Chapter 5218: Darkness! I

Existence breathes, and epochs pass, leaving Civilizations that become monuments, then crumble to memory, and are long forgotten when that breath comes again. In all these epochs, Infinity reigns supreme.

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What the fuck?!

This thought ran through Sororis Prima Prabhavati’s consciousness on continuous loop as she moved backward through the multicolored sea of the Wandering Territories with a franticness she would later refuse to admit had been franticness, because the monstrous thing that had appeared above her continued charging through everything she deployed against it even as hundreds of Gilded Ones materialized in the surrounding space.

She had thought Relictus immediately.

The thought had lasted approximately two seconds before her perceptual apparatus corrected her, because this thing carried no weavings of THE Primordial Source whatsoever. No obsidian depth beneath the surface.

No foundational substrate resonance that THE Relictus always broadcast through their presence like a geological feature announcing itself to nearby geology. What she sensed from it was Infinity.

Pure, dense, aggressive, incomprehensible Infinity.

Its Infinity felt different from any Infinity she had encountered in her eons of cultivation. Purer was the only word that arrived when she reached for vocabulary, and she did not like the word because purer implied that the Infinity she and every Gilded One she had ever known carried was a lesser version of the same substance, which was an implication she was not prepared to accept from a creature currently bleeding her crimson-gold across three light-years of Wandering Territories.

The Infinity also devoured everything surrounding it, pulling ambient Infinity inward the way a significant gravitational body pulled mass, and its power sat at a position within the Ordovician Paleozoic Scale that exceeded most Gilded Ones at that tier.

What was ridiculous, what elevated the situation from merely catastrophic to something that genuinely tested the structural limits of her composure, was how the singularities kept coming. The Beast of Infinity had begun releasing scorching projectiles from a position that should have been a fixed origin point, and yet the projectiles continued emerging endlessly from wherever he currently was, which was never the same position twice, because he moved through the engagement space with the specific disregard for fixed positioning.

The entire region had filled with projectiles that could injure Ordovician Paleozoic Scale entities, which meant that every Gilded One who had arrived to address the situation was currently moving carefully.

Which meant she was effectively alone with the pursuit.

"GET IT THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!"

She bellowed this with all the dignity she could manufacture while moving backward through light-years of multicolored sea, which was not very much dignity. The Beast of Infinity’s tail struck toward her with the patient repetition of a mechanism that did not get tired of striking, and she unleashed every Pulse she knew in sequences calibrated to build on each other’s effects and create defensive architecture that something at Ordovician Paleozoic tier should not have been able to simply consume and continue through.

He consumed them and continued through.

The only reason she remained alive was her training and her standing as a Superbius Gilded One from the Maharanis House. The Maharanis House had not produced weak progeny across its history, and whatever else was currently happening to her body and her pride, her foundations held because they had been built to hold under precisely the category of pressure that genuinely threatened them rather than the category of pressure that merely felt threatening.

She was royalty.

BOOM!

The Beast of Infinity charged apart another hundred unleashed Pulses, his multicolored scales absorbing the impacts with the disinterest of a surface that had been engineered against exactly this category of input, and he closed to meters away from her with the unstoppable momentum of a thing that had decided on its destination and found the intervening space mostly irrelevant.

"Hmph."

She did not deploy another Pulse as she had finally established synonymous communication.

She had been in communication with the other Sororis Primas throughout the engagement, her power maintaining the link through the chaos of the surrounding combat.

BOOM!

Suddenly...

Boundless chains erupted from the surrounding space.

Not from a single origin. From every direction simultaneously, the chains materializing from the collective efforts of hundreds of Gilded Ones who had been positioning themselves throughout the engagement while the Beast of Infinity had been occupied with pursuing her.

Invisible until the moment of activation, the chains wrapped around the Beast of Infinity in overlapping configurations, each chain backed by the collective power of the Ira warriors holding its other end, the muscular discipline of hundreds of Ira Gilded Ones channeling everything they had into maintaining tension.

Behind the Ira, Superbius Gilded Ones directed the configuration with the cold precision of beings who had made similar arrangements before!

Sororis Prima Prabhavati breathed.

Actually breathed, for the first time in what felt like considerably longer than the engagement had objectively lasted.

She looked at the Beast of Infinity.

He was pulling on the chains. His scaled body strained against them, and the chains held, the collective power of hundreds of Gilded Ones proving sufficient to contain what his individual force could not simply break through.

Because they had observed him devouring Infinity, the chains had been built from their own Civilizations and their Superbius and Ira authority and their raw Observable Force rather than from ambient Infinity, removing the substrate he had been consuming from the equation entirely.

He could not break through!

She let that fact settle into her awareness.

Multiple Sororis Primas floated to her position, their expressions carrying the mixture of assessment and bewilderment that the situation warranted in equal measure.

"What is this thing?" The nearest one looked toward the chained Beast of Infinity with narrowed eyes. "Why is it targeting you specifically? It doesn’t feel like a Relictus but... what the fuck is happening down here to birth two things that can contend with Gilded Ones now?"

Prabhavati floated toward the chained Beast of Infinity with the precise cadence of a being demonstrating to everyone present, including herself, that she was not afraid of the thing that had been chasing her through light-years of multicolored sea and putting holes in her body.

She stopped several meters from him.

"Hey, beast fucker."

"What are you? Why are you screaming War, war, war like a retarded Bounded Ant?" She looked at the scales, the horns, the crown, the tail, the crystalline eyes burning with what she now recognized was not quite THE Gamaidjan’s madness but something adjacent to it!

"Huh?!"

...!

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