Ragnar V49 and Ragnar V55 moved simultaneously an instant after!
This was not coordination in the way that coordinated attacks required planning between separate consciousnesses. It was something closer to the simultaneity of two identical instruments played by the same hand, the mass-produced architecture of their engineered existence producing identical instincts at identical moments across two separate bodies.
Both of them crossed the distance between their positions and Noah’s with the speed that had characterized V49’s opening strike in the prior battle, the speed that bypassed perception-extension and arrived at conclusions before the preparation for those conclusions had finished.
Both of THE Bellum Cause and THE Dominion Cause erupted simultaneously from both massive frames, the compound force of two Prime Cause integrations from each of the two Ragnars converging on the single coordinate where Noah floated with his head tilted slightly back and his tyrannical smile playing on his bestial lips.
The attacks did not reach him.
Not because he moved. Not because a barrier materialized between his skin and the incoming force. Not because the attacks were absorbed or reflected or countered through any visible mechanism that the assembled thousands of Gilded Ones had a framework to classify.
The attacks arrived at the threshold of his Infinite Vector’s passive field and found their direction, their magnitude, and their intent rewritten simultaneously in the fraction of the instant before contact.
THE Bellum Cause force from V49’s right hand had its direction reversed, arriving back at V49 from the angle it had departed at. THE Dominion Cause authority from V55’s simultaneous strike had its intent rewritten so thoroughly that the force which had been moving toward Noah’s position began instead reinforcing the ambient multicolored fire still burning through the Wandering Territories, feeding it rather than striking through it.
V49 absorbed his own Prime Cause strike.
He staggered in the air, his massive frame shifting backward by a distance that communicated genuine surprise at the force, which was his own force plus the Vector’s magnitude adjustment, arriving back through his own foundations at amplified intensity.
HUUM!
V55 found his Cause authority simply gone, redirected into the surrounding fire before he could account for its disappearance from his own expression!
Noah had not moved.
He floated at the same coordinates he had occupied before both Ragnars had closed the distance, his posture unchanged, the multicolored flames of his Infinity still burning around his crown with their patient continuous expression!
His crystalline eyes carried the specific quality of a being who had just confirmed something he suspected and found the confirmation magisterial!
The assembled Gilded Ones went quiet.
Quiet, the specific quiet of thousands of beings!
BOOM!
And a terrifying progression bloomed because Noah decided he was bored with the defensive demonstration.
He looked around him at the thousands of Ordovician Paleozoic Scale Gilded Ones distributed across the Wandering Territories in their formations, their bodies still bearing the burn marks his opening Fire had placed across the surfaces of those with thinner defenses, their Infinity reserves depleted from the Kilonova chain his Apeiron had left behind before their collapse.
The Infinity within them, diminished as it was, was still Infinity.
It still had direction and magnitude and intent.
He reached outward with THE Infinite Vector’s active application, not forcefully but with the specific ease of a being speaking in their native language, and he spoke the Infinity within and around every Ordovician Paleozoic Scale Gilded One in his perceptual range a new set of properties simultaneously.
New direction: toward him.
New magnitude: compressing inward, the Infinity folding itself tighter and tighter within each affected Gilded One the way a star compresses under its own gravity when the outward pressure fails, the compression accelerating as the distance between them and Noah decreased.
New intent: fuel.
He waved his hand!
HUUM!
The gesture carried the specific casualness of a being swatting something like a fly away from their meal, and the result it produced was the opposite of that gesture’s ordinary meaning.
BOOM!
Hundreds of Ordovician Paleozoic Scale Gilded Ones lurched from their positions across the Wandering Territories and began moving toward Noah with a speed that had nothing to do with their own volition and everything to do with the Infinity inside them having been told it was going somewhere specific and going there efficiently!
They moved like projectiles because that was what THE Infinite Vector had made them, the compression accelerating their trajectories toward the single coordinate their Infinity was now pointing at!
The expressions on the faces of the Gilded Ones passing through the air at velocity they had not generated were shocked!
Noah opened his jaws as he fucking planned to eat this projectiles of Gilded Ones!

The formation technique Vaeltharion had initiated had stalled, the Ordovician Scale contributors to its collective power now being redirected at Noah as fuel rather than into the formation’s architecture.
The nine Ragnars did not become projectiles.

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