Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5386: It!

THE Sealed One did not rise from the throne of corpses. It simply turned its attention to the eight True Lifeforms who remained bound in the crimson coils, the gory ruin of the ninth still settling into the heap below, and it asked them a question.

"Where is it?"

It.

The word came with no antecedent that Noah could grasp, no explanation of what the it was, and yet every bound True Lifeform on that mountain understood it perfectly. He could feel that they understood, through the borrowed perspective. Whatever it was, it mattered more than their lives, and they had all known the question was coming, and they had all already decided their answer.

The answer was silence.

They gave THE Sealed One nothing. Bound, doomed, watching one of their own crushed into parts mid-defiance, they held their silence with the same conviction the woman had carried, and THE Sealed One received their silence with that same gleeful patience, and killed them for it!

One after another. It did not torture them or bargain with them. It asked, and it received nothing, and it crushed the one it had asked, and then it turned to the next and asked again, working down the line of the eight with the unhurried thoroughness of a thing that had all the time that had ever been.

Each crushing was casual. Each was total, the crimson coils reaching past flesh into Source and identity and ending the whole of the being at once. The mountain of corpses grew by one, and one, and one.

Until only the last of them was left.

He was a man with a scholarly air, boundless Infinity moving through him, and he looked at THE Sealed One with the calm of a being who had already finished being afraid. He answered where the others had been silent.

"You truly will never get it," he said. "Do you understand that yet? The fact that you seek it like this, with this much desperation, piling up True Lifeforms and crushing them one by one to wring it out of us, that is the precise reason you will never have it. It is not a thing that can be sought. It does not answer to hunger or force or the size of the heap you build."

His scholarly calm held.

"It is drawn to greatness. It comes toward that which is purest, toward the Epitome, toward a being so completely and truly itself that the it has no choice but to be pulled to it. You cannot chase it down. You cannot take it from anyone. You can only become the kind of thing it comes to, and you, with all your grandeur, are not that thing and have never been, because a being that crushes mountains of its betters to find a treasure has already proven it is not pure. It is only hungry."

He held the gaze of the thing on the throne.

"So you will never find it. Not in this Age. Not in any. Someone else will, and at that time...I will laugh at you gleefully wherever I am in thr endless darkness."

...!

THE Sealed One’s gleeful patience cracked.

For the first time in the record, the borrowed feelings flooding into Noah changed shape, the perfect controlled arrogance giving way to a flash of genuine rage. It crushed the scholar. Faster than the others, with less ceremony, the crimson coils snapping shut on his existence and ending him mid-calm, the way a man swats at a thing that has stung him.

And then the mountain held nine corpses where it had held eight and a line of the defiant living, and the thing on the throne sat alone with its rage and its silence and its it that it would never find.

Noah watched all of it, cold, his own identity burning clean through the borrowed feelings. The it. The fusion. The thing drawn to that which is purest.

And then the perspective shifted, and THE Sealed One spoke, and it was no longer speaking to the dead True Lifeforms. It was speaking to him.

"This part of you, by the way," it said, the rage smoothing back into warmth, "the sliver you so bravely sent in to spring my little trap. It will not be leaving this record. That was the trap, in case you are still looking for it. My record is as grand as my power, vessel, and a thing that walks into a memory of mine does not simply walk back out when it has seen enough. You will stay. A piece of you, kept here, while the rest of you grows easier to take. My record is grand. As grand as I can possibly make it, which is to say more than enough to hold a sliver of one small budding True Lifeform who thought himself clever enough to-"

CRACK!

The record broke.

It came apart around the both of them before THE Sealed One could finish the sentence, the mountain of corpses and the raging Infinite sky and the throne all fracturing at once, and out of the gaps in the shattering memory Noah’s body manifested!

HUUUM!

It was not a sliver. Not a kept piece. The whole of his presence, grand and imperious, stepping out of the breaking record to stand before the manifestation of THE Sealed One, and the thing wearing devilish beauty showed, for just an instant, a trace of genuine surprise.

Noah had come prepared. He had understood, the moment he sent himself into the record, what could happen! And in the time since, he had understood his own Intent more and more, his Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian settling deeper into him with every breath, and that understanding was the answer to the trap before the trap was ever sprung.

Noah looked at the manifestation across the swirling fragments of its own broken record.

"You built this record to hold a piece of me by making it your domain. Your memory, your structure, your rules. But my existence is bathed in my identity now. All of it, completely, down to the foundation. And this record is inside my existence, the same as you are, the same as everything you’ve shown me. You handed it to me through the hand sealed in my heart, which means it played out in here, in me, on my ground."

His eyes were steady.

"And I understand myself more thoroughly than I ever have. Which means my control over anything within my existence is...absolute. Including your record. Including this."

BOOM!

The moment the words left him, endlessly blue chains rose out of the fracturing memory, Osmontian Absolute Infinity now braided with his branded Source under the banner of his Egoic Intent, and they wrapped around the manifestation of THE Sealed One.

All around the two of them, the fragments of the shattered record swirled, the mountain and the sky and the throne reduced to debris turning in the dark of Noah’s own existence, and Noah looked at the bound manifestation of the thing that had crushed nine True Lifeforms without rising from its seat.

"I think," he said quietly, "your time has come to an end."

WAA!