Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5684

Chapter 5684: Ten Nanoseconds! II

The sky itself seemed to lean closer! The pressure of the two vast eyes doubled, hot mirth and cold appetite pressing down together, and torrents of Existential Moirai began to pour into the space between the two rulers, golden and thick, the Ruling setting its table for the grandest single exchange this Dimension had ever hosted!

The armies moved!

Hundreds of Primevals and Descendants flowed outward and around in vast slow currents, forming an enormous ring across the black plain, titans of bone and omen-blooded children of the architects circling shoulder to shoulder as spectators to the fate of their entire Dimension. The ring closed and the center emptied.

And the two rulers walked toward each other!

Ghurvakh came forward with slow seismic steps, his tail carving the stone, his forest of golden horns beginning to burn! THE Creature drifted forward to meet him, obsidian and white-gold flames trailing off his body, small before the horned mountain and entirely unbothered by the difference!

Behind THE Creature, unseen by every other existence on the plain, the massive statue followed.

It smiled brutally as it walked, and its voice arrived for him alone.

"I never expected something seemingly foolish from you," the statue said, and there was a strange, almost respectful curiosity threaded through its brutality.

"You had a higher chance of winning with the army. But by yourself... this is adversity you cannot overcome."

The statue had weighed the Horned Sovereign the same way THE Creature had, and it had reached the same honest sum!

THE Creature nodded calmly as he walked!

"I know," THE Creature said.

And then he said the thing that shocked even a remnant of Ages!

"So I am making a gamble with my existence. You have been seeking control of me... I give you ten Nanoseconds of full control of my existence, in exchange for clearing the obstacle ahead of me. After you deal with it, you are free to do what you wish with the remaining time."

...!

The statue stopped walking!

Its brutal smile faded, and for the first time in this entire campaign, for the first time perhaps in Ages, its carved face became grim! Full control. Freely given!

The thing it had circled and bargained and told stories toward, offered up in a single flat sentence, with conditions attached and a clock of ten Nanoseconds strapped to its wrists!

THE Creature closed his eyes!

And the statue MOVED!

It crossed the space between them faster than any measurable speed, faster than the concept of the space existing at all, and it smashed into the body of THE Creature!

CRACK!

Ghurvakh, THE Horned Sovereign, ROARED!

The sound flattened the burning clouds! The old monster surged forward across the emptied center of the ring, and as he came, he pulled his full arsenal into the light!

Chains of screaming gold erupted from his hunched back, and dragging at the ends of those chains came his hoarded Ages, multiple First Causes blazing like shackled suns, and beside them, miniaturized Observable Existences, entire compressed realities bound and dragged behind him as weapons, the plunder of a monopoly that had taxed a Dimension for eternity!

It was the arsenal of a true apex! It was a charge that could unmake armies!

And across from it, THE Creature opened his eyes.

They were pure white. There were no pupils. There was nothing in them at all that had ever been THE Creature, only a flat, bottomless, ancient white, like twin windows opened onto something that had been waiting behind a door for a very long time.

The body of THE Creature raised one hand, and tapped the air, emotionlessly, once.

The Horned Sovereign popped.

...!

There was no exchange! There was no clash of Causes, no contest of chained Existences, no battle at all! One instant a mountain of cursed majesty was charging with the hoarded arsenal of Ages screaming behind him, and the next instant his entire massive body burst like a bloody balloon, and what sprayed outward was not blood and was not flesh, for every fragment of Ghurvakh, THE Horned Sovereign, ruler of THE Vhelgaros for Ages beyond counting, turned to pure white ash before it could even land!

The chains fell. The shackled First Causes rolled loose across the black stone like dropped marbles. The miniaturized Observable Existences drifted, suddenly ownerless.

Silense!

An immense, total, crushing silence swallowed the entire Dimension! Hundreds of Primevals stood frozen in the great ring! Descendant Ilvexa stared at the white ash drifting where her husband had existed, her clawed hand still half-raised from her final warning! Even the torrents of Moirai hung motionless in the air, as though the Ruling itself needed a moment!

And the thing wearing THE Creature did not celebrate, and did not look at the ash, and did not acknowledge the succession it had just settled with a tap.

It looked around, instead, at the edges.

The white, pupilless eyes swept slowly across the boundaries of THE Vhelgaros, and they saw the faint crystallized barriers at the far borders, the streaking of the burning sky, the deep structural hum beneath the black stone, the signature of a Dimension that was not sitting still in the void but MOVING, coupled and chained and dragged along linear tracks through the crossing-dark!

THE Vhelgaros was a Dimensional Cabin!

This entire Dimension, this entire succession, this entire Narrative, was one carriage among many upon THE Dimensional Provenance Train of Existence, rushing forward through the lethal dark toward the architects’ grand design!

The thing in THE Creature’s body looked at the edges of its moving cage, and then it looked up.

At the two eyes.

It raised THE Creature’s left hand and waved it once, and a bow appeared!

The bow was pure white! It was tall as the wielder and taller, a single flawless arc of blinding white authority with a string of compressed brilliance, and the instant it materialized, every Primeval and Descendant in the great ring felt their existence scream at them to be anywhere else!

The white-eyed figure nocked nothing, and drew!

The string came back, and power began to accumulate!

It built and built and BUILT, white authority folding into itself in silent detonations, and the pressure of the draw alone rolled outward across the ring in expanding rings of pure weight, and half of the surrounding army, hundreds of Primeval Ones and omen-blooded Descendants who were not even the targets, simply fainted where they stood, titans of Ages collapsing across the black stone like scythed wheat as the accumulating force scraped their consciousness flat!

And the bow rose.

It rose past the horizon. It rose past the burning clouds.

It aimed at the two eyes of THE Immense Ones!

...!

Pure horror swallowed everyone still conscious in THE Vhelgaros!

Primevals who had knelt to tyrants for eternity, Descendants born from the very lineages of the beings above, all of them watched the white bow settle its aim upon the twin gazes of the architects themselves, and every single one of them understood that they were witnessing something that did not happen, that had never happened, that could not happen!

One did not aim at THE Immense Ones!

One did not even look at them for too long!

The white-eyed thing wearing THE Creature released.

Two shots, loosed simultaneously!

They surged upward like ascending spears of absolute white, and the power packed inside them was unfathomably grand, layered and braided and WRONG, multiple unique Causes swirling within each shot alongside an unknown power that no information named and no Records dared annotate, and they crossed the entire height of the burning sky in less time than a scream takes to begin, and they smashed directly into the two gazes of THE Immense Ones!

BOOM! BOOM!

...!

The moment the impacts landed, all of existence within this Dimension began to shake!

The black plain heaved! The crystallized borders of the Dimensional Cabin screamed across their entire length! The burning sky tore and bled light from horizon to horizon, and through the tearing, from somewhere unfathomably far above, roars echoed down into THE Vhelgaros, vast and layered and existence-filling, roars of pure incredulity and gathering rage, the sound of two beings who had come to watch a bloodbath discovering that the bloodbath had looked back and reached UP!

They weren’t hurt or even touched at all, but their dignity...oh their dignity!

And down on the shaking plain, the white faded.

The pupilless light drained out of THE Creature’s eyes, and his own gaze returned to him, and he came back to himself standing beneath a torn and screaming sky with a fading white bow in his hand and ten spent Nanoseconds behind him.

He looked tired and heavy. The weight of the possession sat on his body like a debt already being collected.

And then his expression became grave, gravely still, because the roars from above were still echoing, and the sky was still blazing, and he looked up, slowly, to see exactly what the thing he had given control to... had done!

The two vast eyes above THE Vhelgaros burned through the torn and bleeding sky, and the pressure that had been mirth and appetite only moments ago curdled into something that made every surviving lifeform on the black plain forget how to breathe!

Prompts slammed down across the entire Dimension, and for the first time, Existence itself felt like a wound!

|THE CACKLING BUTCHER has stopped laughing.|

|THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR declares this meal RUINED. It has been struck. STRUCK. In ten thousand dynasties of endings, nothing has ever dared to season itself.|

|The spectators’ grievance is being drafted into the Records!|

|Judgment gathers.|

WAA!

"Why did you do that."

And then the sky opened a third time.

HUUM!

|A third gaze has arrived.|

|THE REMINISCING WIDOW looks upon THE Vhelgaros.|

|She rarely watches anything anymore. She finds that most things remind her of something better, and then are not it.|

|THE CACKLING BUTCHER protests! It was STRUCK! Its dignity demands this Cabin’s erasure! The honor of Those Who Remain is not negotiable!|

|THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR protests! A spectator’s sanctity was violated! Precedent demands a deletion! What is dignity worth if insult goes unpaid?!|

|THE REMINISCING WIDOW replies: I do not care.|

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