Chapter 5642: Power!
Chapter 5642: Power!
<Descendant Alcaeus>
A great number of lifeforms believe peace is the ultimate reward of a long life.
They would be ridiculously wrong.
The truth of any cage of peace is that eventually, the prisoner will beg for a war.
For those who lived across the deepest expanses of reality, stagnation was the only true death.
They climbed through the tiers of existence, gathered their authority, and built their citadels. Yet, when a being possesses the lifespan of an entire epoch, the quiet becomes an unbearable weight. To answer this endless boredom, certain Dimensions were authored exclusively for the harvest of violence.
THE Morior Dimension was one such place.
It was a vast, blood-soaked arena where the progeny of the highest authorities went to prove the weight of their lineages. Deaths that occurred upon its rusted soil were not recorded in the Records as permanent endings. The Dimension itself was a miraculous testing ground where shattered flesh and spilled Trueness were simply collected and remade, allowing the strong to fight without the inconvenient finality of a true death. It was a slaughterhouse that functioned as a stage.
In the center of a jagged canyon, Descendant Alcaeus stood like a monument to absolute brutality.
He was a colossal, muscular titan draped in the thick, golden pelt of a slaughtered Primeval beast. His skin was scarred bronze, and his eyes burned with a terrifying, unyielding joy. He did not care for politics or anything else. He cared only for the glory of battle!
Of course, the rules of his favored game had recently changed.
When Vakochev’s Scales fractured across reality, THE Provenance of Existence had descended. Alcaeus had not questioned the booming, serene voice that spoke into his lineage. He had simply proclaimed his life of violence loudly to the empty air. Existence had weighed his endless battles, measured his absolute devotion to conflict, and found him perfectly in accordance.
A golden sign shaped like a roaring lion’s visage hovered above his head. He was Ordained. He held the Mantle of THE CHAMPION.
Because of his staggering accumulation of victories, he had already triggered a Narrative of Existence. The information that resonated in his mind called it THE Endless Crucible. It was a triggered external conflict that paid him for every drop of blood he spilled. He did not need to retreat to a quiet peak to cultivate his power. He simply needed to fight, and the Ruling would fund his rise.
Existential Moirai surrounded him in a thick, golden aura. It acted as a localized destiny, actively lifting him up and bending probability to ensure his continued survival in the canyon.
He was not fighting alone.
Far above the rusted cliffs, the sky was not a sky at all. Three massive eyes hovered in the purple firmament, unblinking and terribly ancient!
They were three of THE Immense Ones, looking down to observe the proving grounds of their children. They watched the bloodsport in total silence, their mere presence crushing the air below.
"Come on!" Alcaeus roared, his voice shaking the canyon walls. "Is this all the depth you can muster?!"
Hundreds of other Descendants charged him from all sides. They carried massive weapons and roared with THE Argent Loom!
Alcaeus laughed joyfully.
He did not draw a blade. His Dimensionality ran terrifyingly deep. He understood that true power was not about how hard a thing could push, but where a thing truly stood!
He reached his massive hands up and physically grabbed the white threads of THE Argent Loom that stitched the air together.
Alcaeus grabbed the threads and pulled them down into his palms by brute force. He mixed the pristine white authority of The Argent Loom with his own roaring, bronze-colored power, and then flooded the mixture with the heavy golden Moirai granted by his Mantle.
He pressed his massive hands together.
The sheer, unfathomable PONDUS required to compress such authorities was staggering, but his muscles merely bulged as he forced the mixture to collapse inward!
The threads, the power, and the destiny condensed into a sphere no larger than a fist. It was a small, screaming, condensed dimension of pure kinetic force.
He formed a miniature Dimension with his own hands!
Alcaeus threw the compressed dimension directly into the charging army.
BOOM!
The miniature thing expanded instantly upon impact. It swallowed fifty Descendants in a localized singularity of white light and crushing pressure. Armor shattered. Weapons turned to dust. The roaring of his enemies was simply snuffed out as their bodies were unmade and swept out of the arena to be reconstructed later.
The survivors leaped through the settling dust, their power aimed at his neck and chest.
Alcaeus moved into the fray.
A spear of THE Argent Loom thrust toward his throat. Existence leaned. The Moirai of THE CHAMPION bent the probability of the strike away, causing the spear to glide harmlessly past his skin!
He caught a falling sword of THE Argent Loom with his bare hand, the blade biting into his palm. He squeezed his fist, shattering the weapon into fragments, and punched the owner so hard the air itself screamed.
He threw another compressed dimension!
BOOM!
The battlefield became a canvas of absolute destruction. For an hour, the canyon shook with the sounds of unmaking. Alcaeus fought with the chaotic, unyielding rhythm of a being who knew he could not lose. He did not fight to survive. He fought because fighting was the only language he truly understood.
When the dust finally settled, Alcaeus stood alone in the center of the crater.
The corpses of hundreds of defeated Descendants remained scattered across the broken ground, waiting for the Dimension’s laws to pull them back into the cycle. Those few who had survived in the periphery had already turned and run, their morale broken by the sheer, insurmountable depth of THE CHAMPION!
Alcaeus threw his head back and roared his triumph to the empty sky!
OOOOH!
The response from the new Ruling was immediate and staggering. Moirai gushed down from the heavens like a golden sea, pouring directly into his body. The sheer volume of the reward washed over his attributes, feeding his existence and solidifying his Mantle even further. He felt the heavy, intoxicating rush of am Existence that was actively paying him for his violence.
As he stood basking in the golden downpour, the sky changed.
One of the three massive eyes above him suddenly pulsed. It was a bloodshot, terrifying gaze that represented THE SLEEPLESS FIEND.
The atmosphere in the canyon dropped to an absolute, freezing silence. The other two eyes slowly drifted backward, allowing the Fiend’s gaze to dominate the firmament.
Alcaeus stopped laughing. He fell to one knee, bowing his head in sudden, total reverence.
The message did not arrive as a sound. It bypassed his ears completely and burned directly into the obsidian brow-mark on his forehead. It carried the impersonal, heavy weight of a Father addressing a useful tool.
|Something has grown bold enough to rewrite my curses.|
Alcaeus grimaced as the sheer density of the thought pressed into his skull.
|It has passed through THE Krazhor-Nul Dimension and THE Ymnaros Dimension. A Cure-Giver.|
The image of a broken curse, of Steeds running unchained, and of lines of writing being forcibly altered flickered through his mind. The Fiend was searching for the source of an impossible rebellion.
|Find it for me and ask it for me... what made it so bold?|
HUUM!
The burning sensation in his brow slowly faded. The massive eye in the sky stopped pulsing and drifted back into its silent, unblinking watch alongside the others.
Alcaeus remained kneeling for a long moment, the dust settling silently around him. He processed the weight of the command. A hunt!
A target that had somehow managed to undo the authored punishments of Those Who Remain. A being that operated across THE Krazhor-Nul and THE Ymnaros.
He looked up at the sky as a wide, terrifying grin spread across his face.
He laughed joyfully, the sound echoing through the canyon of corpses. He did not care about the politics of curses, or the implications of a broken sentence. He only cared that a target capable of such impossible feats would undoubtedly provide the greatest battle of his entire immortal life.
"As THE SLEEPLESS FIEND deems," Alcaeus said.
Oh!
Existence was vast and filled with terrors.
One couldn’t even begin to imagine just what terrifying wonders were out there that they didn’t even know about!