Chapter 5249: Survival! IV

The rocky terrain was genuinely fun!

Noah did not examine this feeling too closely, but it was there, running beneath his careful attention to the dark and the sounds of the Source Lands around them. He had not felt this kind of adversity for a long time. Not the managed adversity of THE Wandering Territories where he had arrived with THE Infinite Tongue and a Primus Apeiron form and proceeded to scatter several thousand Gilded Ones across Observable Existence.

Raw adversity! A mile of perception. No body. Hunger falling by the minute. Unknown creatures in the dark. Unknown creatures in the dark that could kill him if he was not paying attention, which was the kind of adversity that produced the kind of presence he had not felt in his mind since the early apocalypse years.

He was enjoying himself!

He moved through the jagged rock formations with the calm confidence of a being who had elected to be here, his Galdr Source multicolored and steady in the ambient dark, his eyes bright as they tracked the terrain ahead and the terrain to either side and the terrain above without urgency but without gaps.

Behind him, Eon moved carefully.

"These stones..." She had stopped, crouching to examine something near the base of a jutting rock formation.

She pulled her hand back. A thin line of gold on her fingertip, genuine and immediate, the Source Lands making no accommodations for the gold skin of an Ubergulden Royal.

Noah stopped.

He looked at the crystalline obsidian formations embedded in the jagged rock around them, running his Galdr Source light across the surfaces to map their positions. The crystalline clusters appeared at irregular intervals, their edges catching the ambient dark in ways that made them slightly more visible than the surrounding rock, but not enough for someone moving carefully to guarantee they avoided every one.

He crouched.

His hands closed around three of the largest crystalline outcroppings with his Galdr Source blazing gold-multicolored around his palms, the compressed energy of his Source bearing down on the material with the directness of a being applying what he had available to the problem in front of him.

The crystalline stone broke along the lines he pressed, shearing cleanly rather than shattering, and he pulled three jagged lengths free, each one roughly the length of his forearm, each one with a natural point at one end from where it had broken.

He bathed his hands in Infinity.

THE Infinite Tongue directed the obsidian material at the blunt ends of each piece, the grinding and reshaping slow but functional, the Tongue convincing the crystalline substance to smooth itself into a grip rather than forcing it. The grip end rounded. The pointed end stayed sharp. Three times, then a fourth for himself.

He handed three to Eon.

She looked at the weapons and then at his hands with an expression that was recalibrating something.

He started moving again.

---

The cavern opening presented itself in the face of a larger rock formation, a darkness within the general darkness that his perception mapped as a space extending approximately thirty feet inward with a single entry and no additional exits. One way in. No way to be flanked from behind.

He held up a hand.

Eon stopped.

He went in alone.

He had covered approximately six feet of the cavern’s interior when something shot from the ceiling without warning, the movement fast and low and aimed at his face. Noah raised his hand.

THE Infinite Vector caught the creature’s momentum mid-air and held it, the forward force redirected sideways by a fraction sufficient to stop its trajectory dead, the creature suspended in the space in front of him at approximately chest height, its limbs cycling uselessly in the frozen direction.

He looked at it.

It was compact and dense, roughly the size of a large dog, its exterior composed of layered rock-like plates that interlocked across its body like the shell of something that had been designed to live in exactly this kind of terrain. Four legs, wide-set, built for ceiling movement as much as floor movement. Its eyes were small and deeply set in the rock-plate face, currently blazing with the crimson of a creature that was very angry about no longer moving.

|Source Creature: Seidr Cave Mantler. First Demarcation. Long-term resident of THE Source Lands’ rocky regions. Territorial. Ambush predator operating from ceilings and overhangs. Source technique- Plate Lock: can harden its rock plates to absorb significant force from direct strikes. Most effective against brute force approaches. Bypassed by piercing or internal damage.|

Noah smiled.

He drove his crystalline spear into the gap between the Cave Mantler’s neck plates and pushed Infinity into the wound directly, the multicolored current moving through the entry point and distributing through the creature’s interior with the thoroughness of liquid filling a container. The blazing crimson of its eyes dimmed in segments.

He caught the body as the Vector released it.

He directed the obsidian Infinity from the surrounding cave walls to form a bubble around the body, the dark material compressing around the creature and sealing it, containing the smell and the dimming Source light inside the seal. Preserved. He set it against the cave wall.

"Clear," he called out.

Eon entered.

He moved through the full interior of the cavern with his Source expression lighting the space, mapping the ceiling for additional residents, checking the floor for anything embedded in the rock. Nothing. He took inventory of the entry angle, the ceiling height, the width of the passage at the narrowest point where it could be defended from.

He went to the back and sat down.

Eon came to the back and sat beside him, close enough that her shoulder was near his, her golden Source expression still cycling at slightly elevated intensity from the last hour of continuous alertness. She breathed out.

The breath carried something it had not carried outside.

Noah looked at her face in the multicolored light of his Source and at the gold of her expression cycling warmly in the dark cave and felt the amplified pulse of this place pressing against his lust with the patient insistence it had been pressing with since they arrived. He did not act on it. He put it under things controlled.

He thought, instead, about how universal this moment was.

Power or no power, cultivation or no cultivation, Gilded engineering or Bounded scrapping ...everyone wanted to feel safe. Everyone wanted to stop moving and breathe out. Those with power built the safety themselves. Those without it had to find something powerful enough to stand near and trust that the proximity would hold. He had been that proximity for people across the full span of his climb. It was a role he had never applied for and had never stopped occupying.

He leaned back against the cave wall and closed his eyes.

The amplified lust of this place pressed. He did not move.

"Keep my mind busy," he said. "Tell me about your time before you became THE Secretive Eon."

A pause.

Eon blinked at the request. He did not look at her to observe it, but he felt the small shift in her Source expression that corresponded to being asked something she had not expected.

Then she moved and turned. She put her back against the smooth section of rock beside him and pulled her knees up and looked at the cave ceiling.

She began to speak.

The words came slowly at first. Then less slowly. Then with the continuous ease of something that had been waiting for someone to ask and had simply been waiting for a long time.

Hours began to pass as Noah listned to THE Secretive Eon while waiting for light to come so he could really begin his growth and conquest of THE Source Lands!

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