Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5910

Chapter 5910: Nightmare IV

Noah stood in the snow and looked at the thing wearing his son.

Something in him went very far away.

It was the view from high above where everything became pattern and nothing became panic. From there he could see the shape of it all: a Nightmare, a borrowed face, snow and ash and a voice from the bottom of a well, pieces arranged to make him feel a particular thing.

His Shinjitsu rose over him, slow and still and glass-bright, closing over his skin. Underneath it, his Dreaming Human Origin began to pulse, deep and steady, a heartbeat bigger than his own. And as it pulsed, the dark around him gave up a little more of what it was hiding.

|This is a Nightmare of Quantum Existence.|

|Behind it is something unfathomably powerful.|

|It sensed your use and alteration of countless quantum lines of possibility and probability across existence.|

|Just as you have begun to glimpse countless probabilities of your enemies, other lifeforms skilled in this field can extrapolate probabilities about you.|

|This one is a terrifying Nightmare.|

|Should you lose, or fail to clear it, it will usurp and claim every memory of every possibility it shows you.|

...!

Noah read it once, and understood.

It was going to show him Henry, every Henry, every road where his son had lived or died or waited for him at a table. And if Noah lost here, it would take every one of those memories for itself. His son’s face, his son’s voice, every moment they had ever had, and every moment they might have had, gone into the dark to feed something that kept the roads no one wanted.

Among everything else it could take, it could take his son.

His existence blazed!

The Shinjitsu around him flared from clear glass to burning blue-gold, covering him completely, every inch, until he stood in the snow like a figure cut out of a blazing star!

The ash falling near him turned to light before it touched him. Beneath his feet, the snow melted into steam.

Then he shot forward!

He crossed the distance in nothing, and his fist went through the Nightmare’s chest.

It went through easily. Too easily. Henry’s body came apart around his arm like smoke, and for an instant there was nothing in front of him at all.

Then there were a hundred Henrys!

They stood in a ring around him in the snow, every one of them a little different. One was a small boy in a too-big jacket. One was a teenager with a split lip. One was grown, tired, with grey already in his blue-gold hair. One was a body lying face-down that slowly got to its feet. All of them had the same black-sand tears running from their empty eyes.

|These are the possibilities you did not choose.|

|Every one of them is real to it.|

"Did you think there was only one of me?" a hundred voices said together. "You threw away so many roads, father. I lived down every one of them."

Noah hit them!

He went through the ring like a falling sun. Blue-gold light tore the Henrys apart, five, ten, twenty, scattering them into black glitering dust. He reached for his Dream and dropped it over the whole field like a net, as he had dropped it over Dimensions and Gaps and the Keepers’ frozen Legacy, insisting with all his truth that this place had always been his.

The snow shivered.

Then it held.

|Your Dream cannot replace this place.|

|Every possible path is closed. There is no likelier road for your Dream to make true.|

The dust he had scattered drifted back together. Henry by Henry, the ring reformed, as if nothing had happened at all.

One of them stepped forward. The grown one, with the tired face.

"You helped bring another life into existence," it said quietly. "I looked up to you. I loved you. I was your responsibility, yours to care for and to look after. And you discarded me for the next shiny thing."

Noah tore it in half.

It went on talking from the halves, and then from the Henry beside it, and then from the one beside that, the voice passing from mouth to mouth around the ring as smoothly as a cup passed hand to hand.

"How can mana be manipulated? What fantastic things does existence have for me to explore and learn? What enemies can I make? And what women can I fuck, just so I don’t have to spend a single second looking after my son?"

The voice stayed level. It stayed calm and terribly reasonable!

"You ignored me so much that you found yourself an adopted daughter, something else shiny to hold your attention, so you could forget me even more. Just how terrible a father can you be?"

...!

Noah gave no answer.

He knew what it was. It was something else entirely, a thing wearing his son’s face and reading his son’s lines off the back of every road Noah had left unwalked. He knew that. His Shinjitsu knew that. Every part of him that could tell true from false knew that!

And yet the words landed.

They should not have had any weight at all. They were lies, or half-lies, spoken by something that fed on lies. But as each one left the Nightmare’s mouth, Noah felt it reach for him, not for his body, but for his memory. It pressed against everything he remembered of Henry, and tried to make itself fit there.

|The Nightmare is imposing its words onto your memories.|

|It is trying to make them true.|

|Memory: Henry’s first words. Overwritten: 4%.|

|Memory: the empty seat set at every meal. Overwritten: 11%.|

"And then you put me to sleep," another Henry said, almost gently. "You put all of us to sleep, for centuries, inside your Dream Engine. You called it protection. And while I slept, you went out and conquered. Tell me, father. What is human about the Dreaming Human Origin, when the humans are all asleep?"