Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5427: I Decide! I

Noah hung in the gold sky before THE Aureate Firmament, and wrapped himself in what he was.

His Osmontian Source Infinity rose to shroud his body, deep cerulean closing over his skin, and his Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian settled over that, so that he floated there as a single quiet blue figure against the vast golden dimension.

The air this high above the dying capital carried the smell of scorched bone-gold and the faint ozone and radiation of an Olympian Intent saturating the heavens, and beneath it the heat of the falling capital rose in slow waves he could feel even from here.

The Pantheon itself was the strange part. Looking at it was looking at a place that was not quite where it appeared to be. THE Aureate Firmament loomed above him, all soaring lattice-towers and burning sigil-walls, golden chains hanging from heights that hurt to track, and yet his perception kept sliding off it, kept registering that the Ealdor within was somehow elsewhere even as he loomed right there. Unreachable!

A being standing behind a window that only looked like an open door. The pressure of it pressed down on Noah, ancient and certain, the weight of a dimension that had decided he did not belong in it.

He tested it first without his real weapons. He wanted to feel the gap himself.

He threw rivers of Mana at the Pantheon, great cerulean torrents of it, raw and unintented, and they phased clean through. They passed into the golden structure and out the other side as though it were a mirage, touching nothing, changing nothing, and the Ealdor within did not so much as flinch.

|The attack failed because there was nothing present to strike, Master. This is the core truth of a Mesozoic Scale being and the thing that makes them so difficult to kill.|

|Vularch Sethis does not fully reside in THE Braneworld. He resides within THE Aureate Firmament, his own Pantheonic Dimension, and only projects into the surrounding existence. His Pantheon governs what is permitted to interface with him there. He permits the existence of his own dimension to touch him. He permits forces he has acknowledged as his equals or betters. He does not permit raw Mana flung by a being he considers beneath him; to that, his dimension simply does not grant the permission to be real in his presence. Your torrents were not blocked. They were declared irrelevant, and so they passed through a being who, to them, was not there at all. To reach him, you must present something his Pantheon cannot dismiss.|

Noah smiled at that, because it was exactly the kind of arrogance he had come to test.

And Vularch Sethis, watching the Mana phase harmlessly through his Firmament, grew calmer. The caution bled out of his gold eyes, replaced by the cold certainty of a being who had just confirmed his own superiority, and he settled back into his throne of authority with an arrogance that filled the sky.

"You begin to understand," Sethis said, his voice rolling down like a verdict. "The gap between the truly powerful and the mediocre is vast, little blue thing. Vaster than the mediocre can even perceive, which is the mercy and the curse of being mediocre. I felt your Intent. It is unique, I will grant you that. Unusual. But uniqueness is not grandeur. Sometimes a clever, singular Intent simply cannot overcome a glorious Pantheon, no matter how novel it is, because the Pantheon is not a technique to be out-thought. It is a dimension to be lived in, and you are not invited."

Then he exerted his Pantheon’s effect, and the heavens corrected themselves!

HUUM!

|Vularch Sethis has enacted the core expression of THE Aureate Firmament. Designation of effect: THE Gilded Mandate. The Pantheon imposes the absolute order of its dimension upon the surrounding existence, overwriting all that it touches with hyper-rigid, hyper-logical geometric law. Within the imposition, organic existence is forbidden. Reality is forced into the strict architecture of his Firmament.|

It rolled outward across gigaparsecs.

The chaotic, ruined sprawl of the capital and the dark beyond it seized and snapped into perfect order. The drifting smoke of the fallout flattened into rigid stratified layers. What broken terrain remained crushed itself into flawless ninety-degree planes, jagged ruin shearing into clean golden cliffs, the very air locking into strict linear vectors that hummed with a cold geometric tension!

Every soft and living curve for an unfathomable distance was forced straight, compressed, gridded, the existence around Noah becoming a vast perfect golden lattice with no cover, no chaos, no give, a chessboard the size of a region with Vularch Sethis as its only permitted hand. The shearing correction tore through everything caught in it, the topography itself becoming a weapon as reality was bludgeoned into compliance with the Firmament’s rigid law.

Noah felt it press in on him from every direction, the cold ordered weight of a dimension trying to flatten him into one more square on its board, and he experienced the full terror of what a Mesozoic Scale being could do to Existence simply by insisting Existence be shaped like him.

He nodded slowly. He had wanted to feel it. Now he had!

Then he got to work.

First, he swung THE Loyal Reach.

The split-blade came around in a single cerulean arc, and it cut. It tore a huge gash straight across the gridded golden environment, the perfect geometric law splitting open along the line of the blade, because THE Loyal Reach carried a Primordial Intent and could wound even the Mesozoic Scale, and the Pantheon’s rigid terrain could not simply dismiss a weapon that grand. The clean shearing wound hung there in the gold, the first thing all day to mar the Firmament’s perfection!

HUUM!

And then Noah unleashed himself.

His Osmontian Source Infinity erupted out of him in a flood, the deep cerulean blazing, and his Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian roared up alongside it, and he tapped THE Loyal Reach’s pommel down through the gridded air with tyrannical calm and bellowed.

"I AM!"

BOOM!