Chapter 5246: Survival! I

Noah waved his hand.

Multicolored Infinity bloomed outward from his palm like a fire, illuminating the immediate surroundings with the warm cycling light of his Source expression. He looked at himself in the glow of it.

His fair skin glistened in the Infinity-light, every surface of him vivid in a way that cultivation had been quietly suppressing for so long he had forgotten this was what skin looked like when nothing was filtering it. His shoulders and abdomen were pronounced, the muscular definition of his frame rendered in sharp relief by the light, and across his front and behind, broad green leaves covered what they covered with the patient indifference of an environment that did not concern itself with modesty but had provided the minimum available.

He looked like something carved from a grand idea about what a man should look like.

He turned to check on Adelheid.

"Damn."

He said it before he could arrange his face around not saying it. He fully attributed it to the place amplifying every basal emotion to its unfiltered intensity, which was a factually accurate attribution, and which also did nothing to change the fact that the damn had been entirely warranted.

Ubergulden Adelheid’s fair gold skin shone dimly in his Infinity-light with the specific luminescence of a Source expression that was warm and genuine underneath every layer of engineering she had accumulated across her eons. Her figure was pronounced in the way that this place pronounced everything it stripped back to its essentials, and the broad leaves covering her chest and waist were providing coverage in the technical sense of the word.

She had not noticed him looking.

Because she was looking at him.

Her eyes moved across his figure with the specific unhurried assessment of a being whose basal emotions were also running at full unfiltered volume, her gold eyes tracking across his shoulders and abdomen and back up again with an expression she had not yet arranged into the composed neutrality she used for most situations.

They were both acclimating!

Then Noah’s Infinity pressed against something in the dark behind them and rang out a warning, and he grabbed Adelheid without deliberating and pulled her hard to the right as her warm figure pressed against him and they hit the ground rolling.

BOOM!

The ground where they had been standing exploded upward in a shower of dark sand and jagged rock, the impact deep enough to suggest the thing that had caused it was not small. When the debris settled, the creature stood in the crater it had made.

Twice their height. Obsidian from its snout to the blunt end of its abbreviated tail, its body low and wide and built in the way that things built for pure damage tended to be built, with no wasted space between its thick haunches and its broader shoulders. The fur, if it could be called fur, was dense obsidian-dark with the texture of compressed Source material rather than ordinary animal coat, each strand carrying a faint crimson luminescence that matched the blaze of its eyes. Its claws were longer than Noah’s forearm, the ends catching the Infinity-light and holding it in the way that things built for tearing held light.

A Honey Badger!

The obsidian honey badger looked at them with the crimson eyes of something that had been hunting in THE Source Lands for longer than it was comfortable to estimate and had not done so unsuccessfully.

A Seidr Source. First Demarcation.

It felt like considerably more than First Demarcation should feel.

That was the first thing Noah registered as the honey badger charged!

WUUU!

It moved low and fast and without any of the telegraphing that combat experience produced in beings who had fought other combat-experienced beings. It had not developed fighting instincts against opponents who could read its preparation. It had developed fighting instincts against everything in THE Source Lands, which meant it assumed nothing could read its preparation and moved accordingly.

Noah pushed Adelheid left and went right and the honey badger drove between them, its momentum carrying it past their positions before it arrested with a pivot that something its size had no business executing at that speed. It turned on Adelheid.

She was already moving.

Her Seidr Source flared gold around her as she drove her hands outward in the form of an attack that would have carried Paleozoic Scale Gilded authority in Observable Existence. Here it carried her Source expression raw, unstructured, pure gold light hammering into the honey badger’s flank as it turned toward her.

The honey badger absorbed it.

Not resisted. Absorbed, its obsidian coat pulling the Source energy inward in the way that things designed by long survival in this environment pulled available energy inward, and the honey badger’s crimson eyes burned fractionally brighter after the contact than before.

It was eating her attack!

WAP!

A claw caught Adelheid across the shoulder before Noah could close the distance and she spun backward hard, hitting the jagged rock of the beach with a sound that carried impact. She was upright before he reached her, her expression carrying the specific set of a being who had just received information about the gap between expectation and reality and was processing it at speed.

It felt like something that was Ordovician and Silurian at the same time!

"Hey." Noah stepped between her and the honey badger. "Stay close, okay?"

The honey badger regarded him.

He was a Galdr Source. It was a Seidr Source. By the Demarcation logic, the fight should have been straightforward. The honey badger’s crimson eyes calculated the multicolored light of his Source expression with the unhurried attention of something that had consumed Galdr Sources before and had survived the consumption, which told him the Demarcation advantage was real but not determinative against something that had spent eons learning exactly how to neutralize it.

He reached outward through THE Infinite Tongue. He controlled Infinity nearby!

The obsidian rivers running through the beach terrain responded. He pulled from them, gathering the obsidian Infinity they carried toward his grip, the material condensing under the Tongue’s direction into a shape that was not natural to it but that the Tongue imposed with the same ease it imposed any instruction. A spear. Dense, obsidian, burning faintly with his multicolored Infinity threaded through its core, the head carrying a compressed point that the material held because he had told it to!

The honey badger charged again.

Noah sidestepped and drove the spear at its flank rather than meeting it head-on, the point finding the gap between two dense obsidian fur clusters and going through. The honey badger screamed!

It was not a sound he had expected, genuine and harsh. and pivoted with the spear still in it, swinging its mass to use the weapon as a lever.

He released the spear before it pulled him off balance.

The honey badger turned back with the spear buried in its side and its eyes blazing, and charged again, and this time Adelheid came in from its opposite side with her Source expression driving downward onto its hindquarters, pulling its attention for the half-second Noah needed.

He reformed the spear from the obsidian in the ground beneath the honey badger.

It came up through the beach from below, the point driving through the underside of the creature’s jaw and continuing upward, and the honey badger’s charge became a stumble and the stumble became stillness, the obsidian body collapsing onto the dark sand with the finality of something very large ceasing all at once.

Silence!

Then the honey badger’s body began to glow.

Not dimly. The crimson of its eyes bled outward through its obsidian coat in slow waves, the Source energy it had carried across however many eons it had spent in THE Source Lands radiating outward from the cooling body in the way that concentrated energy radiated from things that had been containing it and were no longer containing it.

Noah’s Source burned.

It was the only word for it. The hunger pulled at his attention with the specific urgency of something biological that had been told there was food nearby and had no interest in polite deferral. He had not felt this feeling since the early apocalypse years and his Source was making extremely clear it intended to be fed!

|Combat concluded. Seidr Source: Honey Badger of THE Source Lands.|

|Source consumed: Seidr Grade. Racial capability noted- Absorption Hide: passive absorption of incoming Source expressions, converting external Source energy into the creature’s own reserves. All attacks backed by Source energy feed this capability. Physical strikes and expressions not backed by Source energy bypass the absorption.|

|Your Source expression absorbed during the engagement: minor. The Absorption Hide required the creature to be struck by Source-backed attacks repeatedly to accumulate significant reserves. You adapted before critical depletion.|

|Satiety recovery available: consuming this Source will restore approximately 80% Satiety for a standard Second Demarcation entity. Due to your accelerated depletion rate, this will restore approximately 40% of your Satiety.|

|Note: Your current Satiety stands at 23%. This recovery is insufficient for sustained operation. Continued hunting is required.|

Noah looked at the glowing body and at the 23% on his panel and at the dark landscape extending beyond his one-mile perception limit.

Adelheid was pressing her hand to the claw mark on her shoulder, the gold of her Source expression fluctuating at the site of the injury in the way of a wound that was processing the implications of being real rather than cultivated.

He looked at her.

"I will eat first..." he said. "Then we move and understand this place some more!"

WAA!

He crouched beside the honey badger’s Source-lit body, and his multicolored Infinity reached into it, and THE Source Lands’ most fundamental transaction commenced!

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