Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5418: Tides of Quintessential Change! I

THE Creature.

What a marvelous thing this existence was. Noah had heard the legends first, the way most beings encountered THE Creature, as a story too large to be a person. Then he had met him, across THE Earliest Folds and the long stretch of struggle after, and somewhere in there he had let himself believe he had caught up. That he had matched THE Creature, maybe even passed him!

But this guy.

Noah looked up at the titanic figure shrouded in billowing obsidian flame and shook his head, and felt something he did not feel often anymore. A competitive spirit. A real one. Because from THE Creature he sensed, unmistakably, an Egoic Intent. Egoic!

Here was THE Creature carrying one too, having taken the impossible and made it ordinary, the way he always seemed to. Of looking at a wall everyone agreed could not be climbed and being, quietly, already on the other side of it.

So Noah wanted to see. He wanted to measure himself against the one being who might actually give him a measurement worth having!

He went forward.

He raised his hand as if going for the old greeting, the dap they had traded across the Folds and after! But as he raised it, he did something grand!

He let his Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian spill freely out of his body.

WAA!

His entire body lit with a terrifying cerulean brilliance! Blue lava poured off him in gushing waves, molten authority welling up through his skin and melting the existence around him where it touched, and above him the hidden Estuary Eye roared, the lemniscate pupil convulsing as it began to bleed in the surrounding existence three times as fast, drinking the dense Sanctum down in a flood as its master finally stopped holding himself small. Noah stood with his arm raised like a titan dragged up out of some buried age, and the Intent rolling off him was not a Primordial Intent, was grander than a Primordial Intent, an identity made into a force that pressed on everything for gigaparsecs!

HUUUM!

Behind him, the Dora Shath’yar threw their hands up in shock. Even Astrid. Eir flailed in something closer to glee, her own bronze body buzzing with answering power, grinning like a being who had just realized the day was going to be far better than promised.

"Oh! Oh! The fuck is that!" Eir bellowed out!

THE Creature’s gaze held a moment of genuine surprise.

For an instant, even he seemed not to quite believe it! And then the surprise burned off, and he answered.

Obsidian lava-like flames spilled out from him without cease, and around his titanic frame an illusion bloomed, a massive sword stretching from below to far above, the manifestation of a being who had made himself into a single edge. He raised his own hand for the dap, and the two hands went forward to meet.

BOOM!

Before the hands ever touched, it was as though invisible force fields covered the surfaces of their skin. The glimmers of their two authorities met in the gap between their palms and shattered the existence caught there outright, the space simply ceasing where the cerulean met the obsidian.

HUUUM!

Cracks tore out from between their hands and raced across the domain, splitting through the floating landmasses and the obsidian rivers, and the already chaotic and deadly region of THE Effluvium Sanctum grew heavier still, the ambient lethal pressure doubling as two beings who should not have been possible refused to give each other an inch.

They looked at one another, neither yielding, two raised hands held apart by the war of what they were!

"Across all of existence," Noah said, "I am unfathomably Quintessential. I am unapologetically Osmontian. I AM!"

HUUM!

THE Creature’s existence flared further, the billowing flames roaring up around him, and he answered, grand and tyrannical, the voice of a being who had burned away everything that was not one single concept!

"Across all of Existence," THE Creature said, "is my Existence. Existence. Existence. EXISTENCE. I. AM!"

BOOM!

Their hands began to close the final distance, and behind them the Dora Shath’yar stopped smiling.

Astonishment took their faces, and they raised their own hands, and their Intents erupted out of them, and every single one of the nine blazed with an Olympian Intent, the fourth rarity, reality reorganizing around each of them as law. Nine Mesozoic Scale beings, Daughters raised personally by THE Queen Regnant, and they had to release their full Intents at once simply to keep from being pushed back by the ambient overflow of two beings who had not yet even forged their Pantheons!

Oh. Oh!

And as their hands neared contact, Noah felt what came off THE Creature, and it was unlike anything.

It was pure Existence. Not a power that touched existence, not an authority laid over it. Existence itself, the thing as a being, and Noah felt all of the surrounding existence for gigaparsecs across the Sanctum and across THE Source Lands beyond it crushing down on him at once, as though THE Creature had simply asked reality to lean on him and reality, recognizing one of its own, had agreed.

|The Intent you are facing is THE Egoic Intent of Existence. It is a True Lifeform Intent, built not on what THE Creature has done but on what he fundamentally is. He has not formed an Intent of Existence. He has become Existence and made his identity synonymous with it, so completely that there is no remaining distinction between the being and the concept. Within his reach, all of existence answers him as itself, because he is not commanding existence. He is existence, addressing the rest of itself. To stand against it is to ask the whole of being to disregard one of its own foundational truths. Nothing has a true threshold to truly go against it. You can, because your own Intent stands at the same threshold, and not one rung lower.|

Noah’s eyes were bright as he read it.

Existence truly was grand, he reflected, as a path and as an identity both. To take the bare fact of being and make it the whole of yourself, to become the thing that everything else is, was an unquestionable foundation. There was no arguing with a being who was existence. You could not deny him without denying yourself. He understood, looking at THE Creature, exactly why it worked, and exactly how rare a thing it was to walk a single concept that completely.

But.

"Existence is grand," Noah said, and the cerulean roared higher around him. "It’s unquestionable. A being can build himself on it and never be argued out of existing." His eyes burned. "But my identity is my Intent. There’s no sliver of distinction in me to exploit, no gap between the concept and the man, the same as there’s none in you. The difference is only the concept. You are Existence. And I am not a concept at all. There is only Osmont. True, and unflinching, and Quintessential. I am not a thing that exists. I am the specific thing that I am, and that is grander to ME than all of existence, because it is mine!"

BOOM!

He infused his Osmontian Source Infinity into his Intent.

The fused cerulean authority poured up through the Egoic Intent, the two great authorities made one flooding into the declaration of who he was, and the gap between his hand and THE Creature’s finally closed. Their palms met in the old interlocking dap, and Noah’s blue washed over his own hand and across part of THE Creature, the cerulean spreading where they touched.

And then they pulled into the hug.

It was casual, in the end.The dap rolled into the one-armed back-patting embrace, a bro hug, two monsters who had just shattered gigaparsecs of existence between their palms greeting each other. And in that contact, Noah’s blue seemed, for a moment, to exceed THE Creature’s!

Because for all his Egoic Intent, for all that he had become Existence itself, THE Creature had not fused Infinity with the Primordial Source, and Noah had. That was the one ledge Noah still held alone.

But even as he held THE Creature, even with that edge, Noah’s existence buzzed hard, because embracing the thing felt like trying to contain something uncontainable, like wrapping his arms around a sea and telling it to be still. THE Creature was terrifying. Genuinely, fundamentally terrifying, in a way that the contact only made clearer!

Behind Noah, the Dora Shath’yar stood with their Olympian Intents still blazing, and apart from Eir, who was bouncing on her heels and already trying to figure out how to make one of them fight her, almost every one of them had gone grim.

Behind THE Creature, Calypso loomed in her massive beast form, and she wore the same grim look, her cold eyes moving between the two embracing monsters.

And across both groups, the same question turned, unspoken and uneasy.

Who the hell were these two?