gold Radiation, its own Intent insufficient to stop a focused Nereid Intent delivered through a Source Armament built for exactly this purpose!

A chest was split wide open!

He worked the rifle’s mechanism and fired again, and a second Gilded One staggered, and a third, the sniper picking targets with the patient lethality of a being who had done this across more battles than he could count!

The one with the obsidian hammer waded directly into the densest cluster of descending Gilded Ones. Where the sniper was precise, the hammer was total.

His Nereid Intent poured into the weapon with each swing, and each swing did not merely strike a target but imposed his record onto a wide territory, the hammer’s arc carrying his Intent across dozens of meters of battlefield and pressing every Gilded One within that arc toward the ground with the weight of an existence that had decided they did not belong in the air.

Two Devonian-equivalent Gilded Ones tried to converge on him and he caught both in a single horizontal swing, the hammer’s Intent-backed impact folding them away from the formation in a spray of Radiation and broken bone.

They were fucking vaporized due to being so weak!

The one with the obsidian gold flail fought defensively, the flail’s segments drifting around the formation’s perimeter, her Nereid Intent woven through each segment so that the weapon occupied a wide defensive radius. Any Gilded One that tried to slip past the others toward Noah and Seo-yeon found the flail’s Intent-laden segments in their path, and the segments did not merely block.

They imposed her record, which Noah read as something to do with protection and refusal, the specific record of a being whose existence had been built around the principle that what she guarded did not fall. Gilded Ones that struck her flail found their strikes returned to them amplified by the contradiction between their aggression and her guardianship, the Intent turning their own force against them.

The twelve Relictus fought as Relictus fought, which was to say with the direct unmediated power of beings constituted by THE Primordial Source.

They took the forms of creatures from the old myths, vast and ancient, and they did not need Intents because they predated the framework that made Intents necessary.

A Relictus in the form of a great serpent coiled around a Fourth Scale Gilded One and constricted, the obsidian Primordial Source running through its body pressing the Gilded One’s foundations toward collapse regardless of the Gilded One’s own Intent!

A Relictus in the form of a massive winged lion struck a descending Ragnar from the side and bore it away from the formation, the two of them tumbling through the reborn sky of Chernobyl in a tangle of claws and Radiation!

The Relictus were not disciplined the way other Source Lifeforms were disciplined. They were forces, and Sir William directed them the way a man directed weather he happened to have authority over, pointing them at problems and letting their nature do the rest!

Oh!

Through all of it, Luxanna did not yet move!