Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5432

Chapter 5432: Gu! II

The Gu’s eerie eyes passed across body after body, lingering, sorting, the white wings trembling, the hall holding its breath. Across the kneeling Swords. Across the shrouded personages. And then they locked, all of them at once, onto a single figure. A burly, muscular woman near the throne, powerful and broad, a long fish-like tail coiled beneath her where legs should have been.

The Gu Archaeognatha cried out!

WUUUU!

It was a horrific sound for so small a thing, a high grinding shriek that scraped at the ear and did not stop, a noise of pure accusation, and every eye in the hall snapped to the fish-tailed woman.

She played it off at once, drawing herself up, her broad face creasing in defiance.

"This is preposterous!" she bellowed. "I serve THE Source! I serve her Majesty! I have served for ages! I have bled for THE Swords! I..."

She did not get to finish.

THE Queen Regnant locked onto her, and the immensity of her power crashed down and sealed the entire hall again, time and space and motion pinned beneath the will of THE First Sword. The fish-tailed woman froze mid-word. And THE Queen Regnant’s eyeless mask burned with an anger so vast and so wounded that the tendrils of it shivered, and she asked, silently, into the woman’s mind alone, a single word.

Why?

And the exposed Follower stopped.

The panic drained out of her all at once, the bluster falling away, and a strange unfathomable calm settled over her broad features, the calm of a being who had been found and had decided, in the finding, to stop pretending. She met her Queen’s fury without flinching.

"You ask why," she said quietly, "as though there could be a why that would satisfy you. There isn’t...there isn’t. There’s only what’s true, and you’ve never wanted to hear it." Her voice was steady, almost gentle.

"I have watched the ages turn, Queen Regnant. And I have understood, the way you refuse to understand, that nothing lasts. In the end, when every Age has burned down to its last ember, only one will reign supreme over all of it. Only THE Sealed One. I simply chose to kneel early, while kneeling was still a choice and not yet a mercy. That is the whole of my why. He wins. He always wins. I only...wanted to be on the right side when he does."

"..."

There was a silence. Then...

THE Queen Regnant crushed her.

She did it with all the grief and fury of a being unmaking something she had loved, and the terrible part, the part that made it so much worse, was that the Follower did not struggle. She did not fight or flee or beg or erupt with any authority.

’Thank you. Forgive me. Forgive me.’

"Sis Regnant," she said softly. "Listen to me. THE Originals received your message. This is not a burden for you and your Swords to carry alone, and you will not be allowed to try. I am only the first line of support, but I am here, and I am yours in this for you to command. The others will send their own. We shoulder THE Sealed One together, the way it was shouldered the first time, or we do not shoulder it at all." She squeezed the shoulder gently.

"I have also been tasked with something else. The safety of the New Sword who brought you all this news. I know you sent him on to THE Effluvium Sanctum, and I only passed through here to say hello to you before going to him. I will set off now, to make certain there are no abnormalities around someone so important. Are you all right here?"

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