Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5328: A Flicker of Quintessence! II

The silver dragon hung above the battle on her silver cloud, her nine spiked tails drifting, her malevolent eyes fixed not on the fighting but on Noah and Seo-yeon.

She watched. She observed!

Noah felt her attention on him with the weight of a predator that had identified what it actually wanted and was content to let lesser concerns play out while it studied its prize. She had howled with greed when Seo-yeon’s nature was revealed, but the greed had not made her reckless.

It had made her patient, which was worse, because patience in a being of her tier meant she was looking for the moment when taking what she wanted would cost her least.

Noah observed everything.

The way Intents imposed records rather than simply attacking. The way rarity determined whether one Intent overwrote another or merely contested it. The way the Source Lifeforms channeled their Intents through Armaments to focus and direct them.

The way Sir William’s third-rarity Titan Intent operated on a tier above the second-rarity Nereid Intents of his companions, able to overwrite where theirs could only press. It was a complete education in Fourth Scale combat delivered in real time, and Noah absorbed it while the Blessing continued pouring Pure Primordial Essence into him, his body shining brighter with every second he stood and watched.

Then Luxanna moved!

She moved without warning and without the wind-up that lesser beings telegraphed, her silver cloud carrying her downward in a sudden plunge, and her Intent erupted as she came.

Noah watched it with full attention, because her Intent was the third rarity like Sir William’s, the Titan tier, and she deployed it with an ingenuity that Sir William’s more straightforward dignity did not display.

Where Sir William imposed his record as a steady overwriting pressure, Luxanna’s silver Acedia Intent did something stranger. It did not impose stillness everywhere at once. It imposed stillness selectively, choosing precisely which records around it to dull and which to leave active, and it used this selectivity to counter the other Intents on the battlefield with surgical precision!

As she descended, her Intent reached out to the obsidian gold flail’s defensive perimeter and stilled specifically the segments of the guardian’s Intent that would have intercepted her, the Acedia record convincing those specific expressions that defending was too much effort, that stillness was easier, that there was no reason to move.

Two Relictus stood between Luxanna and her targets, a great horned bull and a vast many-eyed bird, both burning with THE Primordial Source.

Luxanna’s Intent reached them and she did something grand!

She did not try to overwrite their Primordial Source, which would have been a contest she might not win quickly.

She imposed Acedia onto the space they occupied, stilling not the Relictus themselves but the momentum they were building, the gathering force of their movement convinced by the silver record that motion was effortful and stillness was natural, and in the instant their momentum faltered, she struck them with the full physical weight of a Fourth Scale dragon carrying a Titan Intent behind the blow!

The two Relictus were actually smashed aside, hurled away from their positions in front of Noah and Seo-yeon, the silver Acedia dulling the edges of their forms where the impact landed.

Luxanna charged into the gap she had created, straight toward Noah and the girl!

Yet...

Sir William appeared before her.

He arrived between Luxanna and her targets in the span of an instant, his obsidian Titan Intent of dignity erupting to meet her silver Titan Intent of slothful stillness, and the two third-rarity Intents clashed directly!

Existence buckled around them. Where dignity met sloth, where the record of a being who had never compromised his standards met the record of an artificially engineered laziness mimicking The Great Sloevin, the two Intents pressed against each other and neither immediately yielded, the clash sending waves of altered existence rolling outward across Chernobyl!

HUUUM!

Luxanna laughed, unbothered, her malevolent eyes bright with eccentric delight even as her Intent strained against Sir William’s.

"You know," she said conversationally, as though they were not two Fourth Scale beings locked in a contest of records that was reshaping the space around them, "there are many Gilded Ones, right?"

As she said it, the sky cracked again.

Noah looked up, and what descended this time made even him pause in his analysis.

Nine unique Fourth Scale Ragnars.

He had encountered Ragnars before. They were among the most formidable Gilded constructs, beings of immense power who typically carried themselves with a specific brash confidence, who called out "Buddy Boy" and fought with the swagger of beings who knew their own strength.

These nine were nothing like that. Their skin was gray and lifeless, the color of something that had been emptied of whatever animated it. Their eyes held no confidence, no swagger, no personality at all.

They were filled with the Ego of Acedia to a degree that had hollowed them out entirely, soulless in a way that the Existential Acedia Dredges had been soulless, but at the Fourth Scale, which meant they carried the full power of Fourth Scale Ragnars with none of the will that normally accompanied it.

They did not announce themselves. They did not posture. They simply unleashed their Acedia-based Intents in unison, nine second-rarity Intents of pure slothful stilling, and surged toward Noah and Seo-yeon with the mechanical purposelessness of weapons rather than beings.

Luxanna laughed madly above, her Titan Intent keeping Sir William locked in their contest, preventing him from breaking away to intercept the nine.

"So many of us!" she called. "And your dignified friend can only be in one place at a time!"

The three other Swords of Existence were committed, the sniper and the hammer and the flail each holding back portions of the broader Gilded force, the twelve Relictus scattered across the battlefield in their own engagements.

The two Relictus that had guarded Noah and Seo-yeon had been smashed aside. The nine soulless Ragnars descended toward the girl and the man with nothing in their path.

Noah rolled his neck.

It was, finally, time for him to make a move!