Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5731

Chapter 5731: A Glorious Dream! III

The story didn’t end when THE OVERSEEING ONE left, it was only made...free.

Noah watched from above, unblinking, as the Dark Lord straightened in the middle of his shadow and felt the sky go empty over him. No more gaze pressing down. No more hand moving the pieces. And instead of relief, the thing let out something that in a smaller creature would have been a laugh!

He’d been holding back. That was the part none of the heroes had understood. The whole time the Overseeing One watched, the Dark Lord had fought the way the story asked him to fight, a wall, a thing that stood and took and gave nothing. He hadn’t been trying to win. He’d been trying to be left alone, and standing still was the closest a chess piece got to that.

Now no one was watching. Well, or so he thought, so he stopped standing still.

The shadow came off him all at once as it dropped over the whole floor of the Cabin like a lid closing on a jar, and everywhere it touched, Exietence stopped meaning anything. This was his real power, the thing the Overseeing One had leashed to a role, and it was worse than nullifying strength!

It nullified everything.

The Peacemaker loosed a shot filled with Causes and the arrow simply forgot it was an arrow halfway to him. The Primordial Paradox held two states at once and the shadow reached them and neither state was true anymore, neither false, just gone.

Descartes’ philosophy and wonder, whatever he’d built with the golden bones, met the falling dark and lost the argument it had been making, its logic pulled out from under it mid-sentence!

HUUM!

Noah felt the fight tip. The heroes had been rising while the eye held them to a story. Now the story was off, and there was nothing above them anymore, and there was nothing holding the Dark Lord to a shape!

He could not be beaten. That was simply true. A thing that unmade meaning could not be out-argued, out-shot, or out-thought, because argument and arrow and thought all stopped being what they were the moment they came near him. The heroes were going to lose, and this time there was no author to complain to about it!

Except for one thing the Dark Lord had missed.

Eckert.

—

Back when the eye still watched, Eckert’s unity had crept quiet through the dark ranks, mind to mind, and reached at last for the center. The Dark Lord had felt it come and nullified it, the way he nullified everything, and it should have thinned and died at the edge of his shadow like all the rest.

It hadn’t.

Noah had held it there. A single thread of his old Infinity, fed patient into Eckert’s easy dream, keeping the unity bound to the Dark Lord’s edge even as the shadow tried to unmake it. It had been a small thing, unnoticed, a splinter under a fingernail while the giant fought with both hands. Now the giant had turned all his weight on the heroes, and the splinter was still there, and Noah pressed on it.

’This man does not wish to be a chess piece,’ Noah sent, down the old thread, into the mind wearing Abbadon’s stolen body. ’Erase everything about his will, entirely, and let him rest. Then you can use him. He will be your sharpest weapon yet.’

For a moment nothing answered.

Then Eckert’s unity, held to the Dark Lord’s edge by a hand it hadn’t known was there, stopped creeping and started to bite.

BOOM!

The shadow flinched. For the first time since the Overseeing One left, the falling dark that unmade everything it touched met a thing it could not unmake, because the unity wasn’t power and it wasn’t meaning. It was a decision, one mind spreading into many, and Noah’s Infinity had welded it to the one place the Dark Lord’s authority couldn’t clear it off.

A voice came back up the old thread, dry and amused.

’I thought it might be you, when things started to go crazy down here,’ Eckert said, in the quiet where only Noah’s Infinity could hear. ’The little pushes. Too neat to be luck.’

Something in the tone almost smiled. ’I’d like to catch up. Talk. It’s been a while, and I have questions. But not now. Let me focus on eating this monstrous Dimensionality of his and doing what you asked. This is going to take everything I have.’

The unity dug in!

Noah watched from above, and he thought about dreams.

He was giving the Dark Lord his. The Dark Lord had dreamed of not being a piece in another man’s game, of a domain that was his, of never again having a hand reach down and write his ending. And Noah was about to make it true. No more author. No more role. No more being moved!

He was going to erase the will that had wanted all of that, and let the being rest, and use the shell.

A dream could come true, Noah thought, and not come true the way the dreamer had hoped. The Dark Lord would get exactly what he asked for. He would never be a chess piece again. He would simply stop being anyone who could be played, which was, in the end, the only way a being like this ever got free.

He wondered if that counted. Whether a dream that arrived sideways like this was still a dream, or whether it turned, somewhere in the crossing, into a nightmare. He didn’t have an answer. He wasn’t sure the difference mattered to the one who got to rest!

Prompts bloomed quiet across the eye.

|You have guided the dreams of five existences toward their fullness within a Narrative of Existence.|

|THE Human Dreamer grows for shepherding what others could not reach alone.|

|+14 PROVENANCE ESSENCE.|

|A dream has been fulfilled by your hand, though not as the dreamer imagined it. The Human Dream deepens on the fulfillment and on the cost.|

|A new understanding settles: THE FULFILLED DREAM AND ITS SHADOW. You perceive, now, the gap between a dream as wished and a dream as granted.|

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