Octavius tapped one finger against the air beside him.
A unique sea of Infinity bloomed out from his body, this one tinged with the sickly gold-green of Greed refined into fuel. The sea flowed outward and downward, pouring toward the golden table at the center of the island, and the corpse on that table began to tremble.
The fungi laced through its ribs moved.
They wove across the opened chest cavity rapidly, closing the body they had spent so long opening, stitching the subject back together with threads of pale bioluminescence. The corpse’s limbs twitched, then straightened. In a single fluid motion it sat up, then stood, then launched itself off the table to stand before Octavius!
Rivers of Infinity surged down toward it from every direction, the diverted channels of the research apparatus finally feeding into their intended recipient.
Noah observed all of it.
The body that straightened in front of Octavius was unfinished. The engineering was raw. The weavings holding it together strained against each other in configurations that shouldn’t have held at all. And then it opened its eyes.
WO! WO! WO!
Glistening blue crystalline pupils of pure Infinity shone out from a face that had been a corpse a moment earlier.
He understood what he was looking at instantly!
Madness.
THE Gamaidian.
The creature’s eyes held the madness of Infinity the way a lantern held flame, and his own eyes lit up with interest at the sight of it. So this was what Octavius’s latest product looked like when it stood? An abomination made from the collision of flooded Infinity and something else, held together by engineering that shouldn’t have been possible and somehow was!
|Entity Detected: Unnamed Abomination, Latest Product of Octavius Kraethos.|
|Status: Conscious. Hostile. Unstable.|
|Current Scale: THE Proterozoic Scale - Calymmian Tier verging on Ediacaran Tier(Again, Scale ranking is not to be trusted).|
|Engineering Signature: THE Gamaidian saturation paired with unstable amplification of Ego of Hunger. Control tether active and routed through Octavius Kraethos.|
|Threat Level: Unknown. Combat parameters cannot be fully predicted due to unstable modifications.|
Beside him, Emotive moved to speak.
Noah raised his hand and stopped her before the first syllable left her mouth.
"Stand back and do not interfere."
His voice held the quiet steadiness of a directive that didn’t need to be repeated.
"Naldine, keep an eye on the surroundings. Make sure nothing new bothers us while I’m working. I feel like I’ll be getting a bit serious here."
His gaze settled on the abomination with its glistening mad eyes.
"I want to see. I want to see!"
...!
BOOM!
Terrifying pressure erupted out from his standing form.
It rolled outward in every direction at once, invisible to the eye and yet perceivable by every existence within its range. The ambient air buzzed. The floating island trembled beneath him. The diverted rivers of Observable Force shuddered in their courses!
Even Naldine’s existence braced slightly as the wave passed over her, her vihuela humming awake in response to the density of what had just been released.
|Civilization Activation Detected: THE Hadean Haki of Infinity.|
|This authority extends from your Cause and applies existential pressure across the surrounding region. Common Rhyacian and Calymmian Tier Proterozoic Scale entities cannot move freely under the weight of this Haki while your Cause sustains it. Higher-tier entities will experience significant hindrance depending.|
Naldine’s singularity-dotted eyes widened with astonishment.
She had sparred with him. She had been filled by him. She had been present for his ascensions and witnessed the unfolding of each new capability as it bloomed across his Hadean foundation!
And even she looked at him differently now, her frown tightening with the specific respect of a being who had just been reminded that she hadn’t yet mapped the full breadth of what he was.
Emotive turned toward him with eyes that had gone fervent in a way that bordered on religious.
On the island below, the Rhyacian Tier Primordial Architect who had been flung across the surface simply lost consciousness.
Her body went slack where it had been crumpled. Her power sputtered out of her like a candle in a draft, unable to maintain itself against the weight of Haki that her engineering wasn’t ready to process.
The other Primordial Architects who had been flung aside struggled to rise.
Their limbs shook. Their own weavings of authority slowed to sluggish crawls. They could move, barely, but they couldn’t move freely. The pressure had turned their every motion into labor, and their Greed-amplified foundations weren’t optimized for this particular kind of resistance.
Octavius smiled heavily.
He shook his head with the delighted incredulity of someone who had been presented with an even grander puzzle than he had bargained for.
"Man."
He rolled his shoulders beneath the pressure, working himself loose by fractions.
"Are you really the real deal? Man, alright! Come then! You may be grand, I’ll grant you that, you may be something the ordinary methodologies haven’t accounted for. But you..."
His pale gold eyes gleamed brightly through the weight of the Haki.
"You are not a Chosen."
You rose because you refused to stop rising.
He did not need permission to matter!
The abomination moved first.
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