Chapter 5248: Survival! III

The honey badger tasted like something that had been absorbing Infinity for a very long time and had not wasted any of it.

Noah ate voraciously, the hunger of this place pressing against him with a directness that his cultivated existence had never permitted, every bite landing with the satisfaction of something the body was insisting upon rather than requesting. Beside him, Eon, Ubergulden Adelheid, ate more carefully, with the composure of a being who had more composure available to her at baseline, but ate consistently, her golden Source expression stabilizing visibly with each piece consumed.

They kept their eyes on the surrounding dark.

The beach stretched around them in two directions. Behind them, the obsidian waters churned with the patient menace of something that had a Fourth Scale Eel in it and was not concerned about this fact. Ahead, the terrain divided into two distinct possibilities. To the left, jagged rocks rose from the dark sand in irregular formations that grew taller and denser further inland, the shapes suggesting caves and overhangs and the kind of geography that had defensible positions inside it. To the right, the rocks gave way to coarser sand and sparse ground cover, and in that direction, at the edge of his one-mile perception limit, the faint suggestion of something taller than rock, trees, or what passed for trees here.

Two paths.

Noah ate and thought about which one, and also thought about whether the extreme amplification of every biological function this place imposed was going to extend to the functions he was currently less interested in contemplating, and decided that was a problem for future Noah.

Eon broke the silence.

"Many Gilded Ones will not survive this." She was not looking at him when she said it. She was looking at the dark landscape with the composed certainty of someone delivering an assessment they had already fully made. "They won’t because they can’t. They are inherently prideful, arrogant, and convinced that Existence was designed as their personal velvet cushion. To be stripped down to their Source alone, to have every layer of their engineered armor peeled away until they are naked and raw, is a trauma they aren’t equipped to handle. Adapting is hard when your entire identity is built on the fact that you’ve never had to."

She paused to eat.

"They will try to walk on these lands like they still wear the crown. They will bark commands at the wind and expect the dirt to bow. And they will fail. They will become meals for monstrous Source beasts, torn apart and digested and returned to the mud before they even realize Existence has stopped listening to them." Her expression did not change. "That is the reality. That is the situation. It is messy, it is gruesome, and it is happening right now."

Noah did not disagree.

She turned to look at him, and her eyes moved across his figure with the same unhurried assessment they had conducted earlier, then settled on his face with a different quality.

"But let’s talk about something else that doesn’t add up." Her voice carried the precision of a being who had been constructing a question for several minutes and had finished constructing it. "I am Silurian Paleozoic. As far as I knew only moments ago, whatever changes you had undergone placed you at Ordovician Paleozoic at most. And yet you are doing things that shouldn’t be possible in any version of reality I’ve ever encountered."

She leaned forward slightly.

"How can you do what you do? How can you bridge a gap that eons of Gilded engineering haven’t been able to touch? I don’t care about the smoke and the mirrors or the grandiose declarations you make to others. I want the truth. Is it truly just linked to Infinity? What is in your existence that allows you to do what you do?"

Her eyes were shining and still moving across him in the way this place made eyes move.

"Just what are you, really?"

BOOM!

Noah finished the last piece of the honey badger, crimson-gold running down his chin, and smiled.

"Ubergulden Adelheid—"

"Eon."

She said it quietly but directly. Her eyes held his with the expression of a being making a deliberate choice.

"There are no others here. Just call me Eon."

HUUM!

Her Bounded identity. The name she had carried across the eons she had spent living as Bounded rather than Gilded. He felt the weight of it being offered in this stripped place where everything was its irreducible self, and found the weight appropriate.

His smile widened.

"Eon." He said the name once to confirm he had received it. "I am just built a bit differently compared to most. I’ll tell you what I can in time."

He stood and looked at the area around the honey badger’s consumed Source.

"But right now we have to move."

The reasoning was simple and he did not elaborate beyond what was necessary. A Source beast had been killed here. The energy of the kill was radiating outward into the surrounding environment in a way that other creatures in the area could feel, and creatures that could feel it would move toward it. Some to scavenge. Some to investigate. Some because they had learned that fresh kills attracted other existences and fresh existences were better meals than cold Source residue. The beach around them was already a less safe location than it had been twenty minutes ago, and it had not been a safe location then.

He looked at the two directions.

"We need shelter before whatever passes for night here deepens further. We can’t see beyond a mile and neither can most of what’s out here, but some of it can see further than us and all of it knows this terrain better than we do." He looked toward the jagged rock formations rising to the left. "The rocky area gives us high ground. From the peaks we can see movement before it reaches us. If we find a cave or a crevice, we have one entry point to defend instead of every direction at once."

He looked toward the trees on the right.

"The forest has more resources. It also has a canopy, which means things can come from above, and dense coverage means we can be flanked from every angle before we register the approach." He did not labor the conclusion. "We go to the rocks."

Eon looked at both directions and nodded once, the assessment accepted without requiring further argument.

Noah took the first step toward the jagged formations and she fell in beside him, and behind them the cooling residue of the honey badger’s Source continued its slow fade into the dark sand of the beach.

Somewhere in the dark to their right, at the outer edge of his mile of perception, something moved with the unhurried directness of a being that had registered the kill and was coming to see what else the area offered.

They moved faster.

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