Chapter 5156: For Me, For Her I

The words were not even directed at him, but Noah felt a profound sense of revulsion rise through his existence as he listened to this being speak.

Every word the Idol had said was horrid, and every word the Idol had said had been said with the casual pleasure of a being who took genuine satisfaction from remembering the suffering he had caused, a being who drew a small refined joy from cataloguing the specific horrors of what he had done to a woman who had wanted to escape him so badly that she had tried to collapse her own existence multiple times to prevent the continuation of the encounter.

And he truly, existentially believed everything he said.

The belief was the worst part of all of it, because the Idol was not performing cruelty and he was not posturing for an audience, he was describing his reality with the clarity of a being who genuinely considered himself so far above the Primordial Architects beneath him that what he had done to THE Soul was not a cruelty requiring justification but a casual exercise of authority that no one in the world should ever have expected him to refrain from.

Noah felt rage rising within him from these words alone, and he could imagine how THE Creature felt, and he could feel it because shockingly, at this moment, THE Creature actually broke whatever shackles still kept Noah anchored to his position and began to float freely upward into the air above the mountain, his multicolored flames blazing higher around him as he rose.

The image was glorious against the entirely gold skies and the visage of a Gilded One, a single small figure wreathed in multicolored flames lifting upward into a domain that had been claimed by a being orders of magnitude above him, the gold of the sky pressing in from every direction, the figure refusing to be pressed back down, rising into the Idol’s painted dominion as if the painting had not been noticed or, more accurately, as if the painting had been noticed and found insufficient reason to stop.

THE Creature’s voice came out calm, but within the calm anyone listening could feel the blinding rage that had been refined across eons.

"Yes. I did not have the power to protect her back then."

His flames flickered steadily.

"I failed her. I failed her then, and I have carried the failing across every moment of my climbing since. But I will not fail her now. Bounded Lifeforms, Gilded Lifeforms, Primeval Lifeforms, there are always those considered higher than others across the arrangements of existence, and the higher ones have always operated on the assumption that the lower ones should accept the arrangement with the gratitude due to their betters."

"I have never accepted the arrangement, I have never been grateful, I have only been climbing, and I have only been climbing so that I could stand where I currently stand and make a single small statement that I believe existence has been needing to hear for a very long time."

His flames steadied into their obsidian undertone.

"I want to show that false idols can very much bleed."

He lifted his gaze to the Idol directly.

"Gerousia Aurelius Maximus of the Superbius House of the Crimson Chalice, Third Seat of the Upper Sanctum, Voice of the Radiant Quorum, Keeper of the Chalice that Does Not Empty."

He paused.

"Are you ready to repent?"

As he spoke, THE Creature raised his hand.

His flames surged upward along his arm in braided currents, the multicolored golden fires along his body gathering and flowing into his raised palm, pulled together into a condensing mass that began to shape itself into something. His Civilization of Existence, one of the Four Aspects of THE Oldest Paradox, flowed up alongside the flames and braided with them, contributing the crystalline weight of his most fundamental Cause to the forming shape.

A sword took form.

It was incandescent and crystalline, multicolored across its length with the full spectrum of THE Creature’s refined flames running through the blade like living layers of stained glass fused into a single cutting edge, and it settled into his grip with the quiet weight of a weapon that had been waiting within him since long before this afternoon.

Noah gazed at all of this unfold with an attention that refused to blink, because even he had to ask himself the question.

The entity above felt utterly insurmountable, and the gap between a Second Scale being and a Paleozoic being, even on THE Creature’s unconventional foundation, was so vast that the word gap was the wrong word, because a gap implied a space that could be crossed with sufficient effort, and what sat between THE Creature and Gerousia Aurelius Maximus was not a gap but a category difference that no amount of effort alone should have been able to bridge.

Just how could THE Creature do anything against them?

The Gilded One smiled lightly.

"How does an ant like you come to know my name?"

His voice carried the amused condescension.

THE Creature’s reply came brutal and immediate.

"The names of excrements are easy to find. One simply looks at the bottom of a chamber pot long enough, and the labels reveal themselves. Yours have been particularly easy to read, because your house leaves trails of shit wherever it drags itself."

...!

The swords in the Gilded One’s eyes snapped into tight vertical alignment, and his expression shifted into something cold.

"Ye vile creature."

His voice dropped lower.

"It seems I have given you too much freedom. You can stop speaking and moving now-"

As THE Gilded One was saying this, Noah opened his eyes wide.

He had been paying close attention to THE Creature to see what this being could possibly do against something of this magnitude, and what he felt next froze his every thought in place, because all the surrounding Infinity began to seethe excitedly!

Infinity churned across the mountain and the sky and the entire upper reach of THE Wyld, every current of it responding to something that had just begun to bloom within THE Creature’s body, something Noah did not recognize, something that made Infinity itself react!

In the next instant, as if in slow motion, THE Creature disappeared.

Noah could not follow the motion, because even with his Hadean Mind of Infinite Calculation stretching the instant into extended subjective time, the motion was too quick.

One moment THE Creature was lifting his sword, and the next moment THE Creature was in front of Gerousia Aurelius Maximus, his body floating at the Gilded One’s own altitude, the distance between them compressed to within the arm’s reach of THE Creature’s raised blade.

THE Creature’s multicolored flaming body looked unfathomably calm and serene, because the rage that had driven him across eons of climbing had not disappeared but had simply fallen into an abyssal stillness, the stillness of a fire burning at the bottom of a well that no wind could reach!

He swung the sword, and the swing was slow in Noah’s stretched perception, almost meditative, the kind of swing a master calligrapher makes when placing a single definitive stroke on a page that has been waiting for that stroke across an entire lifetime of preparation.

Noah observed every detail.

The sword’s edge carried, at the moment of swing, an obsidian light that dispersed all Pride and Infinity near it, and the Pride and Infinity did not push away from the sword but simply stopped being within the immediate vicinity of the blade, as if the sword had been dipped in a deeper substrate that took precedence over the current weavings of pride and Infinity of THE Gilded One!

The sword met the chest of the Gilded One, and it cut.

...!

The obsidian light carried it clean through the layered embroidered golds of Gerousia Aurelius Maximus’s robes, through the luminous living alloy of his skin, through whatever substrate lay beneath his skin at the Paleozoic power, and a long gash opened across his chest from his left shoulder to his right hip!

A river of crimson-gold blood erupted from the cut and painted the golden skies of THE Wyld with a crimson spatter that hung in the air like a signature written across a claimed canvas.

...!

BOOM!

Noah saw all of this with disbelief, because what was that power, and how could THE Creature do this!?

BOOM!

After the strike, instantly, the golden sky shattered.

Multicolored flames tinged with an obsidian light covered all of THE Wyld, rolling out from THE Creature’s position in a single vast wave that overwrote the golden dominion the Gerousia had painted across the sky, and where the gold had claimed the air minutes ago, now THE Creature’s flames claimed it, tinged with the deeper obsidian of whatever substrate had just expressed itself through his sword.

When Noah could observe again, he saw Gerousia Aurelius Maximus.

The Gilded One’s face had transformed into something Noah had not expected to ever see on a Paleozoic being, because what now sat across his features was shock, incredulous wide-pupiled shock, the swords in his white eyes quivering out of their tight alignment as his lips parted slightly and his hand rose to touch the cut across his chest.

His fingers came away stained with crimson-gold blood, and he stared at the blood on his fingers for a long suspended moment before his eyes snapped back to THE Creature with an expression that carried the specific horror of a being whose assumptions had just been violated!

Noah’s gaze stayed on THE Creature.

THE Creature was transforming, and his size grew larger and larger as Noah watched, his frame expanding from the standard proportions of a Primordial Architect into something grander, something that had been waiting inside him across his eons of climbing for the exact moment to be released.

His body trembled slightly as he grew, a tremor that suggested heavy strain, but he persevered through the strain the way he had persevered through every strain across his climb.

An obsidian tail bloomed behind him, long and thick and serpentine, wreathed with the same multicolored flames now tinged obsidian, and his body became grander and more muscular as the frame of a being who had shed the limitations of his previous classification settled into its new proportions. His face and body became filled with archaic tattoos, patterns written in obsidian ink across his skin, sigils and scripts that Noah could not read but that felt older than any language currently spoken across the Observable.

An obsidian flame shaped like a crown formed above his head, burning slowly, a single solid ring of obsidian fire resting in the air above his brow.

And then the power he radiated disappeared completely.

As if he no longer existed, or as if his power level was not important to the current arrangement of reality, or as if it was now so deeply veiled that it could not be sensed by any of the frameworks Noah had access to.

Noah’s perception, which had been straining to track THE Creature’s output at the Paleozoic-equivalent intensity of the strike, now registered nothing at all, an empty space where a being should have been.

His eyes became clear for the first time, and they looked mundane, just ordinary human eyes with dark obsidian pupils that held the steady weight of a being who had shed every layer of labeling across his climb and who now stood in front of his enemy with nothing between them but the quiet gaze of someone who had arrived at the place he had spent eons traveling to.

Those eyes looked toward the Gilded One coldly.

At this time, Gerousia Aurelius Maximus moved back.

He moved back with utter shock, and his luminous body, which had been floating with the authority of a being who owned the space he occupied, actually recoiled a measurable distance through the air as his hand stayed pressed against the cut on his chest and the swords in his eyes collapsed into narrow trembling lines.

He bellowed out.

"THE Source! THE Source! How do you... have THE Primordial Source??!!"

BOOM!

...!

Noah’s entire existence buzzed!

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