Novel Full Chapter 5133: Greed! V
Chapter 5133: Greed! V
Valeria spun once through the air, hit the stone of the island, skidded, and came up into a crouch twenty paces away. Her braids had come loose along one side. A thin line of golden blood traced down her cheek from the corner of her brow. She straightened with measured calm, her shoulders rolling as she reset her posture, and then she drew both blades of infinity again without a word.
Above, the abomination completed its spin.
It came back down toward Noah faster than it had gone up!
Its jaws didn’t open this time. Its hands extended forward in front of its body, and from those hands erupted long jagged talons made of concentrated madness, THE Gamaidian given edge and purpose!
The air screamed around the talons as they descended, Infinity twisting into configurations that refused to resolve into any stable geometry.
Octavius launched new weavings from behind the abomination.
His Unity reached through the air in coordination with the abomination’s strike, not trying to bond with Noah now but trying to bond with the talons themselves, trying to graft them into Noah’s body once they connected so that the embedded weapons would root and spread and turn Noah into new soil for Primordial Mycelia.
Valeria came in from the left again at the same instant.
Three angles. Three attacks!
Three different methodologies converging on his standing position with the precision of a rehearsal that had been waiting!
Oh!
Noah watched all of it.
His eyes drank in the weavings as they approached. The mad Infinity of the abomination, wild and beautiful in its chaotic saturation. The Unity of Octavius, patient and infinite in its approach!
Valeria’s cutting Infinity, clean and scholarly in its geometry. Three different expressions of what Infinity could become in the hands of beings who had been engineered to hold it, and all three of them reaching for him at once.
He found himself genuinely interested.
The madness especially. THE Gamaidjan was rare. Most beings who fell into it were consumed too quickly for any meaningful study, their weavings dissolving into incoherent pressure before anyone could trace what the madness was actually doing to them at the fundamental level. But here it was, harnessed, walking, attacking with something that passed for strategy!
Octavius had achieved something grand.
Noah smiled brilliantly.
He raised both his hands upward into the descending convergence of attacks.
HUUM!
Seas of blue Infinity erupted outward from his body in concentric waves, the blue deepening through cobalt and into something closer to void as the density compounded against itself.
Multicolored Quintessence Infiniforce bloomed between the blue currents, golds and violets and purple and silvers braiding through the blue without mixing with it, each color holding its own distinct weaving. The ambient Infinity of the region bent toward him. The rivers of Observable Force on the island curved upward to feed his expanding authority!
Above his head, THE Hadean Pillar of Infinity manifested.
It rose from his crown as if it had always been there and had simply been waiting for permission to be seen. Crystalline blue trees of THE First Tongue formed its base. Multicolored flames of Existence licked through its mid-tiers. Infinite mirrors of Paradox reflected impossibilities at every angle. The eternal storm of Chaos swirled at its apex, and beneath that apex the additional actualized Civilizations layered themselves in concentric halos of authority!
The Pillar towered upward toward a sky that suddenly seemed very small by comparison.
His voice rolled out across the island with calm grand finality.
"Freeze."
...!
HUUM!
Every entity whose body held Infinity within it froze in place!
The abomination’s descending talons halted a hand’s width from Noah’s upraised palms. Its body hung in the air above him, arrested mid-motion, its glistening mad eyes wide and unmoving!
Octavius’s Unity weavings stopped propagating, their tendrils suspended in the act of reaching, their patient weavings paused between one breath and the next. Valeria’s blades froze at the edge of their arc, her dark eyes locked on Noah from her approaching stride, her braids still half-loosed from the earlier impact.
On the broader island, the Primordial Architects who had been struggling to rise stopped rising.
The ones who had been knocked unconscious remained unconscious, their Infinity reservoirs held still within their stalled forms. The ambient rivers of Infinity threading through the island paused in their golden flow, their currents held motionless as if the island’s entire circulatory system had been told to wait!
|Civilization Activation Detected: THE Hadean Pillar of Infinity - Dominion of Internal Infinity.|
|This authority extends from your Pillar into every existence whose body holds Infinity within the surrounding region. You have asserted temporary control over the Infinity inside each affected being.|
|Strain Analysis: Negligible strain against common Proterozoic Scale entities. Minor strain against engineered subjects. Moderate strain against the abomination due to its unstable saturation with THE Gamaidian.|
|Duration: Sustainable for an extended period at current Civilizational Access. Release of authority is at your discretion.|
Only Naldine and Emotive remained moving.
He hadn’t extended the authority toward either of them. Naldine, because she was his. Emotive, and because there was no point in freezing his own tool.
He laughed.
It rolled out of him low at first, a sound that startled the shocked Naldine beside him because she had rarely heard it in this register. It built as he laughed, rising into something louder, something that bordered on the mad but never quite crossed the threshold, because he wasn’t mad!
He...wasn’t mad!
He was delighted. Waves of blue and multicolored Infinity shone across his skin as he laughed, his hair radiating its multicolored light in pulses that matched the rhythm of his amusement, his fair skin illuminating gold from within as if a sun had decided to use his form as its vessel!
"Infinity!"
His voice rolled out between bursts of his laughter.
"All of you, every single one of you, you carry it inside yourselves and you speak of it as if it belongs to you. You call it yours. You cultivate your amplified Egos to withstand it, and you tell yourselves that the withstanding is mastery. That holding the flood makes the flood into something that serves you!"
He laughed again, tilting his head back slightly.
"It never belonged to any of you!"
His Pillar blazed brighter above him.
"Infinity doesn’t have owners. It has channels. Every being who carries a sea of it inside their chest is a channel, and channels do not dictate the direction of what moves through them. You were engineered to hold a flood that was never yours, and the best of you learned to pretend the flood was obedient. The pretense worked because nobody had ever come along to correct it. And now I’m here. Now someone has finally come along!"
"I HAVE COME!"
BOOM!
He spread his arms wider, Pillar towering, Infinity blooming in every direction.
"So hold still."
His smile stretched slowly.
"I’d like to look at each of you properly. Show me your infinity...and I will show you mine!"
WAA!
The island held its breath around him.
Above, the abomination’s frozen eyes still burned with their trapped madness, and Noah turned his gaze toward those eyes first as astoundingly...a bright blue of utter glory and superiority reflected in his eyes!
But he was not mad.
No. He...was not mad!