Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5930

Chapter 5930: Awakening II

Thousands of Gigaparsecs out, at the edge of the battle, a figure moved through the forest.

It was hard to see. It was hardly there at all. A shape of obsidian and gold, half made of the same dark-barked trees and humming rivers it walked among. When the forest swayed, it swayed. When the rivers of light ran fast, it ran with them. When the wind that nobody could feel moved the gold leaves, it moved too.

A piece of Noah. The rest was still on a crimson terrace in Ruination’s existence, and in a snowy little town in a forgotten Dimension, and spread thin across a hundred thousand bloomed Gaps. This piece had simply grown up out of the forest he had given to, and now it walked.

And watched.

Ahead of him, the battle filled the dark.

He could feel it pulling on everything.

Half of existence nearby was leaning toward the Nightmare.

The other half leaned toward the Legion.

Toward the nine lotuses and the woman with the halo. A bright, hot, upward pull, fifty-five thousand Immensities gathered into one point and burning so hard that existence itself bent toward them to look.

And between those two pulls, his forest stretched, groaning, every root taut.

That alone should have been terrifying enough. Two forces large enough to tilt a region of existence.

But what truly enlightened him was something else.

The Nightmare was still not serious.

He could see it clearly. Tens of thousands of Immense Ones, their whole strength braided into one Narrative, a formation as old as Legacies, an Unfathomble Commander at its head, hurling everything they had at it.

And the Stillness of Every Death That Almost Happened was... playing.

Fucking playing!

It fought in a way that made one’s skin crawl.

It held, rather than struck.

Its grey glass rolled forward across the dark in long slow waves, and wherever it touched the edge of the Legion’s light, the light stopped. Completely stopped. A spear of cerulean fire as long as a Dimension froze in midair, mid-strike, and inside it, faintly, a moment appeared. The spear’s own almost-death. The instant it had nearly gone out, long ago, in some forgotten fight. And it was held there. Forever. A frozen spear of light with its own near-ending trapped inside it like a fly in amber.

Then the glass reached the outer petals of the nearest lotus.

The Newly Risen there stayed silent. Screaming takes a breath, and the Held Breath took breath first. They simply stopped. One by one, rank after rank.

Their own near-deaths, pulled up out of them and pinned in front of their faces.

And held.

The petals they stood on began to crystalize. Grey glass crept across the lotus from its outer edge inward, crimson at the rims, and as it spread, eyes opened in it. Crimson-obsidian eyes, small at first, then larger, blinking open in the frozen petal, turning to look inward at the core where the Ancients stood with their hands joined.

Noah watched one lotus begin to turn grey from the outside in.

And the thing doing it was giving the fight only half its attention!

Then the Legion answered.

HUUM!

Ione Kalliste raised both her hands.

The nine lotuses rose with her. Every one of them, all at once, petals lifting, cores blazing. The frozen lotus shuddered as its Ancients poured everything they had outward against the creeping glass. And from all nine, Immensity roared inward, ring by ring, Newly Risen into Established into Ancient into core, and from the nine cores, out, in nine blinding rivers of blue fire, straight into the woman with the halo.

Her Narrative answered.

THE Bloom That Answers Calamity!

The greater the calamity, the greater the bloom.

And this was a very great calamity.

She grew!

Her presence, rather than her body. It swelled out of her in a vast blue corona, petal after petal of cerulean light unfolding from her back, from her shoulders, from the halo over her head, until she hung in the dark at the center of a lotus of her own larger than all nine of the others combined.

Her nine blades left their circle and flew, each one stretching as it went, becoming a river of falling stars, nine great streams of white-blue light pouring down out of nowhere onto the advancing glass.

Where they struck, the glass shattered.

Frozen moments broke loose. The trapped spear of cerulean fire burst free and finished its strike. The Newly Risen on the outer petals gasped, and moved, and lived, their near-deaths cracking apart in front of their faces like old ice. The small crimson eyes in the petals squeezed shut and went dark.

And the bloom went on blooming.

For a long moment, across thousands of Gigaparsecs, the dark was a field of blue flowers fighting a frozen sea.

Noah watched it, his figure half-lost among the swaying trees.

Beautiful!

Terrifying, too.

And still, deep under all of it, the pulse moved, slow and steady, carrying both of them.

He raised his hand.

The piece of him that walked in the forest looked down at its own palm, obsidian and gold, half made of bark and light.

He could feel the power moving through it.

More than his own. His Dreams and Nightmares, yes, his Shinjitsu, eight percent and still as glass. But also the forest. The soil. The rivers. Every tree he had given to, giving back.

Every Gap he had tended, humming.

He was connected to it all.

Connected, rather than ruling or owning. A part of the vastness, moving with it. It was very different from his nature of conquering and fealty and tyranny!

That one day, when it was over, he would rest.

When everything was over and done.

He could live his dream now. This very moment. Now, rather than someday.

That was the flow. That was the current.

That was THE Unstriving Current.