Valeria spun once through the air, hit the stone of the island, skidded, and came up into a crouch twenty paces away. Her braids had come loose along one side. A thin line of golden blood traced down her cheek from the corner of her brow. She straightened with measured calm, her shoulders rolling as she reset her posture, and then she drew both blades of infinity again without a word.
Above, the abomination completed its spin.
It came back down toward Noah faster than it had gone up!
Its jaws didn’t open this time. Its hands extended forward in front of its body, and from those hands erupted long jagged talons made of concentrated madness, THE Gamaidian given edge and purpose!
The air screamed around the talons as they descended, Infinity twisting into configurations that refused to resolve into any stable geometry.
Octavius launched new weavings from behind the abomination.
His Unity reached through the air in coordination with the abomination’s strike, not trying to bond with Noah now but trying to bond with the talons themselves, trying to graft them into Noah’s body once they connected so that the embedded weapons would root and spread and turn Noah into new soil for Primordial Mycelia.
Valeria came in from the left again at the same instant.
Three angles. Three attacks!
Three different methodologies converging on his standing position with the precision of a rehearsal that had been waiting!
Oh!
Noah watched all of it.
His eyes drank in the weavings as they approached. The mad Infinity of the abomination, wild and beautiful in its chaotic saturation. The Unity of Octavius, patient and infinite in its approach!
Valeria’s cutting Infinity, clean and scholarly in its geometry. Three different expressions of what Infinity could become in the hands of beings who had been engineered to hold it, and all three of them reaching for him at once.
He found himself genuinely interested.
The madness especially. THE Gamaidjan was rare. Most beings who fell into it were consumed too quickly for any meaningful study, their weavings dissolving into incoherent pressure before anyone could trace what the madness was actually doing to them at the fundamental level. But here it was, harnessed, walking, attacking with something that passed for strategy!
Octavius had achieved something grand.
Noah smiled brilliantly.
He raised both his hands upward into the descending convergence of attacks.
HUUM!
Seas of blue Infinity erupted outward from his body in concentric waves, the blue deepening through cobalt and into something closer to void as the density compounded against itself.
Multicolored Quintessence Infiniforce bloomed between the blue currents, golds and violets and purple and silvers braiding through the blue without mixing with it, each color holding its own distinct weaving. The ambient Infinity of the region bent toward him. The rivers of Observable Force on the island curved upward to feed his expanding authority!
Above his head, THE Hadean Pillar of Infinity manifested.
It rose from his crown as if it had always been there and had simply been waiting for permission to be seen. Crystalline blue trees of THE First Tongue formed its base. Multicolored flames of Existence licked through its mid-tiers. Infinite mirrors of Paradox reflected impossibilities at every angle. The eternal storm of Chaos swirled at its apex, and beneath that apex the additional actualized Civilizations layered themselves in concentric halos of authority!
The Pillar towered upward toward a sky that suddenly seemed very small by comparison.
His voice rolled out across the island with calm grand finality.
"Freeze."
...!
HUUM!
Every entity whose body held Infinity within it froze in place!
The abomination’s descending talons halted a hand’s width from Noah’s upraised palms. Its body hung in the air above him, arrested mid-motion, its glistening mad eyes wide and unmoving!


|Civilization Activation Detected: THE Hadean Pillar of Infinity - Dominion of Internal Infinity.|
He...wasn’t mad!
"Infinity!"
"All of you, every single one of you, you carry it inside yourselves and you speak of it as if it belongs to you. You call it yours. You cultivate your amplified Egos to withstand it, and you tell yourselves that the withstanding is mastery. That holding the flood makes the flood into something that serves you!"
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