Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5994

Chapter 5994: OINK II

The OINK did not fade.

It went out from the pig in a single deep pulse, and Noah felt it pass through his walls without breaking any of them. Under the pig’s hooves, the moss turned gold!

It spread outward in a slow ring, root and moss and black soil all hardening into hammered gold, until the pig stood at the center of a gleaming circle five meters wide. The great golden hide on its shoulders seemed to drink the light of the golden beam of light above it. Its white wings shifted once, very slightly.

Information rose out of the place before Noah could move.

|Introductory Narrative of Existence: begun.|

|Essara 1 Abomination. Narrative: THE Charge That Gilds the Ground.|

|Condition: endure it, or end it.|

|While this Narrative lasts, acclimation is accelerated.|

|Acclimation: 4%.|

...!

Endure it, or end it. So that was what an introductory Narrative was. The place had set something of his own designation in front of him and was going to watch what he did with it!

The pig charged.

It did not gather itself first. One instant it was standing on its gold, and the next it was simply in front of him, its white wings snapped open behind it for the single beat that carried it across the gap, and its brow hit his walls at a speed his eyes never followed.

BOOM!

Four walls broke at once. Not all the way down, out of existence; Roxanna had done that, and this was something else. These broke the ordinary way, shattering inward with a sound that shook the constellations in the nearest trunks, and the fifth wall bent and held. The pig’s tusks slid off it with a shriek of gold on Narrative.

Noah’s feet slid back two meters through the moss. Then the Endless Retelling caught up, and the four broken walls rose again behind the fifth before the pig could draw back.

|Narrative Walls broken: 4. Restored: 4.|

|Narrative Walls standing: 67 of 67.|

Four walls in one blow, and all recovered! The sensation...felt grand!

The pig stepped back onto the place where it had stopped. The moss under its hooves turned gold. The ring of gilded ground behind it was still there, and now there was a second patch, and a line of gold between them where its hooves had touched in the charge. Noah looked at that line and understood the Narrative a moment before the pig used it.

It charged again, from gold to gold, and this time it was faster.

BOOM!

Six walls.

It wheeled, struck down with one forehoof, and the ground under Noah’s feet turned gold. It struck again from the new gold.

BOOM!

Seven walls!

Every place its hooves struck became its ground. On its own ground it was faster, and heavier, and every charge laid more ground down for the next one. The longer this went on, the more of the forest would belong to it. Noah could already see a rough golden circle spreading around the two of them, twenty meters across and growing, the beams of light catching on it from above until the dark around them glittered.

He held his ground, and he let it come.

It came again and again. It came from the left and from above, wings snapping open for half a heartbeat to throw it across the gold, and from straight ahead with its head low and its tusks up. It never made a sound except the hooves, and the gold ringing where they struck, and the walls breaking. Six. Eight. Five. Nine. The Endless Retelling rebuilt them three a second, and the pig broke them faster than that, and the count of standing walls dropped for the first time.

|Narrative Walls standing: 58 of 67.|

Noah did not step back!

He let the Bleeding Nightmare unfurl.

It had been seeding itself the whole time, a dark seed rooting in the pig wherever its tusks and brow had struck his walls, a dozen of them by now, and he woke every one of them at once. The Devourer’s Hemorrhage bloomed in the pig’s golden hide.

It bled. A thin dark thread ran from its shoulder and from under one eye, and for an instant, the charge faltered.

Only for an instant. The thread thinned to almost nothing and stopped. Whatever the Nightmare had found to bleed out of it, there had not been much.

The Return, then. He pulled on every seed at once, reaching for whatever the pig had taken to become what it was!

Almost nothing came. A faint trickle, gone in a breath. The pig had taken nothing. Its gold was its own, and its hunger was its own, and its Narrative was something it had grown out of itself in a place where nothing borrowed survived the door. Of course the Return found nothing to send home!

He called the Abominations anyway, to know.

They climbed out of the Nightmare seeds in the pig’s hide, gold and winged and wrong, long arms unfolding, faceplates splitting to pour their light. Three of them. They took hold of the pig’s shoulders and its wings and leaned their light into it, looking for anything taken to tear out and return.

There was nothing. Their hands scraped across its golden hide and came away with a few flakes of gold, no more. Then they faded, because there was nothing in the pig for them to do!

"Hmm...." Noah’s eyes shone brightly

The pig’s eyes, for the first time, changed.

They had been calm until now, small and intelligent and almost curious. Now something behind them caught. It had felt the Nightmare and the Return and the long golden hands, every one of them reaching into it uninvited, and it did not like it.

"OINK!"

The pulse was filled with its terrifying narrative as it hit his walls this time.

Eleven broke at once. The pig came through the gap behind them with its head low and its wings wide, and its tusk went through the twelfth wall and stopped a hand’s width from his chest.