Chapter 5345: Origin II

She hammered him again with nothing but a graceful swing of her arm, and as her words and her Intent washed over him, Seo-yeon’s eyes sharpened.

Because she saw what the Scary Source Lady was actually doing.

She was sending musings and comprehension of THE Primordial Source to Mister Noah through her Intent. Threading understanding into the blows themselves.

Seo-yeon went still with surprise, because she knew exactly how hard that was. This was not information. Information was easy, you could simply tell someone a thing.

What Dame Seraphine was passing through her Intent was comprehension, the lived understanding of an unfathomable authority, the kind of thing that normally took eons to develop and could not simply be handed over. It was something so much more valuable than information that calling it teaching felt too small.

The Scary Source Lady was beating Mister Noah and teaching him at the same time!

And as the spar continued, Seo-yeon focused on Mister Noah, and she saw the change.

The Primordial Essence within his existence flashed brilliantly and began to build, concentrating, climbing toward a terrifying density, and in that brief stretch of seconds, Seo-yeon felt like she could peek inside him and see something extraordinary.

Letters. Letters of THE Primordial Tongue, being uttered inside him, fortifying his existence, refining and increasing his concentration of THE Primordial Source. Every second. She could swear she felt letters used every single second, an unbroken rhythm of utterance threaded so deep into him that it ran beneath everything else he did!

Who uttered THE Primordial Tongue every second?

On the third second, it resolved.

BOOM!

Mister Noah’s arms became covered in obsidian brilliance, and then they became entirely obsidian, as though they had been forged from obsidian metal, obsidian embers burning along their edges. The aura he wielded grew more concentrated, denser, grander, the comprehension Dame Seraphine had been feeding him integrating with his own constant utterances into something new. And when the Scary Source Lady swung her arm down again, carrying her Olympian Intent.

BOOM!

Mister Noah did not move.

He was not smashed backward. He stood his ground, his forged obsidian arms holding against the swing of a Mesozoic Scale being, his feet planted, his face fierce and unbowed!

Oh!

Seo-yeon broke into a brilliant smile and clapped her small hands together, bouncing on her toes.

"Beat her down!" she cheered. "Smash her, Mister Noah! Smash her!"

Dame Seraphine raised her brows at the cheering, annoyance across her calm features.

Then she moved faster than even Seo-yeon could follow.

She used her leg this time, her Intent wrapping around it, and she pivoted and kicked sideways, and the kick arrived before Seo-yeon’s sight had finished tracking the start of it.

BOOM!

Mister Noah was flung across the entire farm and smashed down onto a distant plot of Source Herbs, a crater blooming at the center where his body landed.

Seo-yeon’s cheers died in her throat.

"...Mister Noah!"

She took a step toward the distant crater!

—

Noah lay in the crater at the center of a plot of Source Herbs, and Seo-yeon was on his chest.

She had crossed the farm and reached him before he had finished registering that he had landed, and now she sat on his chest with her small hands pressed against him, looking down at his face with an expression of pure worry, the fierceness of her earlier cheering entirely gone.

|Existential pressure analysis. Your existence has been pressured significantly by Dame Seraphine’s Olympian Intent. Under this pressure, you have managed to partially integrate your budding THE Primordial Source into THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian. The integration currently extends to your hands, allowing them to express THE Primordial Source alongside the rest of the Aura. This is meaningful progress. The comprehension Dame Seraphine threaded through her attacks accelerated an integration that would otherwise have taken considerably longer.|

He read the prompts and found the result acceptable. Better than acceptable!

He had walked into this spar unable to express THE Primordial Source at all, and he was walking out of it, or being kicked out of it, with the Source integrated into his hands.

He reached up and patted Seo-yeon’s head.

"I’m okay," he said. "Really. This is just how she’s teaching."

Her worry eased a fraction, and he sat up, lifting her gently and setting her down on the edge of the crater before he rose to his feet. He took a step back toward Dame Seraphine, who stood across the farm watching him with a stern expression, her Olympian Intent still wrapped around her astonishing figure.

"It seems you can handle things a bit," she said. "So I will unleash a bit more of my Intent now, without worrying about killing you instantly with it." Her obsidian eyes held his. "Hang in there. And persevere."

BOOM!

A terrifying storm of obsidian radiance flashed from her, far too quickly for him to track. He did not see it move. He only felt it arrive, and that was all.

|Warning: A terrifying Intent has overtaken your existence. You have fallen into an illusion generated by THE Sovereign Origin. The Olympian Intent, which questions the origins and sources of all it touches, has constructed an illusion drawn from your own origins. The illusion has taken the form of an existence connected to where you began.|

...!

An existence connected to his origins.

Everything faded around him. The farm, the Source Herbs, Seo-yeon, all of it dissolved into darkness, and the darkness took him, and the next thing he felt was a fist smashing into his jaw!

BOOM!

His body flew backward.

When he focused and steadied himself and looked to see what had hit him, there was only endless obsidian all around him, a void with no features, and a single lifeform standing in it.

Seeing the lifeform changed his expression.

He really did not want to see that face.

His father. Erick Osmont!

The manifestation that THE Sovereign Origin had pulled from his origins was his father, shrouded in the obsidian light of Dame Seraphine’s Intent.

Erick stood burly and titanic in the illusion, larger than he had been in life, but the beer belly was still there, still hanging over his belt, and the expression was the one Noah remembered from every day of his childhood. Annoyed. Disappointed. Ill-tempered and ready to turn cruel at the smallest excuse, exactly the way the man had always been.

"You... were a mistake," his father said.

The voice landed somewhere old in Noah, somewhere from before fireballs and Causes and Observable Existences.

"I told your mother not to keep you. We couldn’t afford a baby. We were barely scraping by as it was, barely making rent, barely eating, and she looked at all that and decided to keep you anyway." Erick’s face twisted.

"Because of that choice, the rift between us grew. Bigger and bigger every year. I turned to drinking. I turned to worse. All of it, every bit of it, because of you. You were a fucking mistake, boy, and I said so from the start."

BOOM!

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