Chapter 5260: Overcome All Adversity! IV

Dietrich’s face went through a change he did not fully control.

"My sister has no protector." He said it with the flatness of a fact that had been pressing against the back of his thoughts since the crossing.

"Who knows what she is currently going through. If you are all intact enough, could we search the periphery for her before returning? Even an hour of looking-"

Sororis Prima Lana’s interjected.

"We can continue searching for a few more hours," she said, carefully. "But you do not want to be in these forests when the Illumination Flowers fade. The dark here is not merely dark. The Galdr Source creatures that move through it are different from what you have encountered in the bloom period. We need enough time to return to camp before it fades."

She met his eyes with the directness of someone who was not softening what she was saying. "Communicate with your sister through the thread you left at THE Advent Wall. If Sororis Prima Evangelina outside the Wall can relay what your sister sees around her, any landmarks she can identify, we may be able to narrow the search considerably."

Dietrich reached for the thread.

The sliver of his existence left behind outside THE Advent Wall was present, and communicating through it was a sensation of speaking across a limitation that was not distance but something more structural than distance. He pressed his intent through the connection toward Evangelina and held the channel while he waited for information to return.

What returned was not his sister’s voice.

Evangelina’s reply came back measured and clipped. Adelheid’s golden thread outside the Wall showed her alive. The thread was active. The existence it was connected to continued. But the thread was not responding to communication, not because it was severed but because the existence on the other end of it was occupied with something that was consuming its full attention.

She might be fighting for her life.

He had argued against her coming. He had not argued hard enough. He had looked at the Custos arrangement she had arrived with, the Luxuria standing behind her with the infuriating calm of something that did not understand its own insignificance, and he had found the arrangement unworthy and had said so!

Yet...ah!

He blamed himself for allowing it.

He blamed the Luxuria for existing in a position where being allowed was a meaningful variable.

"She is not responding," he said to Sororis Prima Lana.

"Then we look." He met Lana’s eyes. "However many hours we have before the dark, we look."

Mira, who had been quiet since the three Ubergulden emerged from the treeline, shifted her weight off her compromised arm and back into the readiness of a Custodes with somewhere to be.

Dietrich moved, and his Custodes moved with him, and the three scarred Gilded Ones moved alongside them, and the deep forest of THE Strand of Broken Scales received them all!

THE Strand did not care about their House name!

---

Away from THE Source Lands, in a Collapsed Transcendent Conceptual Fold where existence curved through abstract concepts that the collapse had compressed into visible geometry, Noah floated in his Primus Apeiron form and looked up at Ragnar V49.

The battle had been going on long enough that its texture had changed.

The first exchange had been an assessment. The second had been a confirmation of the assessment. What they were doing now was something else, the specific sustained pressure of two beings who had found each other’s level and were testing whether either of them had a level above the one they were currently occupying!

Ragnar was laughing.

"Buddy boy." He shook his head, the brutal smile wider than usual. "We seem evenly matched. Which is shocking in itself, because I was pummeling you not long ago."

He tilted his head with the assessment of a being who had been doing this for a very long time. "But here’s the thing. The longer this goes, the sooner a truly resounding force gets sent down to address whatever is happening here. You are getting stronger as time passes."

His confidence settled into something absolute. "But it will not be significant enough. It will not."

He said it without malice.

He said it the way someone stated the position of a mountain!

Noah looked at his clawed hand. The Galdr Source emanating through his Primus Apeiron scales had deepened across the duration of this battle, the additional density from the Persevere utterances in THE Source Lands pressing through the connection between his bodies with the compound warmth of something growing faster than the battle was expecting it to grow.

He looked up at Ragnar.

"Then all I will have to do," he said, "is Persevere."

BOOM!

Multicolored flames erupted from him in billowing continuous waves, the letter answering the utterance as it had answered every utterance since he had first grasped it in THE Strand of Broken Scales. They came from the deepest available layer of what he was. Not from his Infinity. Not from his Galdr Source alone. From something beneath both of those, the foundational layer that THE Primordial Source touched and that THE Primordial Tongue expressed, and what came from that layer carried a quality that Infinity-only expressions did not carry.

His Primus Apeiron form stood inside the flames with the easy composure of something that had always belonged there!

The multicolored scales caught the flame and refracted it through their prismatic surfaces until the figure at the center of the conflagration was difficult to resolve as a distinct shape and easy to resolve as a single blazing fact. His four horns burned at their singularity tips. His crown spun above his head with the additional fire layered through its orbit!

The dorsal protrusions along his back channeled the flame’s warmth through the Observable Force lines between them in visible golden rivers.

His gaze was imperious.

He directed his existence!

Utilize Persevere continuously. Do not stop.

|Persevere- Continuous Utilization Protocol established.|

|Current limitation: The letter of THE Primordial Tongue can be expressed once per second at the foundational level of your current access. This limitation is not yours specifically, it is a function of the letter itself and of THE Primordial Tongue’s architecture more broadly. The Tongue operates at a cadence that exceeds ordinary existential expression but is not without constraint. One utterance per second represents the current maximum frequency for this letter at your access level.|

|Each utterance elevates from the previous utterance’s baseline. Compound elevation is active. Continuous utilization will produce continuous elevation at one-second intervals for as long as the protocol is maintained.|

|Infinity cost per utterance: negligible relative to current infinity. Sustained utilization is viable.|

|Beginning.|

The flames did not stop.

They rose and rose and rose in the one-second rhythm of a letter being spoken continuously into the foundation of an existence that had no cost to speak it, each wave overlapping the trailing edge of the previous one, the compound elevation accumulating in the specific way that things accumulated when they were building on their own prior state rather than returning to a fixed baseline between iterations.

Ragnar’s expression changed.The smile held. But behind it, something recalibrated with the speed of a being who had encountered this phenomenon before, who had a classification for what this quality of flame meant, and who had not expected to find that classification applicable to whatever Noah was.

"You were connected to THE Relictus?" He stared. The incredulity was genuine. "You should have shown that earlier. The full force of THE Gilded Ones would have come down for you." He laughed!

"Haha, wow. This is crazy!" His eyes found Noah’s.

"Okay, buddy boy." The brutal smile became something that held respect in it alongside everything else it held. "You are about to be famous."

He shot forward.

BOOM!

The distance between them collapsed in the interval that characterized Ragnar’s closing speed, the Cause-backed force behind his approach cracking the curved conceptual geometry of the Collapsed Fold around the path he traveled. Noah watched him come with the focused calm of someone who had been tracking this approach since before it began.

He punched.

The full compound weight of what the continuous Persevere utterances had built across the preceding seconds behind the strike, his Primus Apeiron fist driving into the center of Ragnar’s chest at the moment the distance between them reached contact range.

The Infinity behind it came through his Source and THE Infinite Tongue simultaneously, the Tongue speaking the impact into Ragnar’s foundations rather than against his exterior.

The dent appeared.

Then the cracks, spreading outward from the impact point across Ragnar’s Silurian-tier chest!

The cracks were real! They were the record of something that had found a gap in what Ragnar V49 was built to withstand.

BOOM!

Ragnar went backward like a cannonball.

The Collapsed Transcendent Conceptual Fold received him at the far edge of the space, the curved conceptual geometry buckling around the impact of a Silurian Paleozoic Ira Gilded One being sent through it at a velocity he had not generated himself, and for a moment the laughing stopped.

Noah floated in the continuous multicolored flames and watched.

The flames kept rising.

One Persevere per second!

One! Per! Second!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.