Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5728

Chapter 5728: One Punch!

She struck the center of her chest with a flat palm.

The scar across her sternum tore open in white light! A dense net of silver thread, superheated by the fire of THE Primordial Source, erupted from her ribs and fanned across the trench, miles wide in a fraction of a second, slicing through the coral.

Where the threads passed the rock went to grey powder, and the water behind the advance collapsed into vacuum.

The net hit Noah.

Red prompts flared across his sight.

|DECONSTRUCTIVE SENTENCE DETECTED: UNRAVEL DEPTH.|

|TARGET RECORD: You.|

|SUBTRACTION ATTEMPT: -50 VERITAS, -50 PROVENANCE.|

Then, his hand pulsed.

|BEDROCK ACTIVATED.|

|What was made cannot be unmade by what was merely given.|

|ATTRIBUTES LOCKED.|

A sound like spikes grinding on stone tore through the canyon. The argent threads caught on his skin, pulled taut, and stopped. White sparks fizzled off into the dark, and not one strand bit in. His numbers did not move!

Inside the band on his finger, Atlas let out a long breath.

|Look at that mess.| His tone was almost mournful. |They took my engineering and tried to build with it, and this is what they made. Primordial fire and argent thread forced together with nothing between them. Look at the seams leak. She is burning her own Existence just to keep the stitch from splitting...what a fucking mess!|

At the prow, Kaelen-Tor’s skin had gone see-through, her veins running violet as the graft ate her own vitality to hold the output!

Noah looked up at the three hundred hulls crowding the water above him.

"You have no Provenance of your own," he said.

His voice did not travel through the water as it landed in the mind of every Descendant in the trench at once.

He parted his lips and spoke one Word of THE Osmontian Tongue.

"THE MORTAL COIL."

HUUM!

The cavern shuddered as he imposed...a change of standing. It came out of his chest like a ring of cold blue gold brilliance and washed over the three hundred vessels, the hounds, and Kaelen-Tor.

Wherever it passed, the borrowed ground went out from under them.

THE DOMAIN OF THE MORTAL COIL did not touch flesh. It took the scaffold away. Every thread inherited from Those Who Remain, every law granted by the Ruling of Existence, simply stopped applying, and left each of them with only what they were on their own.

They held zero Provenance. They owned nothing they had made. So the fall was catastrophic!

The silver light of the three hundred vessels went out like blown candles. On the decks the Descendants gasped and staggered, limbs gone heavy, eyes wide, the plain fact of a body with limits pressing down on their chests.

Kaelen-Tor grabbed the railing with both hands as only her...only her dimensionality resisted!

The inscription on her chest, cut off from the Loom that fed it, sputtered, and the stolen weight she wore like a mantle thrashed under the grey and could not get out.

"Haha, what... what did you do, ugly fucker?" Her voice had gone thin!

Noah did not answer.

He raised his left arm. The skin went clear, and the gold under the bone caught the dark water as a heavy Narrative Inscription activated!

I AM THE PROTAGONIST.

The Common Dream Gu in the lattice stirred, and its small dream of warmth was drawn into the script and spent. Two hundred decillion quarks locked. Nine Teloi held one aim!

He stepped forward on the coral and drove his left fist up into the trench.

THE UNANIMOUS BLOW.

No beam and no blast as the whole undivided weight of a foundation of one mind moved, carried forward through mass. The fist met the dead, sputtering web of argent thread, and the space holding them parted!

The water split with a sound like a gate slamming, a corridor tearing open through the sea, and the blow crossed the airless gap and struck the lead vessel!

BOOM!

The hull split down the middle.

The shock went through the deck and hit Kaelen-Tor square in the ribs. Cut off from most of her power by the Coil, the grafted Narrative Inscription had nothing to soften the blow, and the mismatched forces inside it turned on each other!

CRACK!

"Agh!"

She dropped to the splitting deck, dark blood spraying from her lips, her sternum tearing open from the inside as the silver wires snapped. The seven hounds gave dry, muffled whines as their threads dissolved to ash.

She stared down at her own chest.

One blow. Even stripped of her Father’s mantle she still held over two hundred in Veritas and Pondus, and yet she had broken like a clay cup!

Noah was on the deck before the debris settled. On the vessels around them the Descendants were still down, gasping under the Coil as the Mantles and Narratives sought to stand up. He crossed the splintered timber and stopped in front of her.

She coughed a clot of silver-streaked blood over her chin and looked up at his pupils.

"You... are truly connected to Atlas?" she wheezed. "You think you are building something?"

She laughed with one hand clutching the ruin of her chest.

"I will tell you now. Whatever you think you are doing will not end in success. My Father, and all the others around him, are far too powerful. They decimated Atlas. They decimated Vakochev. They will decimate every tiny ant that tries to climb the ladder. Why don’t you all just stop?"

Her fingers dug into the wood, shaking.

"Existence is great. It is a paradise for those of us with power. We can have anything we want. You have the power too. You could have had everything. Why put yourself on a path of destruction?"

Noah looked down at her.

"A paradise where you crawl under someone else’s ceiling is a cage with a soft floor," he said. "And I don’t like cages."

He drove his right hand down and closed his fingers on her throat. Infinite Sanguine Mana poured into her like hot iron!

Her eyes went wide, the last breath going out of her as her records came apart under the heat as he took everything!

|SEDIMENT-SHED INTEGRATION ACTIVATED.|

The corrupted Argent Loom threads and the bloodline of THE Spindle hit his foundation and separated off it like grease off water, pushed out through his pores to drop to the seabed as black grit. What was left, the clean weight and the bare frame of the Tier 2 inscription, ran into his Existence.

Kaelen-Tor went limp and turned to pale dust between his fingers.

On the vessels around him, panic ensued!

Noah did not wait for them to do anything. He raised his hands and struck out into the water rapidly. Again. Again!

Phantom fists of red-gold mana bloomed through the trench, each one carrying the blunt weight of his foundation, each one hitting a vessel like a dropped boulder.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Descendants were flattened before they could draw breath, and the hounds were pounded to ash.

Inside half a second the fleet was gone. No screams left in the water, only ash!

Only ash!

Noah lowered his arms.

He swept a wave of Sanguine Mana across the canyon wall to wall. It ate every drop of blood, dissolved every scrap of bone, and scrubbed the stone of any lingering resonance. When he dropped the inverted Elsedimension, the trench looked the way it had an hour ago. Cold, dark, empty.

To anything watching, three hundred vessels had sailed into the Tide and vanished.

He looked at his left arm as out of and over abundance of caution, even though he had done everything inside an Elsedimension, his figure turned dreamy and illusory, as he began taking steps that covered countless Gigaparsecs as he moved once more!

Noah moved, dreamy and illusory, and while he moved the prompts caught up with him.

|+24 VERITAS. +22 PROVENANCE. +26 PONDUS. +21 OSMONTIAN MOIRAI.|

|Fuses THE Primordial Source and THE Argent Loom into a single expressed authority. Unstable. Corrodes its bearer. Powerful regardless.|

|So this is what they did with it,| Atlas said finally.

|They took what I designed for pairing two authorities and they forced the two worst ones through it. It eats the Descendant who wears it as she was burning her own existence just to keep it lit.|

|Well, even broken like this, even chewing its own bearer to the bone, it harnesses a tremendous amount of power. If they had not run into someone like you, someone who could strip the power out from under them, that woman would have been deadly..|

|And this is only a Descendant’s version. A hand-me-down. They took a great deal of my work, and if they kept at it, kept changing it, kept advancing it the way I would have... they did not stop at what they hung on their children. They will have applied the grander pieces to their own existences. Which means the ones sitting in the high seats are a good deal more than they were when they broke me on the mountain.|

|Alright.| He exhaled. |Alright. No matter. We got interrupted. We were talking about time.|

|When it comes to that,| Atlas said, |you have multiple bodies wandering around, yes? Keep this one here. Search for more Gu, you will need many as ingredients. But I need one of your other bodies to go somewhere. One of my closed-off Elsedimensions.|

|Provenance Lifeforms may already be crawling through it. With a Descendant you always know whose hand is on the leash. With a Provenance Lifeform, you will not know whether they came for themselves, or whether they came because Those Who Remain told them to so...go carefully as you are still young and brittle, and there are many much more powerful than you!|

---

<THE Infiniverse >

"I dream of being an eye in the sky that mimics the gazes of Those Who Remain. I am grand, and I am immense. But I am not alone in existence." His voice was quiet.

"Let me see the dreams of the people who got me here. I can be grander while I watch them, or help them, or move them. Let me start an infinite dream. And for now..."

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