Chapter 5804: The Undersnow II

When Noah thought back across his whole existence, there had been times he could only be called a bully.

He had been terrifying with his power. Overpowered, grand, tyrannical, a being who walked into a war and ended it with a single drop of his blood or mana while armies wept at the edge of his shadow. He did not regret it. It had been who he was, and what the moment needed.

But the higher he climbed, the more complicated existence became. The beings grew stranger. The rules grew deeper. And it grew harder and harder to simply overpower anything, even with everything that made him unique.

Harder. Not impossible.

And through all of it, in every one of those moments when he had stood over something that should have crushed him, there had been one answer to his terrible immensity. One thing underneath all the others.

His Infinity.

So.

He looked at the crow ahead, and his sight opened it!

|EMPOWERED HOLLOW NIGHT LIFEFORM.|

|VERITAS: 999 (+100). PROVENANCE: 999 (+100). POTENTIA: 999 (+100). PONDUS: 999 (+100).|

...!

Nine hundred and ninety-nine, and a hundred more on top of each line!

Noah’s eyes narrowed as he flew. The base alone matched Minerva, the very ceiling she had hit and broken herself against. And then a hundred more in everything, sitting on top of it like a borrowed coat. Where did that come from? The Basal Floor? The cold itself, feeding the things that lived in it? Or something the crow carried inside it, a stolen heart of true Immensity pushing it past a limit it could not reach alone?

He did not know. It did not matter yet. What mattered was that it was stronger than him on paper, in every line!

And yet his numbers were packed and its numbers were hollow. He had learned that much in the snow. Digits were only what existence could be bothered to count. They were never the whole of a thing.

He raised his hand.

"I AM."

HUUM!

He was.

But he was what?

With those two words he pulled every ounce of his Provenance and every scrap of his power together into a single point, and it came out of him as an aurora of dreams. Blue and gold, incandescent, drawn out long and thin and sharp into the shape of a blade, and it shot across the frozen sky toward the crow with a sound like the largest bell in existence being struck once and cut off!

It hit the crow full on!

The crow lowered its head and met it with its beak.

BOOM!

The blade of dreams struck the cracked tower of rime and broke apart against it, scattering into drifting golden sparks. At most, the crow’s head rocked back a fraction, and a thin line of frost cracked along the edge of its beak. That was all.

Little damage. Almost none!

But...

"THE MORTAL COIL."

HUUM!

Golden clouds descended. They came down out of the frozen dark all around the crow, settling over the snow and the floating islands and the torn Dimensions, soft and bright and silent, and wherever they touched, borrowed things began, quietly, to be disallowed. The crow’s hundred extra points flickered. The cold in its feathers wavered.

Every eye it had narrowed! A low sound rattled in its throat, the first sound it had made since it told him there were no answers. It had felt the Coil land, and it did not like it.

"I AM!"

HUUM!

A second aurora of dreams tore out of him, brighter, sharper, a blade of blue-gold light shearing through the air. It hit the crow across the breast, and this time something gave. Black-ice feathers sheared away in a spray, a handful of them, spinning off into the dark as glittering shards!

Out of nowhere, Ling appeared beside the crow’s head.

She had not flown there. She was simply there, one leg already rising, and it came down in a single swing. Her thigh pulsed with a physicality so terrifying that the air around it bent. It hit the crow in the side of the skul, and the whole mountain-range bulk of it was knocked sideways off its island, sent hurtling through the frozen sky straight at Noah!

KAAAA!

The crow screamed as it tumbled, and the storm of its cold howled after it, black feathers and blue-white frost streaming off it like smoke off a comet.

He bellowed it again.

"I AM!"

Another blade tore out of him, and another, every repetition of the words a new eruption of dreams, each one carving across the tumbling crow. His own body began to glisten. Light ran along his crystalline skin in bright veins, blue and gold, and he rushed forward to meet the crow in the air.

His hand met its beak as...

The impact broke him in half!

Half his body simply went, shattered from the shoulder down to the hip in an explosion of crystal and light, and before he could even feel it, the crow’s wing swept around. The rime-banners along its edge had gone sharp as a blade of frost, and they took his other half clean off.

He Root and Existence pulsed as it was overwhelmed and decimated as effectively...

He died!

Ling stopped in the air, one leg still half-raised. Her fierce face went blank with shock, and for one heartbeat she simply hung there in the frozen dark, staring at the empty place where he had been.

...!

A moment later, golden clouds began to gather.

They drew together out of the frozen dark where he had been, bright and slow, and in the heart of them, something took shape again. Then the clouds opened, and Noah came out of them.

|Your existence has ended.|

|Your Dream has not.|

|Your Dream is Infinite. Even death will not stop it.|

He came out cold. He came out dominant!

There was no armament on him. No garment of Provenance, no crystal plate, nothing at all. Only his skin, smooth and shining and unbroken, and the dense packed muscle of a body that had been pressed and refined by the Lived Hour a second at a time into something harder than anything the Basal Floor had ever seen.

He hung in the frozen air entirely naked, a long and heavy thing between his legs, swinging freely as he turned, utterly unconcerned with it. Golden-blue light rolled off his shoulders. His eyes were very calm.

He looked at the crow, and the crow, for the first time, looked back at him warily!

"I am Human," Noah said.

The clouds around him began to churn.

"I am THE Protagonist."

The churning gathered, tightened, took shape.

"I am Quintessential."

All around him, the clouds of dream broke apart into Dimensions!

Small ones at first, each one no larger than a fisst, unstable and flickering, blue-gold bubbles of existence that trembled and pulsed as though they could barely hold themselves together. Thousands of them, blooming out of the clouds in every direction. Then tens of thousands. Then hundreds of thousands, still more of them coming, filling the frozen sky around him until he hung in the heart of a vast, trembling clusters of his own unstable dreams!

One after another, they began to surge toward the crow.

"My dream is fucking infinite," Noah said. "What about yours?!"

BOOM!

He surged forward to meet it!

And as he went, his Dream began, subtly, to change. Infinity threaded into it, more and more, until the two could not be told apart. His Root began to spin inside him, faster and faster, turning like an engine that had just been given all the fuel it had ever wanted. And both of his Inscriptions burned!