Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5889

Chapter 5889: Testing II

Noah watched the glass as the great shape of colored light turned toward Achilles, and the prompts kept coming.

|Day 4, Hour 4: THE First Gu of Emotions sends its power at Achilles Adrastia.|

|It sends no feeling this time. It sends pure power, raw and heavy, enough to crush him outright.|

|Achilles Adrastia tries to assimilate this too.|

|He uses the weavings of Emotions he has already taken to soften the blow.|

|It helps, very little.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions sits halfway to Unfathomable Immensity. It is among the weaker First Gu, and it is still far beyond anything in this army.|

In the glass, Achilles bent under it like a reed in a flood. His body cracked along its seams, light spilled out of him, and the two people sharing his body seemed to pull against each other as the weight pressed down. He roared, a raw sound full of pain and refusal, and kept his feet.

Behind him, Rose was in danger!

The storm had found her. Its colors were closing around her one by one, and she stood in the middle of them with her green hair whiping in the wind of feelings. Then she walked forward, out of the colors and straight through the weight, and stepped up beside Achilles. She took his hand.

She looked at him once, calm and sure, as if they would simply go together.

Noah’s breath caught in the glass!

|Through your bonds, you sense what is unfolding.|

|You send a body.|

|You bring Emotive.|

The pane flared blue-gold, and a body of Noah’s arrived at the edge of the storm with Emotive beside him, her eyes full of every color at once. She looked up at the vast jellyfish of light, at its threads trailing across the sky, and smiled the gracious, dangerous smile.

"Oh, darling," she murmured. "You are...so very loud."

|Emotive does not fight THE First Gu of Emotions head on. She cannot win that way.|

|She weaves herself into its threads instead.|

|Her Seven Virtues anchor those it has seized.|

|Patientia rides the thread of rage and slows it. The Established One stops tearing at its neighbor.|

|Caritas rides the thread of grief and gives it someone to hold. Moriarty stops weeping long enough to look up.|

|Diligentia rides the thread of longing and gives it work to do. THE Thinker stops walking home.|

|Temperantia rides the thread of joy and sets it a limit. The laughing Progeny who remain stop coming apart.|

|Her Seven Sins tangle the Gu itself.|

|Gula floods its threads with more feeling than they can carry, until they choke.|

|Avaritia claims its threads as hers, one by one.|

|Invidia sets its threads pulling against each other.|

|She gives her Everythings away to keep the army standing. They grow back, and she gives them again.|

In the glass, the storm changed! Its colors, which had moved as one, began to snag and knot and turn against themselves. Emotive stood inside the knot with her hands lifted, threads of fourteen colors running from her fingers into the great shape of light, and every thread she touched turned a little less obedient to its master.

|Emotive has bought time.|

|Achilles Adrastia uses it.|

|He begins assimilating everything nearby.|

What happened next was terrifying!

The silk around Achilles thinned and vanished into him. The colors of the storm bent toward him and drained into his body like water down a drain. The loose threads of feeling the Gu had cast across the army came loose from their victims and coiled into him instead. The torn pieces of space near his feet grew pale as he took those too, and the whole region around him began to look a little empty, a little hollow, as if he were slowly eating the room he stood in.

Noah’s body crossed the storm in a single step and stood beside him!

"Listen," Noah said quietly, through the faint connection between them. "What you take, you already make it yours. Find what is still you underneath all of it, and pull everything toward that. This is Shinjitsu as you should be very attuned to it..."

|You share the knowledge of Shinjitsu with Achilles Adrastia.|

|It cannot be granted. It can only be shown.|

|Achilles Adrastia is more in tune with Shinjitsu than any lifeform you have seen.|

|His Assimilation is the very thing Shinjitsu asks for: taking what was borrowed and making it truly his own.|

In the glass, Achilles’s eyes went wide! For one breath, the two people sharing his body seemed to stop fighting and listen to the same thing.

Then the great shape of light screamed!

It made no sound. Its whole body flared every color at once, and the prompts turned grim.

|THE First Gu of Emotions senses its own Provenance threatened.|

|Two unknown things are taking its Emotions away.|

|In a fit of rage, it reaches inside itself and pulls out a glowing object.|

|It is a Shard of IT.|

|It pours its Emotions into the Shard.|

...!

|The surrounding Gigaparsecs fall under a full Unfathomable Immensity.|

|Everything in them is shredded apart.|

|The silk, the storm, the army, the space itself.|

|Nothing nearby survives the catastrophe, except those connected to your Dream.|

|They survive, barely.|

|Ling, Poona, Moriarty, and THE Thinker survive, broken.|

|Your body here survives, broken.|

|Emotive entrenches herself deeper into THE First Gu of Emotions to survive, inside its own threads.|

|Achilles Adrastia survives.|

|Rose’s existence has collapsed completely.|

The glass went white, and when it cleared, there was almost nothing left.

A vast torn emptyness stretched across the pane where the storm had been. In the middle of it hung Achilles, and Noah could hardly recognize him. His nerves had spread out of his body into everything around him, threaded through the shredded silk and the raw, loose feelings still drifting in the dark, so that he felt all of it at once, every scrap of broken space and every wild emotion raging through the ruin.

His hand was still closed around nothing, where Rose’s hand had been.

He roared, and it was a sound of pain beyond measure!

|Achilles Adrastia’s existence is assimilating the ruin around him.|

|His lifeform is mutating.|

|THE First Gu of Emotions senses danger.|

|It runs.|