Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5398

Chapter 5398: THE Defiler II

"I’m bringing a great many of them here, because here, in this destroyed Citadel, are some of the Gilded Ones responsible for producing those Ordnances. The ones who set them off. The ones who followed the chains of command. Basically everyone who had a hand in it. I’ll spare you, because of your sister, which is more mercy than you’ve earned. But you get to watch. You get to watch these Bounded Lifeforms, the ones your kind turned into mindless zombies, backed by a little of my Intent, devour the Gilded Ones who stood so very far above them. The ones responsible for what they became." His smile sharpened. "You... get to watch."

CRACK!

More of Dietrich’s neck bones gave as the infernal being lifted him higher, holding him up like a beast strung for display, forcing his gaze toward the ruin below!

And the slaughter began.

The Existential Acedia Dredges descended.

They came in waves, the silver-lit ocean of them crashing down upon the few million stripped Gilded Ones, and they carried power that was not their own, lent to them, an Intent riding underneath their mindless hunger and making the weak into something that could tear the strong apart.

They fell upon the hollowed Gilded Ones and they did not kill cleanly. They devoured!Dietrich watched a Superbius he had known for ages vanish under a dozen Dredges, watched the silver hands tear into the being and pull it apart even as the mouths closed on the pieces, watched a proud existence become a thing screaming and unmade and eaten in the same moment.

WAA!

It spread across the dead Citadel in every direction. Gilded Ones who had ruled, who had signed off on the deaths of quintillions as an acceptable cost, who had looked at the lower Observable Existence with its countless Living Existences and its Fold Dwellers and found the calculation reasonable, were dragged down into the silver tide and ripped open and consumed by the very beings their Ordnances had hollowed. The stripped ones could not fight. They had nothing left to fight with. They had been reduced to the Second Scale and the Dredges had been lifted past their station, and so the ones who had been titanrs to these Bounded Lifeforms a short while ago were torn into wet ruin and swallowed by the hundreds of thousands.

Blood that shone like ruined gold ran through the rubble. Limbs and fragments of foundation scattered and were snatched up and devoured. The screaming rose into a single sound that was not really a sound anymore, and underneath it the silent silver Dredges kept feeding, mindless, endless, a sea with no bottom eating an empire that had thought itself the top of existence.

Dietrich watched all of it, forced to, his eyes bleeding crimson-gold tears down his face, and beside him THE Defiler spoke, almost gentle, while a civilization was eaten alive below them.

"There’s a thing I’ve been turning over," THE Defiler said, watching the carnage with the calm of a man watching nothing. "About violence. About the beings who only ever know how to deal it outward, who build their whole existence on doing harm to things beneath them and never once imagine the harm turning around. Those beings don’t understand anything, you see. They can’t. They’ve never been on the other side of it. You can explain suffering to a being like that for a thousand years and it will nod and learn nothing, because the lesson doesn’t live in the words. It lives in the experience." He tilted his head.

"So the only thing that teaches them, the only thing, is the same violence done back. It’s not vengeance as its moreso...pedagogy. It’s the single language they were ever capable of learning, and they chose it themselves, and now they’re being taught fluently."

HUUM!

"If it weren’t for your sister," THE Defiler continued, "I think I might have simply wiped out every Gilded One on this entire Observable Existence. All of them. The whole rotten weaving, scoured clean." He sounded almost surprised at himself.

"And I genuinely don’t think I was capable of that before...look at what you fuckers can make people do. I used to be a being with limits I didn’t choose. But people change. Identity is paramount, and identity grows, and a being who lives fully by his identity becomes capable of things his smaller self would have flinched from. That’s all this is. Me, living by my identity. By my Intent. It’s a unique thing, really, to feel yourself become exactly who you are and discover what that makes possible. You wouldn’t understand it. You’ve never been anything but what was installed in you."

Dietrich roared.

He roared and he wept and the curses tore out of him broken around his ruined throat, calling THE Defiler every vile thing his hatred could reach for, a demon, a monster, a defiler, the cruelest thing that had ever crawled through existence, and below him the slaughter rolled on, the Gilded Ones dying by the hundreds of thousands, the sea of billions of Dredges swallowing the few millions whole, and Dietrich could see no end to it, could see no survivors, expected none!

And then, as he roared and cried out, at that very moment.

HUUM!

Far above, Dietrich felt it. The eruption of a terrifying Pride, vast and cold and proud, and he knew that signature, knew it in his bones, a Gilded One, and not one of THE Triassic Scale!

A Gilded One of THE Mesozoic Scale!

OH!

"KILL HIM!" Dietrich screamed. "Kill him, great Ealdor! Kill him! He is right here! He is the one responsible for all of it! He is right HERE!"

"You’re dead!" he bellowed. "You’re dead! You’re DEAD!"

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