Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5932

Chapter 5932: Know Your Limits!

In the Maze of Destiny, Noah was being thrown into a wall.

BOOM!

The golden walls of the Maze rang like a struck bell. He slid down them, robe of dreams and nightmares settling around his ankles, obsidian crown still turning calmly above his head, and stood back up, brushing gold dust off his shoulders. One eye gold. One eye obsidian. The thin film of Shinjitsu over his skin, veined black and gold, stayed perfectly smooth.

Across the corridor, Kir One loomed, its many faces turning, one of them still chewing on something, its Ancient Immensity rolling off it in thick waves that made the golden seas beyond the walls slosh.

"Are you alive?" one of the faces asked.

"I am!" Noah said.

"Unfortunate," said another face, and Kir One came at him again.

They had been doing this for some time. Kir One was an excellent sparring partner. It hit very hard, and it had no idea how to hold back, and it seemed to genuinely enjoy the work.

Off in the distance, at the far end of the corridor, the Verdant Regard stood and watched.

Her body, at least. Her eyes open and blank. Her name was gone. Her identity was gone. Only her dream remained, held inside Noah’s, and her body stood where he had left it, watching the spar with no more interest than a statue watches rain.

But Noah’s attention was only partly here.

The rest of him was elsewhere. On a crimson terrace. In a snowy town. In forests across the Gaps. And at the edge of all of it, two pairs of vast silver wings, cutting through the dark toward THE Chrysalis.

Toward here.

He thought about them as Kir One’s fist came down.

Something past Unfathomable, probably. A Shinjitsu his own slid right off. A father on the banner, near enough to the top that a King’s Legion looked small to them. And they were coming to collect someone.

Monsters, honestly. Very pretty, very arrogant monsters!

Kir One’s fist arrived.

And Noah stopped fighting it.

Blocking and dodging both fell away. He let his Shinjitsu settle, still as glass, eight percent and steady, higher now than anything Kir One carried. And he felt the connection. The Maze around him. The golden seas beyond its walls. The Chrysalis beyond the seas. His forests beyond the Chrysalis.

All of it, one woven thing, every part touching every other part, and under all of it, faint and slow, the pulse.

Kir One’s fist was moving with that pulse. Its whole body was. Its Ancient Immensity, its momentum, its many faces, all of it riding the same current as everything else.

He simply went with it.

He put one hand on the fist as it came, not to stop it, but to follow it. He turned, gently, as a leaf turns in a stream.

And the whole weight of an Ancient Immensity, which had been pouring forward, kept pouring forward, exactly where it had been going, except that Noah had already moved aside and his hand was guiding it just slightly around.

Kir One spun.

All of it. Every face, every limb, every ton of Ancient weight, wheeling around Noah’s palm in a full circle like a door on a hinge, and then away, faster than it had come.

BOOM!

It hit the opposite wall of the Maze so hard the golden stone cracked from floor to ceiling.

Noah stood in the center of the corridor, one hand still raised, his gold eye and his obsidian eye perfectly calm, his robe of dreams and nightmares settling slowly around him, the thin film of his Shinjitsu glass-still over his skin, veined with gold and obsidian. Gold dust drifted down through the air like pollen.

Brute strength had played no part in that. His Shinjitsu had, and his own understanding, and nothing else.

He looked, for one long moment, like someone who had sat under a tree for a thousand years and had finally stood up.

As if he had meditated and grasped something as he smashed away Kir One...who had decimated THE Verdant Regard before!

He looked at his hands. Could he now oppress...Ancients?

Somewhere above, on the top of the Maze wall, Lygara and Lifthrasir blinked.

Lygara’s beautiful face tilted on its long insect neck, her tentacles going still. Lifthrasir’s mouth fell slightly open.

Then Lifthrasir clapped.

"Wow!"

...!

Kir One peeled itself out of the cracked wall and turned its many faces toward him.

"Are you...alive?" one of them asked, sounding almost hurt.

"I am." Noah said.

He lowered his hand.

He felt calm. As if a knot he had been carrying in his chest since long ago had quietly undone itself while he was busy looking elsewhere.

Calm. And then calmer.

Was he becoming some kind of sage now?

He shook his head at himself. No. That sounded insufferable. He was the same as he had been!

He just felt more at ease.

As if he finally knew what he wanted. How to get it. How to face whatever existence threw at him next, and the next thing, and the thing after that.

He stretched, arms over his head, joints cracking pleasently, and looked up at Lifthrasir on the wall.

"Oh, by the way," he said. "You’re about to have some very interesting guests."

...!

Lifthrasir’s clapping hands slowed.

"Guests?"

The golden seas beyond the Maze went still.

Then the sky over THE Chrysalis split, and silver poured in, entirely ignoring the Maze that had been set up and meant to confound.

Two pairs of wings first. Vast, bladed, silver, sweeping in across the golden seas for light years, each feather a gleming edge, so wide that the seas themselves seemed to shrink beneath them. Then the twins, stepping down out of the light onto the top of the Maze wall as easily as two women stepping off a carriage.

Phaedra and Thessaly Arcanthe.

They looked around.

At the Maze. At the golden seas. At the cracked wall below and Kir One still standing beside it. At the blank green figure of the Verdant Regard, far down the corridor. At Lygara, coiled at the top of the wall with her beautiful face gone very still.

Their eyes passed over Noah and kept going.

Zero pause. Zero flicker. As if he were a bit of gold dust on the floor of the corridor, not worth the effort of noticing.

Then they turned to Lifthrasir.

"Little sister," Phaedra said.

Lifthrasir stayed silent as her eyes squinted.

"Father has commanded that you be brought back," Thessaly said. "Into the family. Where you belong."

The Maze was very quiet.

Lifthrasir looked at them for a long moment. Something in her face went tired and old.

"No," she said. "I wish to live the rest of my life the way I want."

Her chin lifted. "And I do not particularly care for the progeny of the old man. None of you even know me as there is not an ounce of care between us."

Phaedra’s eyes stayed perfectly steady.

"Then care about your mother," she said. "Our dear stepmother. THE First Gu of Calamity itself."

...!

Lifthrasir’s gaze changed.

The defiance went out of her face, not all at once, but slowly. Something underneath it came up instead. Something younger. Something that had been waiting a very long time to hear that name said aloud.

"Go," he said. "You can reach me anytime you need me. If you need any help or someone is bullying you, just let me know."

"THE Sumeru Elysium," said Thessaly.

"Beyond the Source Lands and above the Chrysalis, where THE Mountain at the Center of Everything rises out of the fields of rest. Where the oldest and the first have always gone when existence turns and needs them to decide what kind of turning it will be. Its golden meadows have not been walked by so many Firsts at once since before THE Long Night. They are gathering now. All of them."

She inclined her head, very slightly. "You are...welcomed."

"I am," Noah said. "Look after her."