Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5160

Chapter 5160: Golden Wrath! III

Noah knew the smarter and more logical thing to do was to simply bend his head down and not say or do a single thing.

THE Creature had already set everything up with a fabricated history, had carved an entire alternative sequence of events into the readable weavings of what had occurred, had positioned Noah and Emotive and Anaximander as incidental survivors who had only escaped THE Relictus’s assault because the greater targets had consumed THE Relictus’s attention.

If any being watching from outside had been privy to Noah’s internal debate at this moment, they might have scratched their heads and wondered why he was making such an illogical choice when the alibi was already in place and the only required action was silent compliance. Bow the head. Let the Sororis Prima proceed. Accept whatever adjustments she intended to make to the broader Observable Existence and address the consequences later, once her attention had moved elsewhere and his power had grown significantly could address those consequences properly.

It was the correct play. It was the move any outside observer with a functioning grasp of logic would have recommended!

But truly, the moment he bowed his head would feel like a moment where fractures bloomed in his Civilization.

He knew the shape of those fractures because he had carried similar fractures in him across other moments of his existence when circumstances had demanded a capitulation his core had refused to offer.

It was like mundane normal humans crossing paths with other humans who happened to be richer or who held positions of power, and choosing not to meet their eyes or speak up, choosing to shrink slightly so that the passage through the encounter would produce the least friction possible.

The choice got them in less trouble in the moment. The encounter passed and the day continued. But they would remember that shrinking afterward, would carry the memory of having abandoned their posture for the sake of convenience, and across the years the accumulation of such small capitulations produced beings who could no longer recognize the versions of themselves that had existed before the capitulations had begun.

The fractures compounded quietly. The original shape of the person eroded along the seams of every small unspoken yielding.

So yes. It was not the most logical thing to do. But he still dared to look at a Gilded One, at a Sororis Prima, and say no!

Thinking of all this reminded him of a particularly unpleasant memory of a man he had hated with every bone in his body across the full span of his earliest years of existence.

Thinking of all this reminded him of the only man he had ever bent his head down to, because truly, he had feared him.

Not respected, not honored, not admired, but feared in the specific way of a child facing a being whose capacity to hurt him exceeded any capacity he possessed to defend himself. It reminded him...of his father.

The memory flashed in his mind like something he could not suppress, and in the stretched instant of his Hadean Mind pulling this moment into extended perception, the memory unfurled with the crisp brutal clarity of a small human scene he had been carrying across more years than he cared to count.

---

He was twelve years old at the time, in that broken-down home in the living room with the stained carpet and the curtains that never properly closed.

His father had stood up from the couch where he had been lying most of the afternoon, his stained robe hanging open and his beer belly sticking out in a pale round hemisphere above the waistband of sweatpants that had not been washed in longer than the boy had been alive, holding a leather belt in one thick hand and a half-empty bottle of beer in the other.

The television behind him was playing something loud that nobody was watching. The light in the room was yellow and dim because one of the bulbs in the overhead fixture had been burned out.

His father had asked him coldly.

"I sat and watched you little shit the whole day while your mother worked, and when I bring a woman friend over, you tell your mom about it? Didn’t I tell you to keep your mouth shut?"

The twelve-year-old version of Noah had looked at his father with teary eyes that he had been trying very hard to keep from spilling over, because spilling over would have invited a different and worse kind of response from the man who had just stood up, and he had been defiant.

He had not wanted to see what his father had been doing with the woman friend who kept coming over when his mother went to work. He had not wanted to be told to stay quiet about it. He had not wanted to carry secrets that did not belong to him but that he was being forced to hold for the comfort of an adult who had never shown him a single moment of genuine comfort in return.

So when he had looked up at his father with that small defiant gaze.

The twelve-year-old version had met the eyes of the man who had fathered him, and those eyes had held nothing. Not anger or rage exactly.

Simply the flat contempt of a being who considered the small creature before him an inconvenience that needed to be addressed so that the afternoon could continue undisturbed.

His father had beaten him with that belt again and again.

The first strike had landed across his shoulder and sent him stumbling sideways into the coffee table. The second strike had caught him across the back of his legs as he tried to steady himself. The third strike had knocked him to the carpet entirely, and the subsequent strikes had landed while he was down, the leather biting into his back and his arms and the parts of his body he tried to curl into a protective ball around his chest.

His father had not shouted during the beating. His father had spoken steadily, the way a man speaks when he is delivering a lecture that he believes to be instructive rather than cruel.

"When I talk to you, you look down and listen. You do not look at me like that. You do not look at me with that fucking face of yours like you think you have something to say about anything. I gave you your life. I can take it away. Do you understand? Do you fucking understand?"

The twelve-year-old him had understood.

He had kept his head down after that,crying. The leather belt still landing across his back in measured intervals that had begun to space themselves out as his father’s arm grew tired.

He had not raised his head to meet his father’s gaze for the remainder of that afternoon, and he had not raised it for many afternoons that followed, because the pain of the beatings was real and the fear of the pain was realer still, and he had been twelve years old and his father had been a grown man twice his size and three times his weight, and there had been no framework available to the twelve-year-old in which raising his head would have produced any outcome other than more belt strikes landing across a body that was already bruised in patterns that would take weeks to fade.

He had feared what that useless man, that much bigger than him, could do to him.

He had hated that memory so, so much.

He was not going to bow his head now.

"Am I interrupting you from your thoughts?"

"No. I’m listening."

"I was saying no. I do not agree that those of us here need to be further bounded and severed. We did nothing to deserve such treatment."

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