Chapter 5252: Persevere! III

His Galdr Source took the jump far past what any ordinary jump should have covered, the multicolored density of his Infinity compressing against the ground and releasing upward in a single motion that carried him across the distance between the rocks and the lightning ring with the arc of something moving with intention rather than physics!

He came down inside the ring beside the crabs, and his Source blazed outward when he landed, multicolored and brilliant, the impact sending a ring of displaced sand outward in every direction from the landing point, Eon arrived beside him soon after with an imperial gaze.

The Utahraptor looked at him.

Its cruel eyes moved across Noah’s figure, and something behind those eyes decided on a conclusion quickly!

"Another pair of golden humans appear." It ate a crab while it spoke, the multitasking effortless. "Haha, look at you. Standing there in your stupid form with all that confidence. You are nothing more than golden humans. Fragile. Polished. Pathetic." It ate another crab.

"Many of your kind have crawled out of the woodwork recently. I’ve had to clear the brush. I’ve killed a fair amount, and I must say, you taste better than the common rabble. Your Sources are unique. Intricate. A pleasant change of menu after so much bland, repetitive existence."

It began moving toward Noah, the lightning rolling across its body in lazy arcs.

"And here you are. You’ve saved me the exercise. You’ve descended and landed right in my lap. For that small mercy, I’ll be kind. I’ll make your transition quick." The cruel eyes carried no mercy behind the promise.

"You always have that look. That wide-eyed stuttering shock as the light goes out. As if the laws of Existence were written to exclude you from the grave. As if your power granted you a seat at a table that doesn’t exist."

It stopped and drew itself to full height.

"You think you are the sun? You are nothing. Death is not a suggestion. It is not a request. It is a command. Death comes to all. Death. Comes. To. All!"

BOOM!

"Come receive yours!"

...!

The tendrils of lightning crashed outward from the Utahraptor toward Noah and Eon, the strikes fast and converging, the obsidian Infinity within them carrying the weight of a Galdr Source that had been generating lightning attacks for longer than Noah had been alive!

Noah scowled.

His smile was brutal.

"I was looking for a Galdr Source to test." He met the Utahraptor’s eyes. "You’ll do just fine."

He moved into the lightning.

THE Infinite Vector caught the first tendril mid-arc and redirected it sideways, the lightning curving away from its original trajectory and dissipating into the sand. The second tendril hit the Vector’s passive field and found its direction rewritten before it reached Noah’s position. The Utahraptor’s eyes narrowed as the attacks failed to arrive and Noah covered the distance between them in the interval the Utahraptor spent processing why the lightning had not landed.

His fist found the Utahraptor’s jaw.

The Galdr Source behind the strike hit the Utahraptor’s foundation directly, not a cultivated attack but a Source against Source contact, the multicolored density of Noah’s Galdr pressing into the Utahraptor’s obsidian Galdr at the point of impact!

The Utahraptor’s head snapped sideways and it disengaged with a speed that was genuine, the cruel eyes recalibrating as it circled.

It drove two lightning tendrils of infinity from different angles simultaneously, the spread designed to force a choice between blocking one or the other.

Noah rewrote both of their directions with THE Infinite Vector, then pulled the Infinity in the lightning itself toward him rather than letting it dissipate into the sand, the Vector redirecting the energy’s intent from destructive to available, and drove toward the Utahraptor with the borrowed lightning running through his Galdr Source as an additional layer.

BOOM!

The strike landed in the Utahraptor’s midsection and the borrowed lightning discharged through the contact point, the Utahraptor’s own attack returning through its own body from an angle it had not built any defenses against. It went down on one knee!

Noah was already on it, his Source blazing at the top of its current expression as he drove into the Utahraptor’s position with the focused density of a Galdr!

The Utahraptor’s lightning flared desperately and struck at him from multiple directions, the attacks clumsy from the damage accumulating in its foundations, and Noah took the strikes that he took and he kept pressing because the gap between their Source expressions was real and the gap was in his favor and the gap was widening!

He had the Utahraptor’s neck in his grip, the obsidian lightning sputtering through the contact as the Utahraptor’s Galdr Source burned through its available reserves to sustain the resistance!

He pulled back his free hand to end it and obtain a meal of Galdr proportions.

But...

"PERSEVERE!"

BOOM!

The Utahraptor roared it from somewhere beneath the grip.

Obsidian flames erupted from its entire body in a single expanding detonation that drove Noah backward hard enough to cross twenty feet of beach before he arrested the motion, his feet dragging through dark sand as his Galdr Source absorbed the force of the expulsion. He looked at the Utahraptor with wide eyes!

The wounds were gone.

Not healing. Gone. Its Galdr Source burned brighter than it had at the start of the engagement, the obsidian lightning rolling across it with renewed intensity, the cruel eyes blazing with something that had not been present before!

It had used THE Primordial Tongue!

Noah’s eyes shone.

The same word the two Relictus had used in the Bellum Dreamstone’s vision, healing themselves across eighty-one cycles of destruction and emerging stronger from each recovery!

THE Primordial Tongue, accessible here, in THE Source Lands, apparently to a Galdr Source Utahraptor who had been present long enough to find it.

The Seidr Crabs were burrowing frantically into the sand at the edges of the lightning ring, the trembling of things that had just watched something they would normally run from get hit by something worse and get back up!

The Utahraptor stood like a beast emperor in the bloom light, obsidian lightning cascading off it, the other Seidr Utahraptors at the tree line watching now with different postures than before.

Noah looked at Eon.

"Why don’t you go handle those Seidr ones at the tree line." He nodded toward the watching group. "You haven’t been pulling on my Infinity yet so start doing it now. Pull on my power and you should be more than okay."

He turned back to the Utahraptor, his brutal smile not having moved.

"I...want to have a very good time with this one to see just how long it can Persevere."

...!

Information flowed!

|Source Creature Identification: Galdr Stormcaller Utahraptor.|

|Second Demarcation. An Apex predator of THE Source Lands’ coastal and forest border region in this immediate vicinity. Has been here long enough to develop a personality, which in most contexts would suggest wisdom and depth. In this context it suggests it has eaten a very large number of things and has had considerable time to feel good about this.|

|Behavioral Note: The Galdr Stormcaller Utahraptor is among the few Second Demarcation creatures nearby to have independently developed a sustained lightning-based Infinity expression.|

|Lightning Encirclement Ability: THE Stormwall. A contained ring of obsidian lightning generated from the creature’s Galdr Source, deployed to prevent prey from escaping while the Stormcaller addresses other prey. Functions as intended.|

|Predatory Note: The Galdr Stormcaller Utahraptor prefers to monologue before engaging. This has never once caused it to lose a fight. It has, however, occasionally allowed prey to escape during the monologue.|

|Threat Assessment: Moderate. It is larger than you. It is faster than you probably expect. It controls lightning. It has given a speech at you, which means it is confident.|

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