Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5152

Chapter 5152: Calamity! III

While one being began hunting Primordial Architects across THE Wyld, another had continued his assault on a distant mountain.

THE Gilded White Mountain no longer looked the way it had looked an hour earlier.

Its pale slopes were streaked with the residue of violence. The temples that had once risen in tiered arrangements along its flanks stood in various states of ruin, some of them fully collapsed into piles of their own white stone, others standing in half-standing configurations that the mountain’s structural authority could no longer sustain much longer. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

The golden roofs that had capped the temples had been peeled back or ripped away entirely. The friezes along the upper registers, the carved scenes of Gilded Ones receiving reverence from kneeling Primordial Architects, had been gouged and scorched, the faces of the Gilded figures specifically ruined by flames that had been applied to them with the deliberate care of a being who wanted the defacement to be noticed.

Corpses lay across every tier of the mountain.

Most of the Primordial Architects who had gathered on THE Gilded White Mountain were dead. Their bodies were arranged across the terraces and balconies in the same neat rows THE Creature had been using since the base of the mountain, each one opened cleanly along the structural seams of their Proterozoic Bones, each one’s organs extracted and laid out beside the body it had come from. The rows had grown long. Dozens of them. Each body a small testament to the methodical afternoon that had produced this mountain-wide stillness.

A few of the dead still held traces of warmth.

Their Hearts of Civilization, the organs that had held their personal Civilizations anchored throughout their lives, burned in their exposed chest cavities like candles about to go out. The flames of those Hearts flickered weakly, unable to hold themselves lit much longer without the beings they had once belonged to, and their dimming cast small orange glows across the pale stone beneath them. Within another hour, the last of those Hearts would extinguish, and the mountain would hold nothing but cold meat and cold stone.

At the top of the mountain, on the highest balcony of what had once been the grandest temple, THE Creature sat.

He sat cross-legged on the remains of the balcony’s outer railing, the carved stone beneath him cracked along several of its supporting beams but still holding. His multicolored golden flames had dimmed slightly from the peak intensity they had reached during the assault, but they still wreathed his body in slow steady licks, the bloody undertone beneath them now visible more clearly than before.

His posture was relaxed.

Beside him, on the floor of the ruined balcony, lay Philemon Aristos.

The two-headed Primordial Architect was almost split in half.

A long clean cut ran from the crown of his left head’s skull down through the center of his massive chest, exiting just above his waist.

His Proterozoic Bones were visible through the parted tissue of his torso. His organ systems, the inner architecture of an Ediacaran Tier Primordial Architect, lay exposed to the ambient air of the mountain.

His right head was intact and conscious. His left head hung slack and barely responsive, the plasmic golden flames around it guttered down to faint wisps!

His bones and organs shone weakly.

The fear in his eyes was fuckin’ considerable.

This was a being who had stood at the same approximate level as THE Deliverance. An Ediacaran Proterozoic Scale Primordial Architect whose amplified Ego and refined cultivation had placed him among the highest tier of Primordial Architects in THE Wyld.

And yet here he was, split across his chest, his plasmic flames guttering, his dead peers stretched out along the tiers below him in their neat rows, his own body already halfway reduced to the condition he would have resisted had he possessed any remaining strength to resist with.

He was going to die. He knew this. He had known this for some minutes now!

His right head turned slightly toward THE Creature.

His voice came out hoarse.

"If I die here..."

His words came in fragments, breath by breath.

"I will not die alone. Listen carefully. I bear the unique Engineering of that very same Gilded One you spoke of earlier. The False Golden Idol. The one who collapsed THE Soul eons ago. The engineering he did to me during my rise was his last favor to me, a favor granted because I served him loyally across epochs, and the engineering carries a protocol. The moment I die, the protocol activates. He will know. He will be notified of the manner of my death and the location of my ending, and he will come down from THE Braneworld Observable Existence to address the one who killed me..."

His remaining mouth worked.

"That was his last favor. That was what he gave me. He gave me a tether to his attention, so that no matter where I died or how, he would respond. He gave me a guarantee of immortality...."

His right head fixed its dimming eyes on THE Creature’s face.

"Do you truly want to face a Gilded One right now? Stop this. Walk away from this mountain. You have done enough already. You do not want the attention of THE Gilded Ones right now. You are not ready. No being at your current classification is ever ready. Walk away. I will not pursue you if you let me live."

...!

THE Creature’s multicolored golden flames flickered once.

He leaned down.

The lean brought his face close to Philemon’s remaining head, close enough that his burning breath washed over the cooling skin of the dying Primordial Architect. His posture was almost tender in its proximity, the posture of a being about to whisper a secret, the posture of an old friend sharing one last intimate confidence before the parting.

"You coward."

He tilted his head slightly.

"Do you want to know something? I came here precisely for that. I came for you specifically, because I knew you carried the densest engineering of THE False Golden Idol."

His flames brightened a fraction.

"I came for you to call down your Master."

He let the words settle against the side of Philemon’s ear.

"Whether you can do that while alive, through some deliberate summons I might extract from you through more patient persuasion, or whether you have to be dead for the protocol to fire on its own, is entirely of no consequence to me. Either path gets the Gilded One into my presence. I am indifferent as to the method. I lean slightly toward the dead method, actually, because it requires no cooperation from you, and I do not enjoy cooperating with beings I plan to kill anyway."

HUUM!

Philemon’s remaining head stared at him.

The dread that bloomed across his face was different from the dread that had come before. Earlier, when he had realized his defeat was imminent, the dread had been personal.

The dread of his own ending. What flooded his features now was something larger. The dread of a being who had just understood that his entire participation in this encounter had been miscalibrated. He had been trying to threaten THE Creature with the very outcome THE Creature had been pursuing!

His final leverage had been the thing his opponent wanted most!

Oh!

Fuck!

"Are you crazy?"

"That is a Gilded One. That is a full adult Gilded One at THE Paleozoic Scale. THE Third Scale. A being whose power sits above this entire mountain by a margin that makes everything you have done here today functionally irrelevant! You will die. You will die the moment he turns his attention toward you!!! You are not even at THE Third Scale yourself. You are still within THE Proterozoic. The gap between your classification and his is..oh, you fool!"

"Even if you were at THE Third Scale, his Third Scale is much grander than yours would be. Gilded Ones at Paleozoic exceed Bounded beings at Paleozoic by orders of magnitude that the classifications themselves cannot fully express. You cannot do this. You cannot do this! You! Are you mentally checked out?! Have you gone so far into your grief that the climbing has broken your capacity to judge what is fucking possible? You dumb motherf-"

"Scales, scales, scales."

"Why are you so tightly wound on the Scale of someone? Every word out of your remaining mouth, every last protest you’ve offered me in these final minutes, has been structured around Scale. He is Third Scale. You are Second. I am beneath you. He is beneath him. The numbers circulate between us like the only currency that matters, and every being on this mountain has been taught to reason through those numbers as if they settled every question they touched."

"Osmont, the one you call THE Infinity-bearer, has killed Second Scale beings while he was still at the First Scale. He has done this repeatedly. He has done it as a matter of methodology rather than as a surprising accident. He stood at THE First Scale, and he reached upward across the gap your classifications told him was uncrossable, and he reached with enough conviction and enough foundation to settle the matter in his favor. The Scales said he could not. He could. So...The Scales were incorrect."

"Why bother with what Scales tell you you can do? The Scales were drawn by beings whose interest was to contain. Containment is what frameworks do. They slot. They rank. They say here is where you stand and here is where you end. They were not drawn by beings whose interest was to see what would happen if the slotted things climbed beyond their slots. So the Scales measure accurately what beings typically do. They do not measure what beings are capable of attempting. The two are not the same, Philemon. They... have never been the same."

"Have your Civilization decide, big guy. Your Civilization, when you quiet down the noise of the classifications, has its own opinions about what you can and cannot do. Most Primordial Architects never ask their Civilizations directly. They listen to the Scales instead. That is why they live and die according to the Scales. That is why you are lying on this balcony right now with your chest open to the air. You listened to what the Scales permitted you to do, and the Scales permitted you to do what a being at your tier typically does, and it turned out that what a being at your tier typically does was insufficient for the encounter that actually arrived."

"Now come. Call your Master down. You said your death would accomplish it, and you seemed certain about that part, so I see no reason to argue with you about the method."

"Alrighty then."

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