Chapter 5268: Everybody Dies!

Noah looked at Taylor and thought about what she’d told him and found that not all of it fit.

Some of it did. An assassination team sent from the future was dramatic but not conceptually complicated, beings with enough power and enough motivation and enough temporal capability to execute a retroactive kill had existed.

But the logic anf specifics had problems.

"There’s a lot of possible things that can be done about this," he said. His Primus Apeiron form looked at Taylor with the calm calculation of something that had been chewing on a thought and had reached the point where the thought was ready to be shared.

"But not all of it makes sense."

He let the Persevere flames settle slightly around his form.

"Coming through time is fine. I’ve traversed through time too. But...." He looked at the space around them.

"If they were really going to kill me, my future self would have already intervened. Existence is a closed loop. What was supposed to happen has happened and will happen. The past doesn’t change. What occurred in the past was already set, even if someone in the future thinks they’re going back to alter something. Whatever future they’re in won’t really change." He held her gaze.

"The past is set. If they come from the future, and I am alive in that future, then it means I never died."

WAA!

He straightened to his full height. The multicolored flames of Persevere burned across his Primus Apeiron form with the dense slow-churning warmth of continuous compound elevation, the surrounding seas of Infinity reflecting the multicolored light across the wreckage of the shattered Shelter.

"So all of this...is pointless."

BOOM!

Taylor looked at him.

Her rapid-moving eyes held still for approximately two seconds. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"While your outlook on time seems right..." She paused. "Wowee, you are really full of yourself."

She caught herself. "Err, I mean, yes sir! You are invincible!"

His tail flickered.

She started to pull back, the beginnings of the cowering reflex she’d shown on arrival returning. But something behind her eyes caught and held, and the cowering didn’t complete.

She stood her ground, and the rapid movement of her eyes went still again, and what was behind them wasn’t nervous anymore.

"Hmm. Actually, no, fuck it." She looked at him directly.

"You are not invincible. I’ve seen multiple friends who believed they were invincible die. You too can die, no matter how terrifying you think you are. Even if you say the past can’t change and it’s already set and all that temporal bullshit."

Her voice dropped.

"Even you, Sir Osmontian, can die. Others more powerful than you have died."

The rapid movement came back into her eyes, but it was different now. The movement of someone looking at something far away.

"I have heard their deaths. I have heard Infinity and THE Primordial Source cry out for lifeforms born of Infinity and THE Primordial Source you can’t even imagine."

...!

Lifeforms...born of Infinity and THE Primordial Source?

The air between them was quiet.

She flinched.

Her eyes shut and her shoulders came up and her body pulled back into the reflexive brace of someone who’d said something they believed and was now expecting the physical consequences of having said it. She held the brace for several seconds.

She opened one eye.

Then the other.

Noah hadn’t moved. His expression hadn’t changed. The flames burned. The tail had gone still.

She breathed out.

"Well. That’s just my experience and what I know." She straightened slowly. "But okay. The past is set. So what?"

Noah looked at her and felt something he hadn’t felt in a considerable time, which was the refreshment of a being who talked back. When was the last time someone had talked to him like that?

He shook his head and continued.

"Another thing," he said. "If they came back in time, why not alert the strongest Fourth Scale Gilded Ones here? Or Fifth Scale, if that power exists?" He looked at the Shelter wreckage around them. "They could kill me easily at those tiers. But they haven’t. There should be a reason they can’t, which contributes to the closed loop theory."

Taylor blinked.

Her eyes lit up. She floated toward him again, the fear of thirty seconds ago apparently fully processed and discarded, her face carrying the brightness of someone who’d heard a question she had information about.

"Hey hey hey!" She was close to his head again. "So actually, I heard this woman Vireth, one of the time assassins, talking to a Sororis Prima in our party. She was saying how they’re hiding from existence. If they do anything too extreme, they’ll be noticed."

Her hands moved as she talked, the gestures carrying a rhythm that matched her speaking cadence.

"That’s why they recruited anomalies. Because if they involve Ealdor Gilded Ones, they’ll be detected. She said they have to walk a fine line. Them being here is already bad because they have to make sure THE Primordial Source doesn’t recognize them, since existence would reject them outright. They aren’t from here."

She leaned closer.

"Since I found that out, I’ve been screaming in my head that they don’t belong here. Whispering it. Shouting it. Trying to send this information through my communication with Infinity and THE Primordial Source." She dropped her hands.

"Fucking nothing happened. So if you have a direct line to the Source, that might be the easiest way to deal with them. Because why face a bunch of Fourth Scale fuckers if you don’t have to?"

...!

Fourth Scale fuckers.

This was what wanted to interrupt the momentous occasion of THE Infiniverse becoming an Observable Existence. He’d just become capable of killing Silurian Paleozoic Scale entities, the middle tier of THE Third Scale!

The gap between that and Fourth Scale was not a gap he could currently close quickly.

But if he had time to continue allowing the spam of Persevere...

But for now, this Adversity didn’t need to happen.

A direct line to the Source. He didn’t have that. Not in the way Taylor was describing it, as a communication channel that could deliver a report and receive a response.

But he had a connection to something that did.

THE Creature.

THE Creature who held THE Primordial Source within his existence.

If Noah could get a message to him. If THE Creature’s connection to THE Primordial Source was direct enough to flag beings that didn’t belong in this time. If THE Primordial Source could be made aware, and if that awareness produced the rejection Taylor had described Vireth worrying about...

Then Noah wouldn’t need to fight Fourth Scale beings at all.

He’d just need to make a call.

"Hmmm."

The smile came back.

It spread across the Primus Apeiron form’s features with the slow devilish warmth. The multicolored flames of Persevere burned brighter around the smile, and the surrounding existence registered whatever he was thinking and held very still.

Taylor was watching.

Her eyes moved from his smile to the surrounding space and back to his smile.

"I... don’t like when you make that face," she said!

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