Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5443: Slain!

Across THE Braneworld, in a contested sky half golden grid and half blooming blue farmland, Noah finished his studying.

He had spent the fight learning THE Aureate Firmament the way he learned everything, patiently, letting THE Mirror That Keeps drink in its architecture while his Intent held the stalemate. And what all that study had revealed, in the end, was almost disappointing. The Pantheon was genuinely grand. The being it stemmed from was not.

Vularch Sethis had a weak foundation. It sounded absurd to say of a Mesozoic Scale Ealdor, and it was true all the same. He had climbed Vakochev’s Scales the way everyone climbed them, along the prescribed road, his Irrefutability achieved by the book and his Pantheon raised from the standard blueprint, a fine house built from plans ten thousand others had used.

He was not a True Lifeform! His identity had been installed by Gilded engineering rather than forged, an amplified Superbius wearing sovereignty like tailored clothes. And his Intent, for all its Olympian rarity, was merely Olympian, a fourth-rarity record imposed as local law. Not Primordial. Nowhere near Egoic. The Firmament was a magnificent crown sitting on a hollow head, and once Noah had confirmed the hollowness, continuing to spar with it became a waste of several bodies’ time.

So he stopped analyzing, and went all out.

His Osmontian Source Infinity erupted through THE Estuary Eye, and the hidden star made itself visible for the first time in this war, the fleshy nine-pointed horror opening above him with its lemniscate pupil spinning, and it began to bleed the Pantheon. The golden dimension’s substance drifted toward the eye in accelerating streams, THE Devouring Estuary drinking the Firmament’s own structure out from under it, sigil-walls thinning, lattice-towers going translucent, the untouchable dimension discovering that untouchable and undrinkable were different words!

HUUM!

Sethis felt his Pantheon being swallowed and threw everything he had into holding it together, and it was not going to be enough, and some deep engineered part of him understood that before the rest of him did.

Then Noah pulled on THE Infiniverse!

Her Intent answered him across the unfathomable distance, THE Egoic Intent of THE Infiniverse flowing along their shared Cause, the awakened awareness of an entire Observable Existence lending its weight to her Master’s hand. Noah raised that hand, and a spear formed in it, radiant cerulean flame condensing into a long clean shaft, and into the weapon he poured both Intents at once, his own Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian and hers braided together down the burning length of it.

The spear grew so heavy with identity that even Noah had to swing it slowly.

He brought it across in a single deliberate diagonal, the arc carving through the contested sky with the unhurried certainty of something that could not be stopped and therefore had no reason to rush, two True Lifeform Intents riding one edge.

And...THE Aureate Firmament of House Vularch shattered completely.

BOOM!

The golden dimension broke apart like a struck mirror, halls and chains and sigil-walls bursting into countless drifting shards, the separate dimension of a Mesozoic Scale being cleaved open by a weapon carrying more identity than its holder had ever possessed. Sethis had time for one expression, and it was not rage. It was horror!

Then the shards of his Firmament, and the Ealdor within them, streamed upward into the spinning lemniscate pupil, and THE Estuary Eye devoured every last piece.

|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has been triggered. You have granted death to a powerful enemy, an act that gave THE Braneworld and its peoples a future free of him, and the Tide answers the gift. You have gained three Pantheon Weavings and Epiphanies.|

...!

They descended onto Noah as three folded structures of light, drifting down like sealed letters, each one containing a genuine structural insight into the raising of a Pantheon, or of whatever he would build in a Pantheon’s place. He caught them, and he did not save them for later.

He ripped them open on the spot.

The understanding poured into him one after another, three true glimpses into how a dimension of self was woven, how records became architecture, how a being placed themselves upon their own existence, and he felt each epiphany settle into the growing shape of the thing he intended to make, the thing that would not be a Pantheon because he had already decided he did not need one, and would be grander for the deciding.

Then he floated in the emptied sky, and let himself be seen.

Below, the Acedia Dredges still worked through the stripped Gilded Ones in their silver tide, and above it all Noah hung with the cerulean spear resting across his shoulders, wreathed in the slow-burning weight of two Egoic Intents, THE Estuary Eye turning lazily over his head as it finished digesting a Fifth Scale being and his entire dimension.

He did nothing. He simply floated there, radiating what he was, and the sky around him kept bending toward blue!

WUU!

And down in the ruins, Dietrich looked up at him.

The hollowed Ubergulden knelt in the carnage with his ruined eyes somehow still finding the figure above, and the horror on his face had gone past rage into pure loss, because the silver tide of Dredges flowed around him and did not touch him, parting the way water parts around a stone. Millions of his kind devoured, his capital scorched, his Firmament-bearing better erased into a spinning pupil, and he alone left untouched in the middle of it all, spared by the explicit command of one being.

Which was, Dietrich finally understood, not mercy at all.

---

The victory settled into Noah’s existence quietly.

A Mesozoic Scale being, slain, his Pantheon shattered and devoured. However weak Vularch Sethis’s foundation had turned out to be, a Fifth Scale kill was a Fifth Scale kill, and Noah felt the weight of it distribute itself through his records across every body he wore.

Then he set it aside, because the body that mattered right now stood in a hidden dimension of floating temples and still stellar lakes, facing a being far more dangerous than the Ealdor had ever been!