Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5540: THE Mortal Coil! I

"> <THE True Human Emperor>

They came through the shimmering boundary, and THE Ymnaros opened around them.

Noah felt Hvitrmarr rein herself in the moment they crossed, her ambient field folding down close against her scales, the vast sovereign weight of a Dimension Steed drawing inward until she read, to the world around her, as merely large rather than as a Steed that predated the Scales, and Noah approved of it silently, because there was no reason to announce themselves to an entire Dimension before he had even looked at it properly.

’Quietly, for now,’ he sent through the bond.

’Quietly,’ she agreed, and folded further.

And Ruination went to work.

|Preliminary analysis of THE Ymnaros is underway.|

|Early findings, incomplete: this Dimension is not a smaller or simpler thing than THE Krazhor-Nul. It is a different KIND of complex, and it is at least as vast. Nested Observable Existences in numbers the boundary alone could not fully account for. Ambient laws layered in strata, older frameworks buried beneath newer ones. A drawing authority woven through the entire outer shell that has clearly been rebuilt many times. A central production of some resource that bends the local Causes toward itself the way a great mass bends the space around it.|

|Assessment: you have not stepped down into an easier zone. You have stepped sideways into a different one that is equally deep. Full analysis will take time.|

...!

Noah took that in without surprise.

Of course it was as vast. Anaximander did not call a place the largest and most complex Dimension he had found and mean it lightly. This was going to be another deep place, but not as packed with monsters so far above him...hopefully!

And below him, spread across the ruin, was the war.

He saw the armies first, because they filled the sky, Infinite Lifeforms in their tens of thousands with the weakest of them reading at THE Triassic Scale and the tall silent shapes among them reading far, far past it. He saw the broken gardens and the leaking rivers of light. He saw the two enormous corpses split open top to bottom with Infinity pouring out of them, and the scattered white and blue bodies around a blue-gold obelisk that was still, somehow, shining.

And then he saw the one who did not fit.

A single chained figure on his knees in the wreckage. Golden-haired, built like something made on purpose, and emanating NOTHING. Not one wave of authority, not the faintest pressure, standing in a sky full of beings whose weight bent the land, and yet they had not simply killed him. They had wrapped him in rivers of burning blue chain and pinned him there, which told Noah, before he read a single detail, that the thing giving off nothing was the most dangerous thing in the garden.

They were powerful, all of them.

And as Noah gazed down at them, and as thousands of them began to gaze up at him, he did not feel an ounce of fear!

He had watched a Cursed Descendant fold gigaparsecs of a Dimension into a fist. He had died, once, inside a Steed, and come back. This was an army, and an army was a large thing, but a large thing was still just that.

Beside him, Anaximander had gone quiet in a way Noah had never heard from him.

Noah glanced over, and the scholar’s face had changed. The mild, curious, tousled explorer who called distance a superstition and smiled at everything was gone, and what stood in his place was cold. His eyes had settled on the scattered white and blue bodies around the obelisk, on the small plain corpses of people who had given off no power and died anyway, and for the first time since Noah had known him, Anaximander looked truly angry.

He said nothing. He did not need to. The chill coming off a man whose whole nature was to make existence conform was its own sentence.

A heavy silence hung in the air.

And on the ground, the most powerful of all the Infinite True Lifeforms present, the tall unhurried woman of unspooling blue threads who had been speaking her vile words to the chained man, looked up at the three figures on the white beast, and raised her stained hands, and spoke coldly.

"Now now. I didn’t know there would be reinforcements." Her counting eyes turned over as she smiled up at them. "Though it doesn’t change very much. I will simply do the same for all of you."

...!

Noah looked down at her calmly.

And seeing the armies gathered here, seeing the ruin and the corpses and the vast army filling the lands, reminded him of something.

The paintings.

Ulf’s paintings, the prophecy hung in oils, the ones Ryaenara’s dying brother had made of things that had not happened yet. Armies. Ruin. He was standing inside a scene that carried the same weight those paintings had carried.

But THE Creature was not here. And he did not have Emotive out either. The future those paintings pointed toward had specific pieces in it, and the pieces were not all present, which meant the paintings had not shown one fixed and settled thing at all. They had shown a possibility.

Perhaps parallel possibilities, perhaps potential realities, each one depending on the choices others had not yet made, futures branching off the decisions of every being who had a decision left to make.

Not set in stone!

And as he thought it, he gazed down at the beings below, and he activated THE Protagonist’s Omniscient Regard.

His fifth Letter answered, and the Regard settled over the garden, and the sheets bloomed in his sight.

He looked at the woman first.

|CHARACTER SHEET|

|Designation: Ashkavaal, THE Second Breath. An Infinite True Lifeform.|

|Scale: THE Cenozoic Scale, the Sixth. She has not merely reached the Sixth Scale, she has GRASPED the weavings of time within her Pantheon, where the overwhelming majority who reach this Scale never do. Her chains regress. Her defenses age their attackers. Within a set epoch she can rule a capability out of existence entirely, but she is still learning how to do this.|

|Disposition: cruel by preference, patient by training, bored by the ease of most of her work. Enjoys the ones who resist. Hates the Superpowered Lifeforms specifically, and does not know why the hatred runs as deep as it does.|

|Motivation: to take what THE Ymnaros protects. To deliver it upward. She is not the top of the thing she serves.|

|Fears: ?????|

|Notable thread: her Infinity does not read as her own. It runs UPWARD out of her, always, in a thin constant thread, toward somewhere she does not seem aware she is feeding. She draws, and she is drawn from, and she does not know it. She is not the only one here of whom this is true. Across the entire army, the same thread runs, thousands of them, all pulling from a well none of them can see and all leaking back toward it, an army that believes its power is its own and has never once been told whose cup it is actually filling. ????? sits at the other end of every thread. ????? is very patient.|

...!

Noah’s eyes narrowed at that.

An entire army of Infinite Lifeforms, drawing their Infinity, without knowing it, from a single hidden source?

He set the thread aside carefully, and moved his gaze to the chained man.

|CHARACTER SHEET|

|Designation: Theron Adranos. An Existence Class Superpowered Lifeform.|

|Distinction: Rank S, Ebad. The trembling shield-tree.|

|Nature: emanates no authority whatsoever. This is not weakness and not concealment. It is the SHAPE of his kind. Their power does not press outward on the world as a claim; it simply IS, held entirely inside the body, invisible until it acts. He killed two Infinite True Lifeforms giving off less pressure than the dirt beneath him.|

|Disposition: protective past reason. Grieving. Currently regressed and held; his true Distinction is not what the chains are letting him show.|

|Desire: to guard the shrine. To guard his people. He has failed at the second and will die before he fails at the first.|

|Fears: not death. Only that there will be no one left to stand here after him.|

|Notable thread: the obelisk is not a monument. He is not guarding a symbol. ?????|

Noah gazed down at Theron Adranos, at the golden-haired man who gave off nothing, and at the dead scattered around the shrine he would not stop guarding.

And he weighed something internally.

Death was such a normal part of being human.

So many humans lived, and so many died, that death itself became ordinary to the ones still living, a thing on the news, a thing in the next town, a number that scrolled past. People grew calloused to it because they had to, because a person could not stop and grieve every single one and still get out of bed, and so death became background, became a normal and unremarkable feature of the human world.

But each death was a human.

Each one had held dreams, and hopes, and ideals, and a family, an entire private universe that had taken a whole life to build, and when the death came the universe went out all at once, and to the people around it nothing was ever ordinary about it at all. Only distance made death ordinary. Up close it was the end of a world every single time!

Even his own death.

He had died in THE Krazhor-Nul, and he had come back, but only because he’d had the capability to come back. What if he hadn’t? What if the Hepatarch had not answered, and Noah Osmont had simply ended in the dark inside a Steed’s body? Amelia would have a son-shaped hole in her forever. Henry, Seo-yeon, Adelaide, Barbatos, every person inside THE Infiniverse waiting for him, would have a critical pillar missing from the center of their lives, a pillar gone, the whole structure left standing crooked around the gap where he had been.

That was death. That was what it took, every time, from someone!

This was human.

And as he thought it, standing in the sky above a garden full of the human dead, something opened in him.

An epiphany, profound and complete, the kind that did not arrive as information but as a door swinging wide onto a room he had always owned and never entered!

He had five Letters. I AM. OSMONT. QUINTESSENTIAL. HUMAN. PROTAGONIST. And the Tongue’s growth from here was not more Letters, it was WORDS, and he had known that for a while and had not yet spoken a single one, because a Word had to mean something true enough to carry, and he had been waiting, without knowing he was waiting, for a truth exactly this size.

The human experience. And death.

That was the Word.

Not a Word for power, or conquest, or dominion. A Word for the thing that made the dead in that garden matter, the thing that made his own near-ending matter, the plain unbearable truth that a human life was a whole world and a human death was the ending of one, and that no amount of authority stacked on top of a person changed the naked human thing underneath it, the small mortal creature that dreamed and hoped and could be ended.

He would speak it. And in speaking it, he would impose it. Not on himself alone but on an entire domain, everyone inside it made to stand as what they truly were underneath the power they wore, all authority stripped away, everyone designated as having none at all, so that in this one place the human experience could finally be exactly and only human!

"The first word shall be...THE MORTAL COIL."

HUUM!

"THE DOMAIN...OF THE MORTAL COIL."

...!

|A WORD of THE Osmontian Tongue is forming.|

|Analysis of the forming Word:|

|THE DOMAIN OF THE MORTAL COIL.|

|Function: within its bounds, ALL authority is nullified. Every Scale, every Intent, every Pantheon, every Cause, every claim of power a being has ever stacked upon itself is designated absent. Inside this domain no one has authority, because inside this domain everyone is only what a human is beneath it all: a life that can dream, and hope, and end.|

|Effect on the wielder: as THE True Human Emperor, you alone hold a single privilege inside the absolute leveling. You are permitted the standing of an F-Rank Hunter. The weakest a striving human begins as. Not nothing, a human’s beginning. In a domain where no one has any power at all, the beginning of a human’s road is a throne.|

|THE Infiniverse and those within are among exclusions if contained within you. If any lifeforms within come out, they will face the same human experience. The cost of bearing THE Infiniverse is paid by the uttered word itself while in effect. All redundancies and conflicts will be actively corrected by the word itself while active.|

|Cost, duration, and reach scale with the truth you speak it upon. Speak it fully.|

...!

Noah looked at the terrible thing he had just made, and he understood exactly what it would do to the garden below, and he did not hesitate!

He gazed down at the army, at Ashkavaal with her stained hands raised, at the thousands of Infinite Lifeforms who wore their power like a birthright and had never once in their long lives been asked to stand without it.

And he opened his mouth, and THE Aura of THE Protagonist bloomed around him as he did, Osmontian Biomass beginning to pour into his reserves in a rising golden tide, generated off the sheer adversity of an entire army arrayed beneath him, breakthrough-weight gathering as he faced down odds that should have crushed him, the numbers climbing and climbing as he drew the breath!

"THE MORTAL COIL."

HUUM!

He spoke the first Word of THE Osmontian Tongue.

HUUM!

It did not sound like a word. It sounded like a fact the world had always known and been waiting to hear said out loud, and it rolled out from him across the ruined gardens of THE Ymnaros and kept rolling, and where it passed, the domain came down.

And below, the Infinite True Lifeforms ran out of patience at the worst possible moment.

Two of the tall shapes among the army began to rise, done with waiting, lifting off the ruined terraces to come and end the reinforcements themselves.

And moments later, they felt their flight falter.

The vibrant, terrible waves of authority and power they had carried since before their first memory, the pressure that was so much a part of them that they had never once thought about it any more than a person thinks about the weight of their own hand...

It began to fade, and thin, and go out, and the two great existences felt themselves growing lighter in the exact way nothing that mighty should ever grow lighter, and their rising stalled, and their bodies began to fall!

DUN!

Across the whole vast reach of the domain, every being was about to learn what it meant to be human!