Chapter 5253: Persevere! IV

Noah coated his hands.

The obsidian Infinity from the surrounding beach answered THE Infinite Tongue without argument, pulling toward his grip and compressing into a dense layer across his knuckles and forearms, the Galdr Source concentrating it further until the coating carried the viscous density of his full Source expression rather than the loose ambient material it had been before he touched it. His fists burned obsidian-multicolored, the darkness of the Infinity threading through with the gold of his Galdr.

He moved toward the Utahraptor!

His footwork was fluid and low, his body swaying lightly with brutality as each step rolled into the next with the continuous momentum of water finding its way downhill!

The Utahraptor drove its lightning toward him and he rolled under it, the motion carrying him beneath the strike and into the Utahraptor’s throat, and he came up with a punch coated with his source to hit the Utahraptor’s jaw from below!

BOOM!

The obsidian coating on his arm discharged on contact.

The Utahraptor’s head snapped back.

It came back with a low sweep of its tail and a lightning tendril from its right, the combination designed for the specific geometry of something that had fought many things and built patterns around what worked. Noah stepped over the tail with a sweeping lateral kick that changed his position without stopping his momentum, the kick connecting with the Utahraptor’s knee on the way past, and the lightning tendril hit the space he had just vacated.

He was already behind it.

His heel came down across the back of the Utahraptor’s neck with the full compression of his Galdr Source behind it and the obsidian Infinity coating making the contact point a concentrated delivery of everything he was currently carrying.

BOOM!

The Utahraptor went down hard.

"PERSEVERE!"

Obsidian flames. The Source healing again, the wounds closing in the surge of Primordial Tongue authority, the Utahraptor rising back to its feet with the specific quality of something that had found its bottom and bounced off it. Its lightning was brighter this time. Its eyes burned harder.

Noah watched the recovery with genuine interest.

He moved back in as he loved getting physical!

The rhythm of the engagement settled into something he was reading and the Utahraptor was not, his footwork carrying him around the Utahraptor’s committed strikes rather than through them, the swaying lateral motion making him a target that resolved in different positions than the targeting had accounted for. He hit it from three different angles in a sequence that did not give the Utahraptor time to establish a defensive posture between impacts, his hands and feet working in the rolling continuous combination of someone who had decided the fight was an exercise in expression rather than survival.

The Utahraptor’s lightning fought back with everything it had.

Noah’s Vector redirected what it could and his Source absorbed what it couldn’t redirect, the obsidian strikes landing on him with decreasing effect as the fight deepened and the Utahraptor’s reserves burned through their recovered fullness faster with each Persevere cycle.

The second Persevere came slower than the first.

The wounds it healed were the same wounds, or similar enough, but the roar had less behind it. The Primordial Tongue cost something. Using it repeatedly cost more of something, the same word drawing from the same well and finding the well slightly less full each time.

Noah kept going as he wanted to learn everything.

He kept the rhythm. Low, flowing, continuous. Hit and move and hit from somewhere else and move again, his footwork never quite stopping, the fight a sustained expression of everything he had been doing rather than a series of separate exchanges. The Utahraptor’s responses slowed by increments small enough that each individual increment was unremarkable and the accumulation was devastating.

Third Persevere. The flames that erupted were shorter lived. The brightness they produced faded faster!

Fourth Persevere. A long pause before the word arrived, the Utahraptor finding it from somewhere deep, the voice carrying the sound of something that was very tired and had not yet admitted this.

Noah leaped.

He came down with both feet across the Utahraptor’s back in the specific concentrated delivery of someone landing on something they intended to stay landed on, the obsidian coating on his feet discharging completely into the contact point, the full density of his Galdr Source driving straight down through the Utahraptor’s foundations.

The Utahraptor trembled.

It tried.

The shape of Persevere formed somewhere in its chest, the ancient letter of THE Primordial Tongue moving toward expression with the desperate insistence of a word that had saved it four times before and was being asked for a fifth.

It could not make it out.

The Source broke with the exhaustion of something that had held on as long as holding was available and had simply reached the end of how long that was. The Utahraptor’s obsidian lightning went still. Its eyes dimmed from their blazing cruel brightness to something quieter, the light retreating toward the center before it stopped entirely.

From its body, a fragment of obsidian light rose.

Small. The size of his fist! Drifting upward from the collapsed Utahraptor’s Source with the patient certainty of something that knew where it was going.

|A Glorious Battle!|

|Galdr Stormcaller Utahraptor: Defeated. Its Source has been broken through sustained engagement rather than a single overwhelming strike, which required considerably more effort than the single overwhelming strike would have. On the other hand, the sustained engagement was more interesting.|

|Consumption available: The Utahraptor’s body will restore approximately 51% Satiety for a Galdr Source entity. This is a meaningful meal. Eat it.|

|Secondary acquisition: Fragment of the Letter of THE Primordial Tongue- Persevere.|

|The creature accessed THE Primordial Tongue during your engagement. It did not give you this fragment voluntarily. You took it by breaking its Source before it could use the letter a fifth time.|

|The Primordial Tongue operates through complete letters rather than fragments. You currently hold one fragment of Persevere. Obtaining four additional fragments of this letter will allow your Source to fully grasp its weavings and utilize it as the creature did.|

|Note: THE Primordial Tongue is the language of THE Primordial Source.|

|One fragment down. Four to go.|

Noah’s eyes shone brilliantly as he watched the dazzling loot!

This place continued to exceed every known measurement of power and glory as he had to find...4 other fragments to gain acces to another tongue!

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