Novel Full Chapter 5304: Settlement I
Chapter 5304: Settlement I
The higher they climbed through the air above the canopy of THE Strand of Broken Scales, the more the pressure made itself known.
It came from above rather than from any directional source, pressing down on his Galdr Source with the blunt authority of this place communicating what it communicated to everything that tried to rise above its designated level...that the sky here was not neutral territory, that elevation was claimed by the things powerful enough to claim it.
And that claiming required being the kind of thing the sky couldn’t simply press back down.
He kept going up.
His Galdr Source was saturated in a way he had no prior reference point for, the second Demarcation pressed to its ceiling by the utilization of Persevere of the past several hours.
It was dense and viscous and incapable of rising further. And yet every passing second added another utterance, and every utterance reinforced what was already there, the ceiling not broken but the substance behind it made denser than any ceiling had been designed to contain.
He felt like he could break past whatever ceiling there was at will to arrive at the next stage, but he held back for now and compressed everything further.
The multicolored flames around his body were not the open billowing flames of earlier utterances. They had compressed into something concentrated, drawn close against his body by the density of what they were expressing, the air around him sparking and trembling as he passed through it.
The Infinity and the Galdr Source and the Observable and Unobservable Force burning around him produced the ambient condition of something at the edge of a threshold, the environmental quality of standing next to a furnace.
The Unobservable Force was an interesting development he was still mapping.
He had noticed in the past several hours that its qualities bore resemblance to his Humilitas Ego of Infinity, the obsidian brilliance of it carrying a capacity to make things imperceptible, to move without registering against the awareness of beings who were looking for Observable Force expressions and finding nothing.
As he was thinking through all this...
A crimson-furred mass dropped toward him from above.
A baboon, massive, its Galdr Source blazing through the crimson fur in pulses, its foundational depth carrying the density of something that had been in THE Strand of Broken Scales long enough to become dangerous to most things that shared the space with it.
It dropped with the committed velocity of something that was excited for meat!
OOOH!
Noah angled his body and shot forward, arcs of Osmontian Absolute Infinity surging around him.
BOOM!
The impact was total. His frame burning with concentrated Infinity hit the baboon’s mass at speed and the creature’s musculature and bone structure...exploded!
The Prime Cause of Harvest released its golden tendrils immediately, reaching into every component of the creature’s existence before any of it could disperse, converting the full content of what the baboon had been into loot that flowed into his foundations.
He had not slowed down.
They continued through the air above the canopy and the beasts continued to present themselves over time.
A massive armored tortoise with a shell carrying Galdr Source energy through its plates hung from the underside of an enormous branch, dropping toward them when they came within range.
He hit it with a compressed Osmontian Absolute Infinity discharge that found the gap between plates, the Harvest tentacles following immediately.
A cluster of three serpentine creatures with wings and Galdr Source eyes dove at them from a higher branch, and he addressed all three in the same motion, the Bellum Cause and the Harvest Cause running in compound expression as the Prime Cause of Tyranny froze them for the fraction of a second the motion required.
Eon moved through her own encounters a few meters to his left.
She was faster than she had been on the dark beach where they arrived. Considerably faster!
The Galdr Source burning through her foundations carried the power of everything the past several hours had added to it, and she dispatched the beasts she encountered in a few seconds each, precise and deliberate and far more composed than the circumstances strictly required.
A few seconds compared to his instantaneous resolutions.
They flew on until...
"Oh?"
The geography had been changing for the past several minutes in ways he was only now recognizing as deliberate rather than natural.
The trees of THE Strand of Broken Scales grew in various formations, some dense, some sparse, their ancient root systems competing for the same deep substrate. But the trees here were different.
Infinity said they were called...
Lotusvara Trees.
Their trunks rose in the shape of lotus petals layered vertically, each layer wider than the one above it, the wood carrying a luminescence that pulsed in the same rhythm as the Illumination Flowers above, the bioluminescence running through the bark in patterns.
They formed concentric rings around a central point, each ring a different height, the arrangement too precise to be coincidental.
In the far distance at the formation’s center, the massive logs of the outer Lotusvara Trees had been felled from their foundations.
They had been arranged.
The logs formed a wall that stretched across the visible range of his perception, each log enormous, their cut surfaces facing outward in a continuous barrier that pulsed with an autnority and aura he placed immediately.
Superbius. Ira!
The Existential Radiation of both Egos pressing outward from the wall in visible waves, the pride of one and the war-nature of the other combined into the atmospheric condition of a Gilded Ones settlement!
Around the wall’s exterior, the bloody remnants of Source Beasts were distributed across the ground and the surrounding Lotusvara Tree bases, some recent, some older.
Several Galdr Source creatures prowled the perimeter with the habitual circling of things that sensed something they wanted and couldn’t reach.
Noah’s eyes went sharp.
A Gilded Ones settlement. In THE Strand of Broken Scales!
This changed the topology of the situation in several directions simultaneously.
He looked at the wall and at the Superbius and Ira aura pressing outward from it and at the prowling Source Beasts unable to breach what the settlement had established, and he thought about what the Gilded Ones inside knew of this place among other things.
Eon came to float beside him and followed his gaze as her eyes shone brightly!