Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5395

Chapter 5395: Stripped! I

While one body crossed the dark toward a dying Observable Existence with his family on THE Loyal Reach, the rest of Noah kept moving, because his pace had never once been the kind that allowed for resting.

In THE Source Lands, the body that walked among the Gilded Ones had left the settlement behind and set off toward the treasure that Marxist and the Ealdor Gilded Ones wanted. Things had shifted a great deal since he stood on that wall and put Dietrich in a crater.

His power had climbed rapidly in the time since, and Existence around him had been moving too. Taylor of the Light had reached out to him with news. She and Adrastia had become Attendants of the Swords of Existence, and Adrastia had taken a mission into the Strand of Broken Scales to learn why the Source Beasts there were dying in greater and greater numbers. He had found Gilded Ones at the root of it, and he had blown the whistle immediately. Now Relictus and Swords of Existence were being dispatched, to the Strand and to every other region the Gilded Ones had quietly infiltrated.

Change was coming for the Gilded Ones whether Noah pushed it or not.

He weighed that as he traveled, because his pathways could shift quickly depending on how events flowed, and a being with a dozen bodies learned to read which roads were still worth walking. He did not have to keep playing the loyal Custos lost in the throngs of Gilded Ones grasping for a treasure. Eon wanted to change her people, and the change had already begun.

In THE Braneworld, Emotive was lighting the Luxuria uprising, THE Great Usurper was binding the Acedia chain under Unity, and Alexander carried the stripped power of millions. THE Primordial Paradox had sent word as well, that he and Erwin, the teacher and student who had spent ages trying to collapse one another, were now moving against the Gilded Ones together.

So change was definitely coming to the Gilded Ones of THE Braneworld. From every side at once!

Which meant the body wearing a Custos’s identity could afford to stop pretending. It could change its path.

---

Noah and Eon stood at the edge of a rising glacial landscape, and Ubergulden Dietrich stood before them wearing a hateful expression he had not managed to set down since the crater.

Rows of Gilded Ones waited behind them, and more rows stretched ahead, led by Marxist, the shrewd old man in beast-skin and bone who had welcomed Noah into the settlement with every grievance intact. The vibrant green forest they had crossed gave way here to massive glacial foliage, frost-rimed and pale, climbing toward a mountain that shone with the auras of hundreds of Source Beasts. Many of them sat at the Third Scale. Several burned at the Fourth. Whatever treasure the Gilded Ones wanted up that mountain, it was guarded by a slaughter’s worth of powerful beasts.

And the treasure was not enough to move Noah. Not enough to make him climb that mountain and kill hundreds of Source Beasts for the sake of a prize the Ealdor Gilded Ones coveted. He had no quarrel with the beasts, and he had stopped, a while ago, doing work that did not serve his own ends.

Well, and he even had the oath when he was sworn in as a Sword!

So he turned to Eon, and took her hand, and looked into her eyes.

"Do you trust me?" he asked, calm.

...!

His gaze was intense, and it made her tense, a brief tremble running through her at the directness of it. She bit her lip, a small uncertain thing, and then she nodded.

Noah nodded back.

"I promised you change for your people," he said. "I’m going to bring it. I’m just going to take a different route to it than this one. Okay?"

...!

Eon breathed out, slow, like a being steadying herself before stepping off a height. And she nodded again.

"O, Superbius."

HUUM!

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