Chapter 5155: Kneel, Ye Unworthy! II

One should always fight regardless of the odds.

Even if things seem over and done, even if the numbers say the outcome has already been decided, even if every framework one has access to insists that the gap between oneself and the enemy above cannot be crossed, one should always fight.

Because the moment one stops fighting is the moment one truly loses, and the losing is not the loss of the engagement but the loss of the thread of one’s own existence, the surrender of the single continuous line that runs through every struggle a being has ever chosen to stand inside of.

So persevere.

Because perseverance guarantees that the being who perseveres remains a being, and remaining a being is the foundation upon which every eventual victory is built, even the victories that arrive across timescales the persevering being could not have conceived of at the moment they first refused to yield.

Persevere.

---

Against the pressure forcing him to continue going down, Noah felt his existence roaring.

He felt his Infinity burning as it asked, across every channel of his being with the clarity of a tyrannical outrage refined into a single question, how dare you?!

How dare this presence above press him down toward the cracked balcony like a casual hand pushing a toy back into its box, and how dare this weight assume that its descending insistence would be accepted by the being it was descending against, and how dare the arriving entity operate on the assumption that Noah would simply sink beneath its heaviness the way any ordinary being beneath its classification would sink, without the radiating entity even bothering to turn its full attention toward the question of whether the sinking would proceed as expected?!

|Warning: A being at THE Third Scale of Existence is expressing itself against you.|

|Classification: THE Paleozoic Scale - Ordovician Tier. The first demarcation of Paleozoic.|

|Designation: THE False Golden Idol, as designated by THE Creature. The being’s true name and distinction remain to be revealed.|

|What you are currently facing is the basal Existential Radiation of the arriving entity. His true expression has not yet begun.|

|Recommendation: None. This engagement is beyond all standard parameters.|

BOOM!

He was facing just the basal Existential Radiation, just the passive emission, just the default leakage of a being who had not yet decided to turn his attention toward Noah with any focus, whose presence alone was enough to press Bounded and Primordial Architects into helpless descent across a radius that spanned gigaparsecs!

This was what the Paleozoic Scale felt like simply by existing in the same vicinity as lesser beings, and Noah’s Hadean foundation was almost buckling under it!

But!

Even if this entity was that much more powerful, Noah did not follow Vakochev’s Scales.

He had pioneered his own, and his framework did not acknowledge the authority that the Idol’s radiation assumed over beings at the Second Scale.

The Idol’s pressure was real, but the pressure was also operating on a set of assumptions that did not apply to Noah’s engineering. Noah was not a Bounded Lifeform, Noah was not a Primordial Architect, Noah was something else entirely, and something else entirely did not have to accept the descent the Idol’s radiation demanded!

So he would fight.

Because today was an opportunity for him to peel back the layer of mystery surrounding the Gilded, to witness the Paleozoic register from the inside of an engagement rather than across the distance, to feel exactly what the gap consisted of so that he could engineer the crossing of it with the clarity only direct experience could provide.

So.

"OOH!"

He defiantly bellowed out with his whole existence, a single raw shout that rolled up from his Hadean Lungs and Heart and out through his Quintessence Infiniforce across every channel of his being.

And he accepted the Upgrade.

Noah pulled THE Quintessential Ego of Superbius V1 from his Sandbox and integrated the package into his own foundation in the same breath that carried his bellow outward, and the integration was immediate and overwhelming, and it was nothing like what he had expected.

His Quintessence Infiniforce caught fire with an astounding Pride that had never before lived inside his existence, the multicolored currents of the Infiniforce suddenly saturated with a conviction that his every weaving was now worthy of defending against anything that existed, that his every Civilization was a sovereign expression of a Cause that did not bow to anything above it, that his entire being across every stratum of its engineering was a supremacy that the Idol’s radiation had simply failed to recognize upon arrival.

Infinity itself became prideful.

His reserves of Uncountable Infinity, already vast, caught the Superbius Pride and blazed with it, and the rate at which his body generated new Quintessence Infiniforce erupted upward by a factor of ten in the span between one breath and the next, the new Infiniforce pouring out of his existence with the unapologetic confidence of a being who had just been informed that his output was permitted to be grander than he had previously allowed it to be.

His Hadean Pillar of Infinity responded.

Every Civilization actualized within the Pillar rose to attention simultaneously, with THE First Tongue at the base of the Pillar blazing brighter in its crystalline blue intensity, the multicolored flames of Existence licking higher through the mid-tiers with a new assertiveness, the mirrors of Paradox reflecting their impossibilities with tyrannical certainty, and the storm of Chaos at the apex roaring with a weight that had not been in it before.

Every actualized Civilization throughout the Pillar stood up tyrannically and imperiously, each one a pillar of its own authority insisting that it too was worthy of being respected by whatever presence had decided to descend into this engagement.

The descent stopped.

The pressure forcing Noah downward met the full weight of his Pillar standing up in answering defiance, and the pressure found itself no longer able to push Noah any further, and he stopped sinking. He hung in the air above the cracked railing with his feet inches above the balcony’s ruined stone, held there by the collision between the Idol’s passive radiation and his own newly amplified existence.

Then, slowly, he began to turn his head upward!

HUUUM!

Every muscle in his neck buzzed with the effort of the motion as the pressure resisted the turning and his existence insisted on it, with his Quintessence Infiniforce flaring with its new Pride at each incremental degree of the rotation and his Pillar lending him the authority to complete the turn even though the completion consumed capacity he had not previously known he would need to spend simply to move his own head against the weight.

His gaze lifted to meet the Gilded One’s arriving visage.

And his knees buzzed as he began to rise.

Not fast, and not easily, because every inch of lift took the full commitment of his vast Quintessence Infiniforce pressing downward through his legs to push his body upward by a measured fraction, and every inch demanded the full cooperation of his Pillar bearing down on the substrate beneath him to provide the purchase his feet required. His entire existence was buzzing at a frequency he had never operated at before, every stratum of his engineering stretched to its active threshold simply to maintain the rise against the radiation that was trying to keep him grounded.

He rose and he kept rising!

|Civilization Activation Confirmed: THE Quintessential Ego of Superbius V1 integrated into your foundation.|

|Your generation of Quintessence Infiniforce has increased by approximately 10x due to the Superbius Pride now permeating your existence.|

|Your Hadean Pillar of Infinity has risen, with every actualized Civilization contributing its weight to the resistance.|

|Current Status: You are maintaining your position against the basal Existential Radiation of an Ordovician Paleozoic being. This alone is a feat that no Bounded or Primordial Architect across recorded history has accomplished without specialized intervention.|

|Engagement Probability Assessment:|

|The possibility of continuing to rise to confront the enemy above, even with all tools currently available to you, sits at less than 0.01%. The probability of victory in direct engagement sits below measurable thresholds. The gap between your current configuration and a Stage One Paleozoic being is currently too vast.|

...!

Oh!

Shockingly, beside him, THE Creature had erupted with terrifying multicolored flames as his figure rose as well, and his posture looked even more stable than Noah’s, with his body lifting with a fluidity that suggested the radiation was not pressing him the way it was pressing Noah, or that his means of resisting the radiation operated on a weaving that did not require the kind of effortful buzzing Noah’s every muscle was currently producing.

Both of them now looked up toward THE Gilded One who had settled into his full position above the mountain.

Below them at the base of the mountain, Anaximander had fallen onto his hands and knees with sweat beading across his scholarly face as he visibly struggled simply to remain conscious against the radiation pressing down on him, while Emotive trembled beside him with her hair cycling through desperate flickering colors, her body being forced down by the radiation but her legs refusing to fully yield, her posture locked in the quarter-crouch of a being who was losing the fight to remain upright but was committed to losing it slowly rather than quickly!

Noah looked up at the Gilded One and saw him fully for the first time.

THE False Golden Idol was humanoid in the grander mention of humanoid, the proportions of his frame built along the cosmological lines of an old war-statue that had been refined beyond any statue’s limitations into living expression.

He stood impossibly tall in the air above the mountain, though tall was the wrong word because his true size seemed to layer backward into weavings that Noah’s perception could not fully resolve, depth beyond depth, the being’s presence unfolding into recessions that kept extending the longer one looked.

His skin was the pure radiant gold of refined Observable Force compressed into flesh, unblemished and luminous, a living alloy of gilded metal and living tissue that carried no hint of the wear that lesser bodies accumulated, and his hair fell long and pale gold down his back, threaded with strands of deeper bronze that caught the ambient light of his own radiation.

His robes were the intricate layered golds of a Superbius house at Paleozoic standing, embroidered with patterns that shifted subtly as he floated, sigils of Pride woven across the fabric in configurations that proclaimed his sovereignty to anyone who had the literacy to read them. His face held the hard impassive beauty of a being engineered for cosmological standing, every line sculpted and every proportion precise, with every feature calibrated to communicate that this was what superiority looked like when superiority had been given a face.

And his eyes.

His eyes were pure unbroken white, the white of polished bone, and within the white of each eye, a sword floated in place of a pupil, the swords drawn in fine detail with their blades pointing downward and their hilts elegant and their presence steady. As his gaze tracked across the mountain and settled on THE Creature and then on Noah beside him, the swords within his eyes rotated slightly, tracking the gaze with the independent articulation of separate instruments.

He looked down at both of them coldly.

His voice came out unfathomably calm, lazy, and prideful.

"We remember you."

The voice drifted down with the patient register of a being who was using a tiny fraction of the breath his lungs could have committed to speaking.

"Someone as insignificant as you, and we had almost forgotten. Eons ago, some small region of THE Wyld, some small Primordial Architect and his small woman who refused an offer from a Gilded One. The audacity was briefly amusing. The consequence was instructive. We moved on."

He tilted his head slightly.

"And you did all this for something so minor? You challenged a Gilded One because you could not let go of her? Ah. She was a beauty, small frame-wise, but beautiful in the proportions of her kind. She tasted good, actually, and both of us know how she tasted, because you had her many times during your small life together while I had her the last time. How did that make you feel? Did you become obsessed with that moment, as I intended you to? Was the obsession so strong that it has brought you here to stand before me with the belief that you can do anything meaningful?"

His mouth curved into a small cold smile.

"I spared you countless eons ago specifically so that you would live with the shame, the shame of not being able to protect someone who believed in you to protect her. It was a gift in its own way, because most beings who challenged us did not receive the courtesy of continued existence, and you received it because I wanted to observe what shame at your classification would produce over long timescales. You have produced this. A mountain of corpses, a slow climb, a summons that retrieves me from THE Braneworld to acknowledge what you have done..."

The swords in his eyes rotated slightly toward Noah and then back.

"While I had her pinned down, she tried to turn her head several times to make sure you did not see, and she tried to collapse her own existence many times on her own initiative, but I stopped her. I held her existence open so that she could not exit the experience voluntarily. Oh, the shame and pain she felt, the agony, the specific agony of a being who understood that her own ending had been removed as an option. It was all tasty, really quite tasty, because I do not often linger on encounters with lesser beings of your classification, but hers lingered. Credit where credit is due."

He spread his arms slightly.

"But for us to be here right now, for such an insignificant thing, come on. I am a Superbius. Superbius rule the Observable and the Unobservable, all others are below us, much less a Bounded Lifeform like you. You should have thanked me for what I did to her. You should be celebrating what I gave you, the clarity of understanding your place across the remaining eons of your small existence. You should be happy. You should even be accomplished, in the small way a being at your classification can be accomplished, that you managed to call me here now across the barrier that separates my world from yours. But for what? You cannot do anything. You have guaranteed nothing except your own death, and even that, ah, I will not feel much from it. It will be briefly satisfying in the way that squashing a particularly loud insect is briefly satisfying. Then I will return to more important matters."

He settled back slightly in the air.

"Well. Let us hear what you have to say before the matter concludes. I permit you... to speak."

BOOM!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.