Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5748

Chapter 5748: You Freed Me!

Vakochev floated upon the sundered weavings of the Dimensional Provenance Train, and the space around him was no longer space.

The cleaving of the Train had unmade the very definition of the region, and where reality had been there was now only undefinition, a churning obsidian foam that filled everything, existence itself boilng where the seam had parted! And within that foam the Remnant hung, wrapped in his obsidian flames, a silhouette of dark fire standing at the center of a wound in creation, unhurried, unbothered, waiting!

And at the edge of the breach, The Immense Ones gathered!

They came, and they were not entirely perceivable, because beings such as these did not fit inside the sight of anything lesser! At one moment they were massive eyes hanging in the dark, and the next they were gone entirely, present only as pressure, as weight, as a wrongness in the boiling foam.

THE SLEEPLESS FIEND stepped forward, his form an undulating silhouette of brilliance that would not rest, flanked by the gathered gazes of THE OVERSEEING ONE, THE UNPAID COLLECTOR, THE GLOATING JAILER, THE CACKLING BUTCHER, and THE STARVING CONNOISSEUR!

A chilling silence gripped the void!

And into that silence, Vakochev spoke!

His voice did not rumble with theatrical rage. It did not roar or thunder or shake the foam. It carried instead the cold, measured cadence of a man presenting a failure to the ones responsible for it.

The obsidian flames turned slowly around him!

"Across uncounted epochs, you who Remain have extinguished decillions of living beings. Whole Observable Existences and Dimensions, pulverized to nothing. Whole civilizations, ancient and striving and full of small warm lives, harvested down to the bone for a portion of their weavings, their entire histories reduced to a resource and then to silt."

His voice never rose. "And you wrote every one of those deaths into your weavings as meaningless. Unworthy of a second thought. Dust swept from a floor. Decillions upon decillions, and not one of them was ever weighed as anything at all."

He looked from one indistinct gaze to the next.

"And yet. If a single one of you were to bleed. If one Immense One, one, were to die here today, every one of you would shake with hysterical horror! You would call it an impossible crime! You would name it an atrocity against the whole of Existence and hunt the cause of it across every age until the end of things."

The foam boiled around the Remnant.

"So tell me, by what weaving is this measured? By what law is the life of a mortal who owns no borrowed authority weighed as lesser than one of you? Show me the reckoning. Show me the line in existence that says a striving thing with no crown is worth decillions-to-one against a thing like you."

His dead quiet eyes swept them. "You cannot. Because it does not exist. Existence itself does not recognize your hierarchy. Only your violence does. You did not discover that you were worth more. You decided it, and then you killed everything that might have argued."

...!

THE SLEEPLESS FIEND answered him.

The Fiend spoke with terrifying scale, with an absolute and sterile condescension that made the foam itself seem to cringe, and there was no anger in it at all.

|A mountain does not hold council with the gravel beneath its base.|

|The lung does not ask permission of the air it consumes.|

|You speak of a reckoning, little ghost, as though the weak and the mighty were entries in the same book. They are not. Those without authority, or with less of it, are not a lesser party to a negotiation. They are scenery. Backdrop. The texture against which the real story unfolds.|

Existence writhed!

|You misunderstand what an Immense One is, and you always did, which is why you died the first time. An Immense One does not merely live within the architecture of existence. An Immense One IS the architecture. And you would have us weigh the scaffold against the dust swept out the door as though they were equals?|

The Fiend’s threads gathered into something almost like a face, and it looked upon Vakochev with a contempt colder than the void!

|That is the delusion of a peasant who discovered how to strike a spark, and in the striking, believed he had invented the sun.|

Vakochev looked at the Fiend with dead quiet eyes!

He did not flinch, and he did not argue the point, because he had not come to win a debate! He had come to correct a record!

"You slaughtered many of my weavings," Vakochev said, and now his voice changed, went lower and more terrible, though it still carried no rage.

"You broke all of it because you told yourselves a story about it and you believed the story."

The obsidian flames flared!

"You believed that if you stripped away everything I loved, you would break my will. That grief would bring me to my knees. That a being with nothing left to protect would beg, or bend, or surrender the road I walked." His dead eyes did not blink. "You thought my loves were the handles by which you could steer me."

He spread his fire-wrapped arms slowly!

"But you did not break me. You freed me. You...freed me."

HUUM!

Vakochev delivered a vow.

"So here is what I will do today," he said, quiet as the grave he had risen from. "I am going to look upon an Immense One with the exact same gaze you have cast upon the weak since the beginning of things. The careless gaze. The indifferent one. The gaze that does not even bother to weigh what it is destroying."

He looked at the Fiend, and at the gathered gazes, and for the first time something moved behind his dead eyes, and it was not hatred, and it was not grief!

It was indifference!

"I am going to treat your existence," Vakochev said, "as common cattle."

"Now this," she breathed, her eyes shining. "This is a grand story. Okay!"

He wanted to see! 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

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