Chapter 5265: Across Time and Existence! I

Heralictus said war was the father of all things and king of all.

He wrote this in a treatise that would survive longer than every building he’d ever entered, arguing with the calm assurance of someone who believed they had located the first principle beneath everything else!

Peace was not a condition. Peace was the absence of conflict between conflicts, the brief intermission where opposing forces caught their breath before resuming the violence that actually drove existence forward.

Harmony was stagnation, and stagnation led to decay, and decay led to the collapse of whatever complacent arrangement had mistaken its temporary equilibrium for a permanent state.

Change required destruction. Progress required brutal opposition. The only existences that grew were the ones that fought, and the only civilizations that endured were the ones that understood fighting as foundational rather than aberrant.

Adversity was good. War was good!

This was what Heralictus believed completely and wrote about extensively and defended against every colleague who challenged the thesis across the full span of his scholarly career. In his entire life, he never once touched mana. He never cultivated a single day. He lived and died on the floor of existence he’d been born on and experienced none of the wars his work insisted were necessary for the progression of all things.

The thesis was correct.

He had simply never been in a position to verify it personally!

---

The last three Ragnars had gone down within minutes of each other.

V287 first. He’d been sheltering inside the remains of a shattered Shelter of THE Loom. It hadn’t mattered. The other two fell after a few exchanges as he...had gotten very good at taking down Silurian Paleozoic Scale Gilded Ones!

He ate all three.

The Primus Apeiron form processed. Each Ragnar was a Silurian Paleozoic existence with two integrated Prime Causes and mass-produced Ira engineering, and each one’s consumption added measurable density to what he was carrying as the loot from them...was even enough to act as fuel to unlock more of his Ego designations. He absolutely had enough to unlock multiple Sins and Virtues as soon as things died down.

He sat in the wreckage of the Shelter and thought.

He was thriving.

Not in the general sense that he was winning, though he was winning. In the sense that his existence was doing what it was built to do at a pace it was built to sustain, and the results were confirming every structural decision he’d made across the climb.

THE Primordial Tongue’s first letter was his. The loophole that made the letter pull from Infinity instead of his Source was his. The continuous one-per-second Persevere stacking that made his Primus Apeiron form measurably stronger with each heartbeat was his. THE Infiniverse was undergoing her transformation into an Observable Existence at this very moment, the compound elevation of Persevere applied at domain scale doing in seconds what natural development would have taken eons to produce.

The joy of it was genuine!

He’d always liked doing impossible things. The word impossible carried a specific invitation for him that it didn’t carry for most beings. When someone said a thing couldn’t be done, what he heard was that nobody had tried it with his particular combination of resources and willingness, and the combination had not yet encountered its ceiling.

THE Cheating Architect and THE Protagonist sat in his Source as constituent components of what he was, and what they contributed wasn’t a technique or a capability but an orientation... his existence looked at closed systems and instinctively found the gap where the system’s designers hadn’t accounted for him.

The Primordial Tongue had a cost. His existence had found the gap. The gap was Infinity.

Part of him was the concept of cheating!

His good mood extended beyond his own advancement. He’d left Gilded Ones scattered through Observable Existence for those who needed them. Eckert had his targets. Alexander had his. Emotive was hunting with the terrifying combination of her Absolute Luxuria form and the Ira Gilded Ones she’d stripped of will and turned into a team.

THE Primordial Paradox was doing whatever THE Primordial Paradox , and Noah didn’t need to manage that because THE Primordial Paradox had been operating independently for too long.

His people in their Apeiron forms were building their adversity through the engagements he’d reserved for them, collapsing and returning and collapsing again and becoming stronger through the cycle the engineering was designed to produce.

Everything was moving!

THE Infiniverse was about to become an Observable Existence.

At the height of this, at the very peak of the good feeling... Noah’s eyes went sharp.

He’d been here before. He knew this part!

The pattern was reliable enough that he’d stopped treating it as coincidence and started treating it as a structural feature of his existence. Grand accomplishments arrived and settled into their proper positions and then, within a window so consistent it should have been assigned a formal designation, something inserted itself into the moment and refused to let the accomplishment breathe.

He looked around.

He looked left. Rivers of multicolored Infinity moved through the wreckage of the Shelter in their ordinary currents. He looked right. The multicolored seas of the surrounding space swished and settled without urgency. He looked up. He looked down. He extended his perception through the full mile of the Primus Apeiron form’s current range and found nothing approaching, nothing gathering, nothing building toward a disruption.

He waited.

Nothing.

He waited longer!

Still nothing!

The surrounding existence was calm. Aggressively calm. Calm enough that it felt less like nothing was coming and more like something was deliberately not coming yet.

He narrowed his eyes at the general direction of existence and stood his ground for a few more seconds, daring it. If something was going to happen, it could go ahead and happen while he was looking at it with his full attention.

Nothing happened.

Okay!

He started to turn away.

HUUM!

And right fucking then...

Something buzzed above. His Infinity burned bright and his Source compressed into combat readiness without him requesting it, his Primus Apeiron form orienting toward the upper space with the speed of a body that had been doing nothing but fight for the last several minutes and had not yet downshifted. His eyes tracked the disturbance with sharp focus.

Had the response from THE Braneworld come faster than the Directives’ information quarantine could hold?

He prepared for whatever was about to descend from the upper reaches of Observable Existence!

"AHH!"

It was not a Gilded One’s entry signature.

It was a scream. A very normal scream, from a very normal-sounding voice, and when Observable Force flickered and deposited the screaming thing into the air above the shattered Shelter, what he saw was a small woman falling toward him with her arms extended in directions that suggested the falling had not been planned.

She...was not a Gilded One. He confirmed this in the first instant of perceiving her. No engineered Ego. No Observable Force density that exceeded what a Bounded Lifeform carried. She was small and petite and falling, and when she hit the sea, she bounced!

She stood up fast.

"Sir Osmontian, don’t kill me! Hear me out first!"

...!

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