Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5153

Chapter 5153: Calamity! IV

It felt odd to be killing Primordial Architects.

Hours ago, these beings had been so distant, so abstract, so far above the classifications. The Primordial Architect as a category had carried weight in his mind.

That had been hours ago.

Now they were folding under his attention like wet paper, and the folding felt distantly wrong.

He had been waiting to test the extent of his new power before he took on THE Quintessential Ego of Superbius V1 himself. He had wanted to feel the ceiling of his current Hadean configuration before he added another layer onto it. The idea had been reasonable- a calibration pass across the mid-tier Primordial Architects of THE Wyld, to establish a clean baseline measurement of where he stood.

So far, the calibration had been fucking abysmal.

Not as a reflection on his power. As a reflection on the Primordial Architects’ power. Every designated combatant he had reached through Emotive’s list had folded within a handful of seconds of his arrival!

The Calymmian ones did not even qualify as calibration. They qualified as confirmation that his current floor sat well above their ceilings.

Maybe he needed to find one at Ediacaran.

An Ediacaran Tier Primordial Architect with a properly engineered Ego amplification might, possibly, provide enough friction to reveal where his current capacities actually topped out. Possibly. He was no longer confident that even that would be sufficient!

Would he need to face THE Deliverance himself to see the scope of his power?

That was beginning to look like the answer. The ceiling of THE Wyld’s hierarchy sat with THE Deliverance and the three others of his stature, and none of the beings beneath that ceiling were going to give him the data he wanted.

Fucking scrubs.

He and Emotive stood on top of a massive Primordial Tree.

The tree rose from the ambient substrate of THE Wyld with the vast patient grandeur of something that had been growing since before most Civilizations had cohered into their current forms.

The peak of the tree held a broad platform of living wood, shaped across millennia into a natural terrace for whichever Primordial Architects had claimed this territory.

Five of those Primordial Architects lay pulverized across the platform.

Between his personal run and whatever Naldine and Midas were working through on their coordinated hunt, the count so far had to be more than thirty dead Primordial Architects.

More than a third of the designated eighty-one already scratched from the ledger.

In less than a few minutes.

As he was thinking all of this, Emotive cursed in shock beside him.

"Oh fuuuuck."

Her voice was uncharacteristically flat as Noah looked at her coldly.

"What?"

Her hair had cycled into a worried violet streaked with black. She turned to him with her eyes wide and her hands raised slightly in the air, the posture of a messenger who had just received bad news and was not entirely sure how the recipient of the news would respond.

"I have been keeping track of THE Creature’s battle on THE Gilded White Mountain. In the background, anh, alongside everything else, just tapping into the emotional residue of the engagement to monitor the progress. The emotions coming off that mountain have been extraordinary for my cultivation, by the way, just so you know, every Primordial Architect who died up there contributed something to my accumulated intake, and I have been eating very well across the last hour..."

"Focus."

"Right, right, right! The latest burst of emotions from the mountain was large enough and structured enough that I caught a few lines of conversation alongside the emotional signatures. Between THE Creature and Philemon Aristos. The two-headed one. One of the Four of THE Wyld, the four who stand at the same level as THE Deliverance."

Her violet hair deepened.

"THE Creature killed him a few nanoseconds ago. They were speaking before THE Creature pummeled him. They spoke about how Philemon’s death would call down a Gilded One. THE Creature... went to that mountain for that exact purpose. To kill Philemon so that Philemon would summon his Gilded Master down from...what the fuck did he call it? Oh, THE Braneworld Observable Existence. A Gilded One may be getting called down right now, To THE Wyld!"

...!

Noah heard this and frowned.

He had his own plans with Ubergulden Adelheid. Gilded Ones turning their attention this way was an impossibility under normal circumstances. Her whole explanation of the aquarium, of the casual disinterest of the upper tiers in whatever happened below, had been predicated on business proceeding normally.

Gilded Ones would not notice anything he did across THE Wyld because Gilded Ones had better things to do than watch fish fight each other in small glass boxes. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

What THE Creature was doing was not normal.

What THE Creature was doing was pulling a Gilded One down deliberately!

But Noah could understand THE Creature.

He could understand him very well, actually.

His partner desecrated in front of him. Engineered against her will and then killed. The specific cruelty of being forced to watch the defining act of violence against the being he loved most, and then being left alive to carry the memory across eons of climbing.

Noah asked himself, quietly, what he would do if such a thing happened to Adelaide. Or to Barbatos. Or to Athena or Anna or any of the women who had become woven into his own existence. If some being descended into his corner of reality, refused refusal, engineered one of them against her will, killed her in front of him, took what was left as a souvenir, and then departed...

BOOM!

All of surrounding existence shuddered at the thought alone.

The Primordial Tree beneath Noah’s feet groaned against a subsonic pressure that rippled outward from him in a single wave. The bodies of the five pulverized Primordial Architects shifted slightly in their arrangements. The ambient air for several gigaparsecs around him thickened!

He thought for a moment.

Then he asked calmly.

"Where... is THE Creature?"

---

Space fluctuated at the base of THE Gilded White Mountain.

Noah and Emotive appeared within the fluctuation as it resolved.

Noah took in the mountain immediately. The devastation across every tier. The rows of corpses arranged with patient neatness. The ruined temples. The scorched friezes. The slow streams of residual flame burning in the dimming Hearts of Civilization scattered across the lower balconies!

The mountain had been broken across the last hour in ways that would not be repaired in any meaningful timeframe.

He turned his gaze to see Anaximander at the base of the mountain.

Anaximander stood alone on the pale stone, his tall angular frame holding the quiet scholarly composure he always carried.

His attention had been turned toward the peak of the mountain before Noah and Emotive arrived, and now it shifted to Noah. A smile crossed Noah’s face. Anaximander’s eyes lit up in recognition.

Noah floated over toward him with a smile.

"It feels like a long time has passed, and yet not so long. Somehow only days. The feeling is strange..."

Anaximander’s sighed quietly, the sigh of a being who had been sitting with heavy thoughts for longer than he would have preferred.

"It is good to see you, Osmont."

"But the circumstances this time around are very heavy ones. Heavier, I believe, than either of us would have preferred at our next meeting."

"Stay."

"Ho."

"You... have changed tremendously. Something about you has changed completely since our last spar. The last time we stood near each other, I could read your configuration with reasonable clarity. I knew approximately what you were and what you were becoming. Now... I cannot quite put my finger on what you have done to yourself."

"What have you been up to, Youngest?"

"Yes. I have changed somewhat. I didn’t know some things, and I know a little bit now."

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