Chapter 5124: Ego! II

Noah had never considered himself closed minded.

He looked at things dynamically, weighed them against the shifting circumstances that defined every encounter across his existence. If someone asked him whether a fucking stupid and vile being could be redeemed, he wouldn’t answer with absolutes. He would say it depends. Redemption was possible, always possible, but in the end he would be the one who decided whether the effort was worth the cost, and what exactly that being had done before reaching for the chance.

As of now, Emotive’s redemption wasn’t set.

He could still go either way on this disgusting being.

He floated forward across the shattered Shelter of THE Loom, his movement slow and unhurried, as if the terrifying information she carried meant nothing to him at all. The multicolored seas churned beneath his feet without daring to touch him. His fair skin held its golden illumination steady, his eyes reflecting cold consideration as he closed the distance between them.

THE Living Emotive’s chest began to rise and fall faster as he approached.

Her eyes shone brilliantly, holding too many colors at once, every shade pressed against the others without harmony. Chaos swirled tighter around her form the closer he came. Her hair cycled through golds and silvers and deep violets, each transition matching some internal current she couldn’t suppress no matter how much logic she had pulled into her words.

"You’re so close now..."

Her voice came softer, less performed than before.

"I feel oppression and euphoria at the same time! Anh...it’s not supposed to work like that, you know? Most beings inspire one or the other. Fear or comfort. Dread or peace. But you...oh, you give me both at once and they’re not even fighting each other. They just exist together inside me like they were always meant to!"

She breathed in deeply as he stopped within arm’s reach.

"I really would end my existence if you commanded it. I wasn’t lying about that, I promise! But...sheesh, I really really would prefer if you gave me a chance instead. My emotions love to live too. They love to thrive! They love to feel things and burn through me and become something new tomorrow that they weren’t yesterday."

Her knees buckled.

She knelt before him without ceremony, her hands reaching forward to grasp his feet with reverence. Her fingers trembled against the illuminated skin, holding on as if releasing him would mean losing something essential.

"Do you feel that emotion?"

Her voice came out hushed and ragged.

"That discrepancy of power between us? Not even a discrepancy of power...a discrepancy of position! You stand somewhere I cannot reach no matter how much I claim or consume, and my entire existence is screaming at me to acknowledge it. To honor it. To kneel here and beg for the privilege of being looked at!"

Her hair settled into deep gold as she pressed her body toward his feet.

"This is the kind of emotion I’ve been studying! This exact kind! Because the most powerful beings cultivate this in others, and they cultivate other emotions in themselves, and I figured out why!"

She looked up at him with eyes that burned brighter.

"The most powerful Primordial Architects have been modified. Engineered. Reworked at the level of their existential makeup by THE Gilded Ones to amplify specific Egos of Existence. The Ego of Pride. The Ego of Passion. The Ego of Wrath. These emotions are inflated to such tremendous proportions inside them that they define their Civilizations and their power to a degree that lets them tap into vast reserves of Infinity without ever worrying about THE Gamaidian, the Madness of Infinity!"

Her fingers tightened against his feet.

"They are connected to those great beings through this engineering. The power they can tap into is grand! Grander than anything Bounded should reach for, grander than what their classification should permit. And then..."

Her smile stretched wider, the manic edge bleeding back through.

"And then there is you. You, you, you! What could you have possibly been engineered with that Infinity is doing nothing to you?"

...!

She pressed her cheek against his foot and laughed softly.

"They call you the Infinity-bearer. That’s what’s whispered in the high places of THE Wyld now. The Infinity-bearer, the one who shouldn’t exist by every law their engineering follows. They want to study you so badly, oh so badly! They haven’t brought you to the attention of THE Gilded Ones yet because they want their own glimpse first, but they just might depending on how this Civilizational Holy War goes."

Her hair flickered through reds and blacks.

"They seek to understand what Ego you exemplify so they can ask the favor of THE Gilded Ones to engineer them that way too! THE Deliverance is testing the waters with this Holy War. Others of his stature, others even more powerful, are watching from positions you can’t see yet to see how it unfolds. Everybody wants a piece of you. Everybody!"

Before she could finish her next breath, Noah’s hand moved.

His fingers clasped around her neck and lifted her from her kneeling position, raising her until her bare feet dangled above the shattered Shelter. His grip was firm enough to hold her completely, gentle enough that her existence wasn’t yet collapsing under his fingers.

Joy bloomed across her features.

Her eyes widened with shock and awe as she felt the strength of that single hand. Through the contact of his fingers against her throat, fragments of his power leaked into her perception, glimpses of something her senses couldn’t fully process.

"Holy shit, is this..."

Her voice came out strangled and reverent.

"Is this a glimpse of your power? You feel...boundless! You feel...!"

Noah’s hand became firmer.

Her words choked off into something between a gasp and a laugh. He held her there suspended above the multicolored seas, and he turned his head slowly to look out across the endless Wastes around them, his eyes sweeping the horizon as if she weighed nothing at all.

When he finally spoke, his voice carried calm tyranny.

"Character... matters."

His gaze didn’t return to her.

"One can make mistakes. Existence is long enough that mistakes are inevitable, and I’m not so naive that I expect anyone to walk through eons without leaving wreckage behind them. But mistakes need correction. They need acknowledgment from something deeper than convenience, something that doesn’t appear only when usefulness becomes the currency."

His fingers tightened a fraction more.

"Even if I personally don’t care about what you’ve done, I will have you grovel before someone like Malphas, Tor, and Khor. The being whose face you used your feet to step on, whose countless Inevitabilities were imprisoned. If they tell me to kill you, regardless of whatever benefits you bring me, regardless of how much information you carry about THE Deliverance or THE Gilded Ones or anything else, I will still collapse you where you float."

He let the words settle into the surrounding silence.

"No matter how useful someone is, no matter how sharp a tool becomes in the right hands, it needs to have character behind its edge. You will only be a tool for now. Do you understand?"

He didn’t even look at her as he spoke.

But her eyes shone with vibrant brilliance, and profound happiness moved through her features in waves. Instead of breaking into the mania and scattered words that defined her usual responses, she gathered herself with effort that visibly cost her, and what came out of her throat while his hand still choked her was perhaps the most coherent thing she had ever spoken.

"As I learn how critical ego and emotions are at the top..."

Her voice was strained but steady.

"I can feel how boundless my own potential is. Someone filled with emotions, someone who controls emotions, someone who has claimed Chaos itself...I could probably do something grand. Rival Erwin. Maybe even exceed THE Creature given enough time and the right circumstances."

Her eyes locked onto his profile.

"But to me, it isn’t power that matters most. It truly is emotion. The one who can handle Infinity better than even those engineered by THE Gilded, potentially better than THE Gilded themselves..."

Her breath hitched as his grip held her there.

"I will give everything to witness what emotion you have. What quality lives inside you that has made such a thing possible. I will give...Everything!"

...!

The emotion that made him immune to the madness of Infinity.

Noah turned the question over in his own mind without letting his expression shift. Quintessence? Tyranny? Something else buried so deep within his Cause that even he hadn’t named it yet? He thought about whether such a thing even existed within him in the way she described, or whether his immunity came from somewhere else entirely.

He shook his head once.

His fingers released her throat, and the tool he had been holding floated grandly before him with shining eyes, her body subtly trembling with an excitement she couldn’t suppress no matter how much coherence she pulled around herself.

Noah looked at her calmly.

"Give me all the information regarding those participating in the Civilizational Holy War."

...!

"Yes sir!"

She straightened in the air with the eagerness of something that had been waiting eons to be given a purpose by the right voice. Her hands lifted, her fingers began weaving patterns through the multicolored seas around them, and a singularity of emotions began to form between her palms, dense with droves of information she had gathered across THE Wyld.

Noah looked down at his own hands.

The hands that had held the tool. The hands that had held Emotive. He considered her redemption again, weighing what she had just offered against everything she had been before, and the answer remained exactly where it had been when this conversation began.

It still depended.

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