Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5939

Chapter 5939: A Mighty Hoe! III

Noah stood beside the sapling with the hoe resting on his shoulder and blood drying on his lip, and he looked at the blade for a long moment, because he was honestly surprised at how well it had worked.

He had swung it at a falling reinforced constructs filled with Half-Unfathomable Immensity and split it in half, and he had turned over the sky itself with a single stroke. The hoe hummed quietly in his hands, a little warm, and he had the strange feeling that it was just as surprised as he was.

It had not only been the hoe, though, and as he stood there, he went back over the fight and understood what he had actually done. Every Immense One he had ever faced fought the same way, by taking their Narrative and their power and forcing existence to follow it, pushing existence around them into the shape they wanted until it broke or gave in.

He had not done that even once, because he had sent his Dreams out into existence instead, his endless Infinite Dreams and Nightmares, and given his authority to everything around him and let it decide how to help.

That was why the sea had risen when he needed it to rise, and why the ground had opened to pull his enemies down, and why every current of infinity in the Carcosa had pushed behind each swing of the hoe. He had moved with THE Unstriving Current and existence had moved with him, so that every stroke he made carried the weight of the whole region and not only his own. The Half-Unfathomables had fought him alone with their own power, while he had fought them with everything around him, and that difference had closed a gap in strength that should never have been closed at all.

He had not won by being stronger than them, because he was not stronger than them. He had won because he was not using power the way they were, and the hoe made from four Shards of IT had turned all of that borrowed help into something sharp enough to cut through Half-Unfathomable Immensity.

Noah smiled at that, and then he rolled his shoulders and stretched his arms over his head until his back cracked, because there was still work to do.

---

Orren Mourncrest was still lying in the crater in the turned sky, with light leaking slowly from every wound, and Saelith Vane was still hanging where he had left her, staring at the stone house on the cliff with both hands pressed over her mouth. Noah walked up through the air toward Orren first, taking his time, while the currents of infinity bent toward him with every step and the snow parted in front of his boots.

Orren saw him coming and tried to rise, gathering what was left of his Immensity into his fists, but the ground of the overturned sky closed around his arms and legs and held him down before he could lift them.

Noah hooked the blade of the hoe under Orren’s jaw and pulled, and the broad, silent man came up out of the crater with a sound that was halfway between a roar and a sob!

Noah dragged him down through the sky toward the farm the same way he had dragged Corvin, and the soil beside Corvin’s small green shoot opened before they even reached it, wide and dark and waiting. He pressed Orren into it with one boot, and the ground closed over him, and the hoe and the roots of the sapling went to work while Orren’s muffled shouting slowly went quiet under the black-gold earth.

Saelith did not fight at all when he came for her. She only looked at him once, with her eyes full of the house she had never found, and then looked back at it, and she was still looking at it when he hooked the hoe through the front of her robe and drew her down to the farm. He buried her near the edge of the field where she could face the stone house.

...!

The Ancients broke. There were twelve of them still alive, batered and bleeding from the fight, and when they saw the third Half-Unfathomable go into the ground, every one of them turned and fled in a different direction at once!

They tore open the sky to escape, ripping holes into space and diving through them, riding the currents of infinity at full speed, scattering across the Carcosa in twelve streaks of white and gold light, and in a moment they were all gone from sight.

They were, after all, Immense Ones.

Noah watched them go and let out a long breath, because he did not like leaving work half done.

He closed his eyes and gave more of himself to existence than he had given at any point so far. His Dreaming Human Origin flowed out of him in a wide, slow tide, blue-gold and obsidian-gold, spreading through the Carcosa mixed with the spreading Fallow in every direction, through the rivers of infinity and the falling snow and the dark between the Dimensions, and everything it touched leaned toward him and listened.

He did not chase the Ancients, because he did not need to, since existence itself already knew exactly where every one of them was.

The first Ancient was halfway through a veiled Dimension when the Dimension closed around him and turned him back the way he had come.

The second was riding a current of infinity at full speed when the current curved under him, gently and completely, and carried him straight back to the farm, while the third found the sky in front of him turning into soil and the soil drawing him down.

The power expressed by each of the surrounding points of existence was heavy!

One by one, across Dimensions and across rivers of infinity and across the snowing dark of the Carcosa, existence turned every one of them around and brought them home to Noah’s field.

OOOH!

They came down out of the sky screaming, all twelve of them, dragged by the currents and the snow and the ground itself, and Noah stood among the rows of black-gold soil and planted them.

He planted them one at a time, with a stroke of the hoe to open the ground and his boot to press them in and another stroke to close the soil over them, working his way down the field in a straight line. By the time he reached the end of the row, the farm was quiet again except for the snow, and fifteen small green shoots stood in the soil behind him.

...!

Noah leaned on the hoe and looked back along the row of shoots, and he nodded slowly to himself.

"Half-Unfathomables and Ancients," he said, to no one in particular, his voice calm and even. "Every one of them full of Immensity and Narrative and dreams they never finished, and every one of them came here to take what was mine. They will make good fertilizer...better than anything I could have bought."

...!

Above the farm, the prisoners hung in the falling snow, and their shackles had come loose and fallen away somewhere during the fight, so that they were free now and could have gone anywhere. None of them moved!

Octavius Infinitum and the two other Ancients and the ten Established stared down at the neat row of green shoots and the man in the straw hat leaning on his hoe, and their faces had gone grey with horror, because they had just watched fifteen Immense Ones buried alive in a field and called fertilizer.

Noah felt their horror and shook his head, because he did not see it the way they did. This was only nature, the oldest law that existence had, eat or be eaten, and these fifteen had come to eat him and his farm and had been eaten instead, and nothing about that was strange.

|THE Narrative of Kings has shifted.|

|THE Dreaming Human Origin rises from Rank 49 to Rank 48.|

|THE Dreaming Human Origin has faced the forces of two Kings ranked far above him, THE Iron Psalm of the Last Gate and THE Shepherd of Falling Stars.|

|He has dominated the forces of both and has not lost.|