Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5449

Chapter 5449: Choices and Consequences I

Noah’s expression turned heavy, and he prepared for anything, every Foundation coiled, THE Loyal Reach a thought away, his people held tight inside his blue. And yet the vessel made no further move. It had taken the Fifth and Fourth Scale Gilded Ones in its opening breath, and now it simply floated in the blood-colored sky.

And it looked at Noah.

"My dear, defiant Osmont," THE Sealed One said, warm as an old friend. "How has existence been treating you? You’ve been moving around a great deal, I’ve noticed. Doing things here, doing things there. Stripping my Gilded, eating my hand, speaking my name in polite company." The borrowed face smiled.

"No matter. None of it matters, truthfully. I am here today for a lesson. A small one, on Choices, and Consequence. You made choices. I made choices. And today, both of us will pay the consequences of them together. Are you ready?"

HUUM!

Noah’s existence buzzed harder, and he said nothing, and gave nothing, reading the vessel with everything he had. Borys emanated power at the full Fifth Scale even as a worn glove, and beneath that power sat something with no floor to it, the pressure of the thing wearing him bleeding through the seams.

"You know," THE Sealed One continued, conversational, drifting slowly closer through the frozen crimson air, "a great many plans of mine were ruined in this Observable Existence.Assets stripped. Wars I had spent Ages arranging, dismantled in an afternoon by you and your collection of strays. And I have learned, across a very long life, that when plans are ruined, one does not rage. One simply cuts one’s losses, and converts the loss into tuition." He spread Borys’s hands amiably.

"But here is where it becomes delicate, Osmont, and I want you to appreciate the delicacy. I have studied you. I know precisely what you are. You are a thing that eats adversity. Every trial makes you grander, every enemy feeds you, every wound closes over into armor. Fighting you is watering you. I will never provide you adversity. Not one drop of it. No duels, no contests, no glorious clashes for your record."

The smile widened, and the temperature of it fell.

"What I will provide," THE Sealed One said, "is the other thing. The idea of consequences. Because every choice has one, and no one has ever once presented you the bill before."

Above and behind the vessel, existence peeled open.

An appendage emerged, and it was not a hand and not a maw. It bloomed. A flower unfolded across the blood-red heavens, gigaparsecs of it, petal after petal of pale grey-blue flesh opening in slow concentric rings, each petal veined with silent weeping light, and at its heart turned a ribbed hollow like the inside of a mortar. It was beautiful in the way THE Queen Regnant’s tale had called the old brutality beautiful, perfect and patient and utterly wrong, an inherent appendage of the first True Lifeform, older than THE Scales, older than the frameworks, surfacing out of an era that existence had spent eons trying to forget.

"I do not wish to give you any adversity," THE Sealed One said softly, beneath his blooming flower. "So I will simply take. Take that which you love. Take that which you protect. Show you, one consequence at a time, what every choice you have ever made actually cost, with the price paid by everything except you." The aloof eyes glittered.

"Now. Do you know why, all those Ages ago, out of everything I did, it was one particular deed that made all of existence fear me? Do you know why I was feared as the one who swallowed and refined Observable Existences?"

...!

HUUM!

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