Read Novel Full Chapter 5684: Ten Nanoseconds! II
Chapter 5684: Ten Nanoseconds! II
The sky itself seemed to lean closer! The pressure of the two vast eyes doubled, hot mirth and cold appetite pressing down together, and torrents of Existential Moirai began to pour into the space between the two rulers, golden and thick, the Ruling setting its table for the grandest single exchange this Dimension had ever hosted!
The armies moved!
Hundreds of Primevals and Descendants flowed outward and around in vast slow currents, forming an enormous ring across the black plain, titans of bone and omen-blooded children of the architects circling shoulder to shoulder as spectators to the fate of their entire Dimension. The ring closed and the center emptied.
And the two rulers walked toward each other!
Ghurvakh came forward with slow seismic steps, his tail carving the stone, his forest of golden horns beginning to burn! THE Creature drifted forward to meet him, obsidian and white-gold flames trailing off his body, small before the horned mountain and entirely unbothered by the difference!
Behind THE Creature, unseen by every other existence on the plain, the massive statue followed.
It smiled brutally as it walked, and its voice arrived for him alone.
"I never expected something seemingly foolish from you," the statue said, and there was a strange, almost respectful curiosity threaded through its brutality.
"You had a higher chance of winning with the army. But by yourself... this is adversity you cannot overcome."
The statue had weighed the Horned Sovereign the same way THE Creature had, and it had reached the same honest sum!
THE Creature nodded calmly as he walked!
"I know," THE Creature said.
And then he said the thing that shocked even a remnant of Ages!
"So I am making a gamble with my existence. You have been seeking control of me... I give you ten Nanoseconds of full control of my existence, in exchange for clearing the obstacle ahead of me. After you deal with it, you are free to do what you wish with the remaining time."
...!
The statue stopped walking!
Its brutal smile faded, and for the first time in this entire campaign, for the first time perhaps in Ages, its carved face became grim! Full control. Freely given!
The thing it had circled and bargained and told stories toward, offered up in a single flat sentence, with conditions attached and a clock of ten Nanoseconds strapped to its wrists!
THE Creature closed his eyes!
And the statue MOVED!
It crossed the space between them faster than any measurable speed, faster than the concept of the space existing at all, and it smashed into the body of THE Creature!
CRACK!
Ghurvakh, THE Horned Sovereign, ROARED!
The sound flattened the burning clouds! The old monster surged forward across the emptied center of the ring, and as he came, he pulled his full arsenal into the light!
Chains of screaming gold erupted from his hunched back, and dragging at the ends of those chains came his hoarded Ages, multiple First Causes blazing like shackled suns, and beside them, miniaturized Observable Existences, entire compressed realities bound and dragged behind him as weapons, the plunder of a monopoly that had taxed a Dimension for eternity!
It was the arsenal of a true apex! It was a charge that could unmake armies!
And across from it, THE Creature opened his eyes.
They were pure white. There were no pupils. There was nothing in them at all that had ever been THE Creature, only a flat, bottomless, ancient white, like twin windows opened onto something that had been waiting behind a door for a very long time.
The body of THE Creature raised one hand, and tapped the air, emotionlessly, once.
The Horned Sovereign popped.
...!
There was no exchange! There was no clash of Causes, no contest of chained Existences, no battle at all! One instant a mountain of cursed majesty was charging with the hoarded arsenal of Ages screaming behind him, and the next instant his entire massive body burst like a bloody balloon, and what sprayed outward was not blood and was not flesh, for every fragment of Ghurvakh, THE Horned Sovereign, ruler of THE Vhelgaros for Ages beyond counting, turned to pure white ash before it could even land!
The chains fell. The shackled First Causes rolled loose across the black stone like dropped marbles. The miniaturized Observable Existences drifted, suddenly ownerless.
Silense!
An immense, total, crushing silence swallowed the entire Dimension! Hundreds of Primevals stood frozen in the great ring! Descendant Ilvexa stared at the white ash drifting where her husband had existed, her clawed hand still half-raised from her final warning! Even the torrents of Moirai hung motionless in the air, as though the Ruling itself needed a moment!
And the thing wearing THE Creature did not celebrate, and did not look at the ash, and did not acknowledge the succession it had just settled with a tap.
It looked around, instead, at the edges.
The white, pupilless eyes swept slowly across the boundaries of THE Vhelgaros, and they saw the faint crystallized barriers at the far borders, the streaking of the burning sky, the deep structural hum beneath the black stone, the signature of a Dimension that was not sitting still in the void but MOVING, coupled and chained and dragged along linear tracks through the crossing-dark!
THE Vhelgaros was a Dimensional Cabin!
This entire Dimension, this entire succession, this entire Narrative, was one carriage among many upon THE Dimensional Provenance Train of Existence, rushing forward through the lethal dark toward the architects’ grand design!
The thing in THE Creature’s body looked at the edges of its moving cage, and then it looked up.
At the two eyes.
It raised THE Creature’s left hand and waved it once, and a bow appeared!
The bow was pure white! It was tall as the wielder and taller, a single flawless arc of blinding white authority with a string of compressed brilliance, and the instant it materialized, every Primeval and Descendant in the great ring felt their existence scream at them to be anywhere else!
The white-eyed figure nocked nothing, and drew!
The string came back, and power began to accumulate!
It built and built and BUILT, white authority folding into itself in silent detonations, and the pressure of the draw alone rolled outward across the ring in expanding rings of pure weight, and half of the surrounding army, hundreds of Primeval Ones and omen-blooded Descendants who were not even the targets, simply fainted where they stood, titans of Ages collapsing across the black stone like scythed wheat as the accumulating force scraped their consciousness flat!
And the bow rose.
It rose past the horizon. It rose past the burning clouds.
It aimed at the two eyes of THE Immense Ones!
...!
Pure horror swallowed everyone still conscious in THE Vhelgaros!
Primevals who had knelt to tyrants for eternity, Descendants born from the very lineages of the beings above, all of them watched the white bow settle its aim upon the twin gazes of the architects themselves, and every single one of them understood that they were witnessing something that did not happen, that had never happened, that could not happen!
One did not aim at THE Immense Ones!
One did not even look at them for too long!
The white-eyed thing wearing THE Creature released.
Two shots, loosed simultaneously!
They surged upward like ascending spears of absolute white, and the power packed inside them was unfathomably grand, layered and braided and WRONG, multiple unique Causes swirling within each shot alongside an unknown power that no information named and no Records dared annotate, and they crossed the entire height of the burning sky in less time than a scream takes to begin, and they smashed directly into the two gazes of THE Immense Ones!
BOOM! BOOM!
...!
The moment the impacts landed, all of existence within this Dimension began to shake!
The black plain heaved! The crystallized borders of the Dimensional Cabin screamed across their entire length! The burning sky tore and bled light from horizon to horizon, and through the tearing, from somewhere unfathomably far above, roars echoed down into THE Vhelgaros, vast and layered and existence-filling, roars of pure incredulity and gathering rage, the sound of two beings who had come to watch a bloodbath discovering that the bloodbath had looked back and reached UP!
They weren’t hurt or even touched at all, but their dignity...oh their dignity!
And down on the shaking plain, the white faded.
The pupilless light drained out of THE Creature’s eyes, and his own gaze returned to him, and he came back to himself standing beneath a torn and screaming sky with a fading white bow in his hand and ten spent Nanoseconds behind him.
He looked tired and heavy. The weight of the possession sat on his body like a debt already being collected.
And then his expression became grave, gravely still, because the roars from above were still echoing, and the sky was still blazing, and he looked up, slowly, to see exactly what the thing he had given control to... had done!
The two vast eyes above THE Vhelgaros burned through the torn and bleeding sky, and the pressure that had been mirth and appetite only moments ago curdled into something that made every surviving lifeform on the black plain forget how to breathe!
Prompts slammed down across the entire Dimension, and for the first time, Existence itself felt like a wound!
|THE CACKLING BUTCHER has stopped laughing.|
|THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR declares this meal RUINED. It has been struck. STRUCK. In ten thousand dynasties of endings, nothing has ever dared to season itself.|
|The spectators’ grievance is being drafted into the Records!|
|Judgment gathers.|
WAA!
And above the plain, the sky began to fill with swords!
Existential Moirai, the golden currency of fate itself, poured out of the two burning gazes and condensed, and it did not condense into showers of blessing or torrents of reward! It condensed into blades! Thousands upon thousands of golden swords materialized across the entire ceiling of the Dimension, each one long as a mountain is tall, each one aimed downward, a harvest of judgment stretching from horizon to horizon above two armies, one throne of ash, and a single masked figure!
The meaning required no information! The swords were not aimed at THE Creature alone. They hung over EVERYTHING. Every Primeval who had circled. Every Descendant who had watched. Every living fragment of a Dimensional Cabin that had hosted the insult! Two of Those Who Remain had been struck before an audience, and the audience itself had become part of the offense, and dignity of that magnitude was not restored by killing a culprit.
It was restored by deleting a venue!
Primevals wailed across the plain! Descendants clutched their lineages and screamed pleas up at the very beings preparing to erase them.
Ilvexa, widowed for less than a minute, stared up at the sword-filled sky over her Dimension with her clawed hands hanging open at her sides!
And THE Creature looked up at the thousands of blades of judgment, and he did not kneel, and he did not run.
He gazed up defiantly, obsidian and white-gold flames rising off his frame, tired and heavy and utterly unbowed, and he spoke, quietly, to the presence that only he could perceive!
"Why did you do that."
It was not a demand or an accusation. It was the flat question of a bearer who had paid ten Nanoseconds of his existence for one obstacle cleared, and had woken to find his entire Dimension standing under a harvest of golden swords!
And for the first time!
For the first time in this entire campaign, the statue behind him... was quiet.
No brutal smile. No parable. The massive stone face stared up at the sword-filled sky with an expression THE Creature had never seen carved upon it, and it said absolutely nothing at all!
...!
The silence told him more than any answer could have, and none of what it told him was comforting!
Above, the swords finished gathering. The two burning gazes narrowed in unison. The entire golden harvest angled downward as one, thousands of blades drawing back for a single, Dimension-ending fall!
And then the sky opened a third time.
HUUM!
Between the two burning gazes, without arrival and without announcement, a third eye simply came to exist!
It was nothing like the others! Where the Butcher’s gaze quivered with heat and the Connoisseur’s lay flat and cold, this new eye was vast and soft and heavy-lidded, a deep luminous gold framed by long drifting strands of light that fell around it in slow, unhurried waves, and its pressure did not crawl or crush or evaluate!
Its pressure simply settled, over everything, the way dusk settles, feminine and grand and immeasurably old, and beneath it the rage-weather of the other two gazes was flattened into stillness like candle flames under a dropped blanket.
The eye blinked, once, slowly.
And the thousands of golden judgment-swords filling the sky... dispersed!
They did not fade with dignity. They were swept aside, all of them at once, unmade across the whole ceiling of the Dimension by a single lidded glance, scattered into loose harmless Moirai that drifted down over the armies like warm rain.
Waves of information bloomed, and even the Ruling’s voice seemed careful with these ones!
|A third gaze has arrived.|
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW looks upon THE Vhelgaros.|
|She rarely watches anything anymore. She finds that most things remind her of something better, and then are not it.|
...!
The two burning gazes ROILED! Their outrage crashed against the newcomer’s dusk-heavy calm, and their protest arrived for all to read, because beings of their nature did not know how to be indignant privately!
|THE CACKLING BUTCHER protests! It was STRUCK! Its dignity demands this Cabin’s erasure! The honor of Those Who Remain is not negotiable!|
|THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR protests! A spectator’s sanctity was violated! Precedent demands a deletion! What is dignity worth if insult goes unpaid?!|
The third eye regarded the two of them with its heavy-lidded gold, and its reply arrived with the weight of a being for whom their entire honor-culture was a noise happening somewhere beneath her!
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW replies: I do not care.|
...!
The information sat there, four words and a period, and the entire Dimension read it in stunned silence!
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW continues: You came to watch blood and were splashed by it. That is what the front row costs. You may collect your dignity from me, if either of you believes you can carry it home afterward.|
The two burning gazes went very, very still!
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW adds, softly: Besides. Something below drew back a bow I have not seen drawn in a very long age. I am taking this grievance, and both of you, elsewhere. The Narrative will conclude untouched. Do not make me repeat myself. I find repetition exhausting, and I find both of you exhausting, and I was having a rather pleasant memory before all of this.|
And then, before either gaze could shape a reply, her lidded gold eye turned, slowly, away from them both.
It looked down.
It looked at THE Creature, standing small and masked and defiant upon the ruined black plain. And then, in a moment that turned his flames cold, the vast feminine gaze moved a fraction further, past his shoulder, and settled with unhurried precision upon the exact empty space where the statue stood!
The space that no other existence in this Dimension had ever perceived!
The statue did not move and the eye did not linger. The moment lasted less than a breath and carried more weight than the entire harvest of swords!
|THE REMINISCING WIDOW departs.|
BOOM!
A blinding gold light erupted across the entire sky, dusk-soft and absolute, swallowing the burning gazes of THE CACKLING BUTCHER and THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR whole, and when the light faded, the sky of THE Vhelgaros was empty!
All three Immense Ones were gone!
The torn firmament slowly began to knit itself. The bleeding light dimmed. The crossing-dark streaked past the distant crystallized borders of the Cabin, indifferent as ever, and the only sounds on the plain were the settling of white ash and the breathing of two armies that had just survived their own execution.
Silence held for a long, long moment.
Then, across the vast ring of the battlefield, hundreds of Primevals and Descendants slowly turned and looked at each other, and the same stunned understanding moved through every one of them.
They had watched a seated Sovereign of Ages pop like a bloody balloon from a single tap. They had watched a bow aimed at Those Who Remain and loosed! They had stood beneath a sky of judgment-swords and lived because a third architect had swatted the wrath of two others aside like a bothersome insect and then LEFT with them!
And at the center of all of it, tired flames burning low, stood one masked figure.
Slowly, hundreds of gazes converged upon THE Creature!
And the Ruling, which had waited with impeccable manners through the entire catastrophe, finally delivered its verdict, cascading in grand golden text before his eyes as the statue silently translated every line!
|THE Narrative of Existence: The Grand Succession has concluded.|
|The Leading Conqueror has usurped the Seated Sovereign in single combat, witnessed and enforced by the Dimension itself.|
|Winner takes all.|
|You are now the Sovereign Ruler of THE Vhelgaros and all Observable Existences within this Dimensional Cabin. All standing tributes, holdings, and territorial weavings of the former ruler transfer to you.|
|Spoils of Succession: the unbound First Causes of the fallen Sovereign. The miniaturized Observable Existences held in his chains. The accumulated hoard of an Age-long monopoly.|
|Narrative Reward: unfathomable Existential Moirai floods the Leading Conqueror. Your Mantle of THE RULER deepens. Your bearing is now etched into Narrative History.|
|Addendum, recorded with interest: you have survived the grievance of two of Those Who Remain, and drawn the intervention of a third. Existence will remember this Succession for a very long time.|
Waves of golden Moirai poured down out of the healing sky and sank into his frame, and his obsidian and white-gold flames rose and rose, fed by the fortune of an entire concluded Narrative, until his figure hovering above the plain burned like a signal fire visible from every Observable Existence in the Cabin!
THE Creature let it burn!
He rose slowly and grandly into the air above the white ash of the old order, his flames streaming, the loose First Causes of the fallen Sovereign drifting up around him like a crown assembling itself, the miniaturized Observable Existences settling into slow orbits about his body, and he looked down upon the massed hundreds of Primeval Ones and omen-blooded Descendants of THE Vhelgaros with the flat, absolute bearing of a being who had carried weight his entire existence and had finally been handed a throne’s worth of it!
The masses stared up at their new ruler, at the burning silhouette wreathed in stolen Causes and orbiting Existences of light, at the survivor of judgment, at the Great Ruler the Narrative itself had crowned!
And THE Creature spoke.
"Kneel to your King."
...!