Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5407: THE Hall of Swords II

The sensation Noah felt was truly inexplicable.

His body in THE Infiniverse had to sift through boundless weavings of information, the breakdown of THE Sealed One pouring recovered knowledge into him faster than any heartbeat could have managed, and out of all of it he had to decide on the direction of his Osmontian Tongue, because he could finally enact its backbone. THE Genesis Tesseract had been a truly terrifying loot to make all of this possible at once!

A First Cause’s worth of beginning, eaten and refined into him, and now he stood at the threshold of authoring a foundational language of existence around nothing but himself.

But even as that body dealt with those boons, another of his bodies was arriving somewhere that made his existence buzz.

So he split his attention cleanly. He let one part of himself digest and quantify the finalized boons of THE Genesis Tesseract, working through the Tongue and the recovered records at leisure, while he turned his focus to the body that was about to come face to face with the true powerhouses of the Swords of Existence.

And here, he planned to test yet another of his Foundations.

THE Third Foundation. THE Mirror That Keeps. Any capability his existence observed was studied and quietly retained, made his over time without any conscious effort. He grew stronger in the presence of stronger beings rather than diminished by them, their excess feeding his becoming, and what he learned once he never lost. Proximity to power was, for him, a passive harvest.

He grew stronger around stronger beings. So.

Bring them on!

WAA!

|You have arrived in THE Hall of Swords. This location is accessed through a gateway in THE Hallowed Demesne but does not reside within it. You have entered a separate, self-contained Dimension of Existence. Spatial egress is not guaranteed by your own authority here; you exist at the sufferance of whatever holds this dimension.|

Primordial Source flared, and Noah appeared in THE Hall of Swords alongside Dame Seraphine and several other Mesozoic Scale beings, drawn through the gateway out of THE Hallowed Demesne and into the separate Dimension of Existence beyond it.

He looked around the place at once, taking the measure of it before he let it take the measure of him. It was grand and ancient, a hall that had held its purpose across more ages than most existences lasted. A distant obsidian throne of woven swords rose at its heart, and around it stood shrouded figures of esteemed power, and the moment he and the others arrived, the auras in the hall turned toward them.

No. Not toward them.

Toward him!

HUUM!

He could feel it clearly. Every gaze in the hall settled on him specifically, the new Sword, the survivor, the one who had spoken the buried name. And yet none of the gazes were outwardly hostile, and none of them pressed on him in the way he had come to expect from powerful beings. He hated that particular bullshit, the way seemingly grand entities loved to exert their pressure on lesser ones to frighten them, to remind them of the gap, to make them want to kneel. He felt none of that here. Whatever these beings were, they did not stoop to the cheap trick of it.

But the atmosphere was heavy all the same. Heavy in a different way. The heaviness of a room full of beings who did not need to press on you to make you understand exactly how much power was present.

And then his eyes were drawn to the throne, and his existence buzzed.

Or, more precisely, his Osmontian Source Infinity buzzed. Something within the shroud of vibrant Primordial Source that covered that throne reached out and resonated with the fused authority at the core of him, set it cycling, set it humming, and Noah eyes shone.

Why would his Osmontian Source Infinity react to whatever sat on that throne?

His eyes flashed with several possibilities, and he kept every one of them within.

At that moment, Dame Seraphine and the other Mesozoic Scale beings bowed toward the throne and the shrouded figures around it, and their voices rose together.

"We pay our respects to THE Domicile of THE Queen Regnant," they said, "and we greet her Majesty, THE First Sword."

HUUM!

Her Majesty. THE First Sword.

Noah was extremely curious now. What exactly was the origin of such a being? Her power? His entire existence kept buzzing, his Osmontian Source Infinity cycling quicker and quicker within him, and he turned that attention briefly outward to the shrouded figures lined up on either side of the throne. More than a dozen of them, and each held a level of power he could not cleanly quantify. The weakest, of which there were maybe two or three, sat at THE Mesozoic Scale, the Fifth, and that was the floor.

The others exceeded it. Each one of them felt unfathomably dangerous, dangerous even to him, beings who had walked past the Fifth Scale into territory he had no name for yet.

But the throne kept pulling at him, past all of them, and there was a heavy silence after the Swords gave their respects.

And in that silence.

HUUM!

The shroud on THE Throne of Swords began to fluctuate. It buzzed, and it stirred, and it started to clear, and the moment it did, Noah saw shock ripple through many of the shrouded figures around the hall. As though this was not supposed to happen. As though the one on the throne never showed herself, and her doing so now was an event in itself.

Noah’s eyes shone. Was her esteem so grand that the mere act of revealing herself was this significant?

As he thought it, THE Primordial Source cleared from the throne, and he saw who sat there.

THE Queen Regnant.

And she was magnificent, in the way that the deepest and oldest horrors are magnificent.

She was vaguely humanoid, in the loosest possible sense, possessing two arms and a torso, but the skin was not skin at all. It was a slick, mottled expanse of deep obsidian and sickly grey flesh that glistened with an unnatural slime. The face was a faceless, pulsing node, devoid of eyes or nose, and in their place a swirling, writhing cluster of tiny pale suctioned tentacles formed a shifting mask around a dark gaping aperture ringed by small razor-sharp teeth that clattered softly. Countless slender fleshy tendrils erupted from her torso, weaving over her like wet veins, twitching without pause. Her arms were gaunt and elongated, ending not in fingers but in dark claws and a cluster of prehensile feelers.

Below the waist, any resemblance to a human vanished completely. Where legs should have been, hundreds of thick glistening tentacles erupted from massive muscular trunks of flesh, weaving together into a complex squirming base that anchored her to the throne. With every wet squelching shift of her weight, the multitude of tentacles beneath her moved, never still. She was not simply looking at him, because she had no eyes to look with, and yet the entire writhing mass of her head focused on his presence with an intensity that rooted him to the spot, a creature born of nightmares, a fusion of flesh and eldritch horror!

WUU!

Noah stared at her, and his eyes opened wide with fascination.

Because he could feel it flowing through her. Primordial Source and Infinity, both of them, moving through her existence. It was not fully fused the way his was, not melded into a single seamless authority. But it was close. It was so very close, the two grand authorities running through her side by side, intertwined nearly to the point of union!

And it felt grand!