Novel Full Chapter 5230: Oblivion I
Chapter 5230: Oblivion I
He closed his eyes.
He could still feel everything.
That was the first thing that registered when his eyes closed and THE Infinite Vector’s passive field extended outward through his perception without the filtering of visual input, the full scope of what the Tongue allowed him to feel spreading across the entire battlefield in the specific way that a sound heard in darkness carries more information than the same sound heard in light.
The residue of Infinity within every Gilded One body in his perceptual range registered against his awareness as individual signatures, each one distinct, each one composed of the specific configuration of Infinity that their Gilded engineering had built into their physiology.
Paleozoic bones and organs, forged from Infinity as their foundational substrate.
He could feel all of it.
His hands rose without him deciding to raise them.
He began to conduct.
The gesture was not dramatic. His right hand moved to the left in a slow horizontal arc, and two dozen Ordovician Paleozoic Scale Gilded Ones to his right lurched in the direction his hand had moved, their bodies swinging through the burning air of THE Wandering Territories as though strings had been cut and replaced by different strings attached to a different master!
Their weavings engaged against the movement, their Observable Force flooding through their foundations in the automatic defensive surge of beings whose cultivation had trained for physical compulsion, their Cause connections pressing outward against the force redirecting them.
It did not help, because Noah was not pressing force against them from outside.
He was speaking to the Infinity inside their bones.
The Infinity inside their bones was listening.
His left hand dropped slightly and curled inward, and a cluster of Gilded Ones from his left side decelerated mid-formation, their momentum bleeding away not because anything was stopping them but because the Infinity propelling them had been told to change its intent from moving forward to holding still, and the Infinity had agreed!
They froze in the configurations they had been mid-execution of, the expressions on their faces carrying the specific quality of beings whose control over their own bodies had transferred to an external authority without any sensation of force being applied to bring that transfer about.
He waved both hands in a sweeping downward arc.
Several Gilded Ones smashed into each other with the combined momentum of their redirected trajectories, the collision producing sounds that carried through the multicolored fire.
He flicked his right hand forward with his fist clenched, and a cluster rushed toward him with their bodies converted from Gilded combatants into projectiles by the simple administrative fact that he had rewritten what their Infinity was doing, and he opened his jaws and they arrived into them and he ate, and the crimson-gold ran across his chin with the abundance of a being receiving exactly the intake his engineering had been designed to process.
He was conducting a choir of several thousand Gilded Ones whose voices were their vectors!
They could not defend!
Not because they lacked the power. They had every right to their power, he acknowledged this freely, because these were beings who had been engineered from the foundational substrate of THE First Cause itself, who drew on Causes that governed the deep structure of existence, whose bones and organs were built from the concentrated Infinity that Bounded Lifeforms spent lifetimes pursuing through their highest cultivation frameworks. They were glorious in their construction!
And their bones were Gilded Paleozoic bones, forged from Infinity at its highest Gilded expression, which meant that every structural component of their bodies was a medium he could address through THE Infinite Tongue.
They could defend against external force with their Cause authority. They could defend against external Infinity with their Observable Force. They could defend against attacks that arrived as attacks.
They could not defend against their own Infinity being politely given different instructions.
He clenched his finger against his thumb, focused on a single Ordovician Scale Sororis behind him whose Cause connection had been producing the most consistent interference with his Apeiron form’s passive field, and compressed.
THE Infinite Vector rewrote the magnitude of the Infinity within her foundations inward with the specific patience of a being applying pressure rather than delivering a blow, the compression tightening gradually and then all at once, and the Sororis folded inward as her own Infinity compacted around her internal structure, her body collapsing toward its own center the way a star collapsed toward its center when the outward pressure failed.
She became approximately spherical.
He flicked his middle finger.
BOOM!
She crossed the burning air of THE Wandering Territories at a speed that the word projectile technically described and that the reality significantly exceeded, her compressed form traveling in a straight line that terminated against a formation of eight Ordovician Paleozoic Scale Gilded Ones who had been moving toward Noah’s position in coordinated flanking approach.
The impact was the specific impact of a dense compressed object meeting a formation of beings who had not anticipated the approach vector.
They scattered in the way bowling pins scattered!
"Haha...HAHA!"
HUUM!
He was laughing.
The laughter emerged from somewhere beneath his calculated composure and surfaced in the specific way that genuine euphoria surfaces in beings who have not felt it recently enough, unexpected and total and carrying the harmonic depth of his Primus Apeiron form’s resonance chambers. The euphoria was real!
The sensation of THE Infinite Tongue moving through him and through the battlefield simultaneously, the feeling of Infinity obeying the language he was speaking to it rather than the language everyone else had been speaking to it, was the closest thing to flight he had experienced in any form that had nothing to do with actual elevation.
Between the orchestrated Ordovician Scale demonstrations, the nine Ragnars kept coming.
He moved between them.
THE Infinite Step put him between V49’s fist and V55’s Cause eruption simultaneously, the half-second between the two attacks occupied by his lateral displacement and the passive Vector rewriting both attacks away from his current coordinate before they could converge on it.
He moved through the Ragnars the way water moved through spaces between stones, finding the gaps that their coordinated pressure left open and occupying those gaps before the pressure could close them. He could not eat them. He could not redirect them with the Vector’s full efficiency. He could feel the resistance of their Silurian Paleozoic Cause integrations against his application the way one feels a strong current against outstretched hands.
But he could move around them.
And moving around nine Silurian Paleozoic Ragnars while simultaneously orchestrating thousands of Ordovician Paleozoic Gilded Ones through THE Infinite Tongue’s conducting was, he found, the closest thing to complete presence in existence he had ever occupied. No past. No future. Just the Tongue and the battlefield and the boundless Infinity running through him and everything around him.
Just here!
He wanted to know his limits!
He genuinely, completely, wanted to know exactly where his current configuration stopped and the space beyond it began.
His face turned.
The laugh faded into something else, something that sat on the other side of euphoria where the edge between exhilaration and ferocity was not clearly defined, and his crystalline eyes burned with Nearu Absolute Infinity at their maximum passive expression, and he turned toward the cluster where Vaeltharion stood surrounded by the dozen Silurian Paleozoic Scale Sororis Primas, all of them burning with their collective preparation, the terrifying weaving they had been assembling throughout the entire demonstration now coiled and ready with the specific tension of something that had been held past its ideal release point because its wielder had wanted to understand the target before committing.
He opened his jaws toward them.
Not to eat, but to roar.
"Show me."
His voice was filled with majesty.
"SHOW ME!"
BOOM!