Read Novel Full Chapter 5749: The Long Night I
Chapter 5749: The Long Night I
In the heart of the storm, Vakochev chose his target.
He ignored the Sleepless Fiend’s bindings entirely, let the white-hot threads scrape uselessly across his obsidian flames, and drove his path straight toward one gaze and one gaze alone. He went for THE OVERSEEING ONE.
And THE OVERSEEING ONE panicked.
For cycles uncounted, this one had sat in comfort behind protective glass, reaching down to manipulate the small tragedies of mortals, staging their sorrows for his own amusement, arranging their doomed little stories and never once bleeding for any of it! He had authored a decillion deaths from a balcony and paid for none!
Now the glass was gone!
Now the protagonist of his worst and most recent failure, the risen Remnant of the one Narrative he could never fully bury, was coming straight for him through a storm no lesser thing could witness, and there was no railing to lean over and no script to hide behind.
Far at the rim, Noah tried desperately to see!
He poured his infinite gaze into the storm, strained his dreaming sight against the wall of colliding authority, and he caught only fractions, only slivers, disjointed pieces of a thing too vast to hold.
The suggestion of a lunge! A curtain of Dimensionality torn aside! A shape closing on a shape! Fragments, always fragments, the storm too dense and too high for even an infinite eye to pierce.
But he saw enough to know that Vakochev had reached him.
Vakochev’s hands closed around THE OVERSEEING ONE’s throat!
And the coffin answered.
The single obsidian coffin that had risen from Calliope’s page transformed in an instant into INFINITE coffins, countless obsidian caskets unfolding out of one another and wrapping around the two combatants, sealing them together inside an existential grave, a tomb of endless black boxes that closed over the architect and the ghost and shut the rest of existence out!
And inside that grave, the struggle was brutal.
It was unadorned! It was utterly devoid of majesty! There was no grand engineering here, no cascade of complex weavings, no dazzling display of a titan’s full art!
In the barely-perceivable dark of those infinite coffins, Vakochev simply HELD the thrashing architect, gripped him with the exact cold, dismissive strength of a butcher holding a squealing pig over a drainage trough, indifferent to its terror, unbothered by its struggle, waiting only for the moment to do the necessary thing!
And then he did the necessary thing.
With a sharp, concussive twist of his wrists, Vakochev snapped THE OVERSEEING ONE’s neck!
And as he did, unknown seas of THE Primordial Source and raw Dimensionality poured out of the Remnant and INTO the dying architect, flooding him, drowning him from within with something that even Noah, straining every fiber of his infinite gaze, could not perceive!
Whatever Vakochev truly did in that instant, whatever authority he drove into his enemy along with the killing twist, it happened behind a veil that no eye present could lift.
CRACK!
THE OVERSEEING ONE’s scream shattered across the whole of the Dimensional Skies!
His chest cavity caved inward, collapsing as though a hand the size of an existence had closed on it! His eyes burst into blinding silver light, and out of that light his stolen records began to unravel, ages of harvested history spilling out of him and coming apart.
And Vakochev, holding the ruined and screaming thing, drew back a fire-wrapped fist and drove it into the dying architect’s skull, extinguishing his Trueness completely, snuffing the last of what he was!
THE OVERSEEING ONE died.
An architect had FALLEN!
Vakochev dropped the limp corpse!
It fell away into the infinite coffins, a dead Immense One, a thing that was never supposed to be possible, and the Remnant turned his dead quiet gaze upon the stunned, indistinct faces of the Immense Ones who remained.
And he spoke a single word into the ringing silence, a quiet and terrible parting sentence.
"One."
...!
Then Vakochev stepped backward into the unstitched void.
His fire-wrapped body dissolved into the cracks of Existence itself, sinking into the seams his own swing had torn, vanishing back into the wound in creation from which he had come.
And THE SLEEPLESS FIEND roated in fury!
The white-hot threads erupted, and the Fiend surged into the dark after the vanishing Remnant, and THE UNPAID COLLECTOR surged with him, and THE CACKLING BUTCHER too, three of the mightiest gazes in existence plunging into the cracks in violent, howling pursuit of the ghost who had just killed one of their own!
—
An Immense One had been killed!
Noah gazed upon the impossible from the rim, his masked existence rigid with astonishment, and around him many other perceptions did the same! Was Vakochev truly so grand? Truly so terrible that a mere Remnant of him, a Vestige written back into being by a bleeding Descendant’s pen, could reach into the gathered Immense Ones and simply snap the neck of one?
But even as Noah and all the others reeled with that thought...
Existence itself began to shake!
|The historical mass of a fallen architect does not vanish cleanly.|
|An Immense One’s weavings and folded dimensions have begun an immediate, uncontrolled gravitational collapse...|
The whole region trembled and groaned, and the collapse of the dead architect’s immense volume rippled outward, and existence shuddered around them all!
It looked like something was about to happen to the corpse of the Immense One.
Some process was about to start due to this death.
But...it was interrupted. Or more aptly, it was superseded.
Because in the very next instant, something happened that had not happened before in all of existence.
Every single existence present that held any access to authority, any weaving at all capable of communicating with the surrounding fabric of existence, which was to say every being grand enough to perceive the changes rippling through reality, received a message.
It came in a language older than any tongue, older than agreement itself, and yet every one of them understood it inherently, understood it the way a body understands that the air around it has grown warmer, not through translation but through sensation, a direct communication between a living thing and existence itself.
And the message that every perceiving existence received in that moment, felt in the core of their weavings, was this!
|All conditions have been fulfilled.|
...!
All conditions have been fulfilled?
What conditions? What conditions had been set, and by whom, and when, and what did their fulfillment mean? Noah’s mind raced, grasping at a thing with no handle, a message from existence itself with no context and no source and no...
HUUM!
Right after, Noah’s manifestation in that space began to SHIVER!
He blinked, confused, and he looked up, and...
Snow began to fall!
Snow?!
Noah stared upward in disbelief as, out of the murky obsidian foam, out of the churning undefinition all around, snow came drifiting down! A storm of it! White flakes descending in their countless millions across the boiling dark, falling over the shattered remnants of the Dimensional Provenance Train, over the sundered Cabins that stretched away for Gigaparsecs, settling upon the wreckage of a battle beyond perception.
A blizzard, blooming into being across a region of existence that had never known such a thing.
It did not stem from the dead Immense One as much as...it seemed to stem from Existence itself!
And the descent of that snow came with a terrible coldness.
It wrapped over everyone, over everything, a cold that sank past skin and past weaving and into the very substanace of an existence, and Noah himself, hanging masked at the rim, truly felt it.
Cold!
For the first time in what seemed like forever, Noah Osmont felt cold!
How could he feel cold? He, who had bathed in scorching springs and endured the torture of Immense Ones and walked out of the collapse of his own dream. How could a drifting flake of snow reach past all of that and touch him with a chill?
And it was not only him! It was not only the cold!
Prompts bloomed across his sight, and they were not comforting!
|Your existence is being affected by an unknown weaving, established across existence as an EXISTENTIAL CONDITION.|
|Source: unknown. Scope: pervasive. This Condition is spreading.|
|THE CONDITION OF THE DESCENDING COLD:|
|All attributes are being suppressed. All authority is being slowed, dimmed, and made heavy.|
|The suppression scales with the authority held. The mightier the existence, the deeper the cold reaches, and the more it takes.|
|Those who hold the most are affected the most...|
...!
Those who held the most were affected the MOST?
Noah read those words with a chill that had nothing to do with the snow, because he understood, dimly, the shape of what that meant.
A cold... that hunted power? A weather that fell hardest upon the mighty? A Condition that would press lightest on a peasant and crush hardest upon an Immense One?
And below him, layer upon layer of white snow descended.
It fell upon the burning Cluster of underworlds! It fell upon Calliope, who looked up at it with a somber frown, her fascination gone quiet, and shivered where she stood inside the Matriarch’s protection.
Far in the distance, even THE Creature shivered, the coldness wrapping around his titanic frame, and his obsidian-white flames flickered, dimming, guttering against a chill they had never met!
And further still, THE SEALED ONE raised his hands, and around his Vessel a storm of snow circled and howled, frost creeping across everything he was, ice climbing the edges of a being who had walked across existence untouched by anything, now touched at last by a cold that did not care what he had conquered!
A catastrophe had begun.
At this moment, no one understood why! No one understood how! No one could name the conditions that had been fulfilled or the hand that had set them or the weaving that now fell as snow across the murky dark.
But it was pervasive.
And it was occurring across the whole of Existence!