Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5428: I Decide! II

The entire terrain set by the Pantheon began to twist and distort.

It buckled where his Intent touched it, the rigid golden grid warping, and then, impossibly, it began to change into something else. His Intent and his Osmontian Source Infinity asserted his own weavings onto the surrounding existence, overwriting the overwrite, and where the cold geometric law had been, glorious stellar seas of blue Mana began to bloom. Cerulean oceans surged across the flattened golden planes, and from them rose farmland, rich dark soil and growing things, the homely impossible sight of crops spreading across a war-sky, the signature of his Prime Cause of Harvest made manifest.

The straight locked air loosened into living wind. The chessboard drowned under a rising blue tide of his own making, until fully half of the altered region had shifted out from under Vularch Sethis and become, unmistakably, Noah’s.

He had reached into a separate Dimension of Existence and bent it. Not all of it. Half of it. But half was already impossible!

|This is possible because you did not attack his Pantheon. You contested its claim on the surrounding existence directly. Vularch Sethis imposes his dimension’s law onto THE Braneworld through THE Gilded Mandate; you impose your own identity onto the same existence through your Egoic Intent and your fused authority, which operate at the True Lifeform threshold, a tier his Olympian Intent does not reach. Where two claims meet, the grander identity wins the ground. You cannot yet enter his dimension to strike him directly. But you can refuse to let his dimension own existence around you, and take that existence for yourself instead. He overwrites reality as a Mesozoic Scale being. You overwrite his overwrite as something he does not have a name for. The Pantheon is not beaten. Its reach has simply been cut in half by a being who decided his own weavings outrank it.|

Noah looked up at Vularch Sethis with a calm smile, standing now amid blue seas and growing farmland where a golden grid had been.

And Sethis was burning.

The Ealdor’s cold certainty had cracked into pure fury, his gold eyes blazing as though his entire existence had been personally insulted, as though a mediocre thing had walked into his glorious dimension’s imposition and casually planted crops in it. But underneath the fury ran caution now, real caution, the wary caution of a being watching something happen that the rules said could not. His Pantheon pressed down harder, THE Gilded Mandate redoubling, golden law grinding against blue weaving across the contested heavens.

"What manner of vile thing are you?" Sethis bellowed, and for the first time his voice had lost its lazy contempt. "This is not possible. You have no dimension. You have no Pantheon. So do not hide it from me any longer, whatever you are. Reveal it! Reveal your Pantheon and face me as an equal, or tell me how you do this!"

Noah’s smile only widened at the demand.

He let his Egoic Intent pour out further, the cerulean climbing, and he grasped THE Loyal Reach and began to stroll upward through the contested sky toward the golden Pantheon, each step landing with shocking, casual dominance, a man walking up a hill he had decided was his.

"A Pantheon," Noah said, almost gently.

"That’s what you’re so desperate for me to show you? Merely a Pantheon!" He climbed another step, blue seas spreading beneath his heel.

"But tell me, who decided I needed one to stand against another? Whose rule is that, exactly? Yours? Vakochev’s? Some agreement everyone signed before I got here?" His eyes shone. "I decide that I do not need one. And my decision is final."

BOOM!

---

The image of Noah rising to defy the golden Pantheon hung in the air, and then it was only an image, one more illusory screen drifting among the others in the soft cerulean light of THE Infiniverse.

Beneath the blue tree, the true body, or as true as any of his bodies were, lay back in the rain of mana with his head on Barbatos’s thighs, watching himself war against Vularch Sethis on a screen the way another man might watch a distant storm. Drops of mana fell across his chest and broke cool against his skin, beading and rolling, the smell of the tree green and clean above him. The body in THE Braneworld would handle the Ealdor. This body wondered about the larger thing.

How to keep rising faster. Vularch Sethis was Mesozoic, a genuine Fifth Scale being, and Noah was contesting him to a standstill across half a region, but a standstill was not a victory, and there were grander things than Sethis behind the Gilded, and grander things than those behind THE Sealed One. He needed to climb quicker than he was climbing! And the thing he kept returning to, the thing he watched even as he watched himself fight, was THE Osmontian Tongue, and how its first letter alone had already given him and all his people a structure and a pathway upward that had not existed before he wrote it.

The Biomass had been trickling in the whole time, second by second.

|Osmontian Biomass accrued passively since last accounting, generated by the continuous assertion of THE First Letter: +1,500.|

|Osmontian Biomass returned to you by THE Tide That Owes Nothing, in answer to the Biomass given to and grown within your people across the same span: +2,200. As before, the return on giving exceeds the passive generation. Your people rising remains more profitable to you than your own quiet accrual, because the Tide rewards the giving more than existence rewards the being.|

|Current total: approximately 4,700 Osmontian Biomass.|

Barbatos watched the numbers settle in his eyes as he shared what he saw with her, and she traced a lazy finger down the side of his face.

"So," she said. "Nearly five thousand, Little Fish. How do you plan to spend it?" She tilted her head, her dark hair spilling, a drop of mana caught and shining in it. "Your Intent, I’d think. Or your Osmontian Source Infinity. Sharpen the sword or deepen the well. Which is the better buy?"

Noah smiled up at her.

"Neither," he said.

...!