They kept glancing at the explorer who floated calmly beyond the battle with no authority around him whatsoever, doing, as far as any sense could detect, absolutely nothing.
And when they looked at him in their fury, they actually saw him wiping sweat from his forehead, dabbing at it with his sleeve like an academic in an overheated lecture hall, and they wanted to curse him! What was he so tired from when he was just floating there?!
...!
Their distraction cost them everything.
THE Creature’s Pantheon closed. The red sea folded upward in continental walls as the Burden descended one final time upon both leaking, doubting, hemorrhaging existences, and THE MAW opened wider than it had ever opened, wide as a horizon, and THE Creature drove both Gilded True Lifeforms into it with his own bleeding hands!
He devoured them!
Their bodies, their Appendages, their screaming and unraveling Intents, wrath and pride and every last golden thread of two True existences, all of it poured down into the burning dark of THE MAW as the sea finally, finally went still!
And THE Creature fell.
His titanic frame smashed into the calm red water and lay there, half-sunken, breathing heavily as obsidian flames flickered low across dozens of wounds, his existence groaning as it began to heal! Deep within him, the boons of devouring two powerful True Lifeforms churned through his foundations, wrath and pride and Trueness breaking down into raw existential wealth, his frame drinking it all as his grades creaked upward, and Existence, for once, simply floated on its back and processed.
"..."
Anaximander whistled and floated over.
The scholar drifted across the settling waves, and then his eyes blinked wide in wonder as he finally noticed the colossal pale limb floating in the distance, the severed leg with clouds around its heel!
"Oh my. What Lifeform left such a limb behind?"
His eyes sparkled with a pure, bottomless need to understand.
THE Creature breathed out heavily from the water, and waved one bleeding hand.
"The limb of a Primeval One. You can have it." He said it flatly, easily.
"I wouldn’t have even come close to getting it without your help."
...!
He said such words casually, handing away a treasure that a True Lifeform of the Sixth Scale had been bleeding themselves to siphon, for THE Creature had tremendous control over his greed!
Anaximander blinked at him. Then he laughed, loud and delighted, robes shaking.
"What use have I for something so big? Come on, I’ll study it, maybe cook a bit of it, and then you can have it after." He settled cross-legged onto the air above the healing titan, grinning. "It is great seeing you again, Old Friend. I only wish Osmont was here too, so we could all enjoy this properly! I have so many stories. I met so many interesting things! There was this dimension made entirely of arguments, and a creature that only existed on alternating days, and..."
THE Creature calibrated his existence in the water below, and interrupted mildly.
"Osmont is in this Dimension too. Just somewhere very far, as I can’t easily reach him."
At these words, Anaximander’s eyes lit up like twin stars!
"Osmont is here too? Haha!" The Explorer clapped his hands once. "Then it should be easy for us all to get together. I can just take us to him."


"You know, after I left our Observable Existence, I crossed through multiple Dimensions," he said, walking slowly along the air beside the limb as if strolling a museum hall. "I just wanted to get away and explore! And in all the Dimensions I have been in, all of them, Primeval Lifeforms are deemed those at the top. The apex above apexes! You do not readily find a limb of one just...lying around." He gestured at it, delighted.
"I heard stories of Dimensions that served as old battlefields, places where many Primeval and True Lifeforms died in ancient wars, and I was planning on making a trip to one eventually. But this will do..."
VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABEL
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse