Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5317

Chapter 5317: Resuscitation! I

Noah descended into the storm.

The terminal infinity raged around him in obsidian gray currents that would have ended weak Ordovician Paleozoic Scale beings on contact, the unstable First Cause warring against itself across the space, definition and Undefinition tearing at each other in fronts that shifted faster than most perception could track.

THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian held it all away from him, the obsidian gold layer over his existence treating the storm as a condition to move through rather than a threat to survive.

He came near the little girl.

She turned in the storm she was holding back, and as he approached, her voice reached out to him. Small. Tender. Carrying beneath it the constant strain of someone speaking through pain that never stopped.

"You shouldn’t be here...Sir." Her eyes found him, wide and young and exhausted in a way that no child’s eyes should ever have been.

"Staying in a place like this too long, it can hurt your existence. Even strong ones. Please. You should go away. Go somewhere that doesn’t hurt."

She was warning him. Through everything she carried, with the endings of an entire Observable Existence channeling through her every moment, the first thing she did when a stranger approached was try to protect him.

Noah looked at her closely.

"I’m okay," he said. His voice was calm. "This doesn’t hurt me. You don’t have to worry about that."

She studied him with the careful attention of a child who had learned that hope was dangerous to hold.

"Tell me about yourself," Noah said. "About the Causes. About the endings. I want to understand."

She was quiet for a moment, turning slowly in the storm.

"The endings are everything," she said finally.

"When something ends, it doesn’t just stop. It feels itself stopping. Everything that was going to happen and now won’t, all of it presses together at once, and that pressing is what an ending feels like. I hold all of them. Every ending that wants to happen here, I hold it, so it doesn’t." She looked at her own small hands.

"I thought it would be like holding a door closed as it isnt. It’s like being the door. Everything that pushes against it pushes against me."

"How have you carried it this whole time?" Noah asked. "The endings of an entire Observable Existence. For so long."

Her face crumpled, just slightly, the expression of a child asked a question that reached the center of something.

"At first I didn’t know I could let go," she said quietly. "So I just held on. And then I learned I could let go, but by then I knew what would happen if I did. Everyone would end. All of them. The people in the dying Realms and folds and the people I never met and everyone." She turned in the storm.

"So I kept holding on. Every day it hurt more, but every day the reason to hold on was still there. The people were still there. They didn’t know about me. They never knew. But they...were still there, so I kept holding the door." Her voice grew smaller.

"I held it for them. Even though they don’t know I exist. Even though no one ever came to say hi or play with me. I held it because they were alive and I could keep them alive, and that seemed like a good enough reason to keep hurting."

BOOM!

The words hung in the storm.

"Do you want it to stop?" Noah asked.

"I held on because I knew others would die if I didn’t," she said, the words coming out broken. "And I would do it again. I would. But it hurts. It hurts so, so much. All the time. It never stops, not for one moment, not ever, and I’m so tired, and I don’t know how to keep being brave about it anymore. I...am so tired, Sir."

She looked at him with everything a child’s face could hold. "Please, Sir. Do something. Please. I don’t want everyone to die. But I can’t. I can’t keep doing this. Please, please do something!"

"There are always better choices in existence," he said. "People who tell you there are only two options have usually just stopped looking. The list is never as short as they say."

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