Chapter 5708: Powerless! II
Chapter 5708: Powerless! II
Aurelius stood in the center of the thinning with his Provenance wrapped around him, and the pressure that had unmade three of his Elders met that truth and stopped, exactly as it had stopped eleven times before, and for one breath the Elseworld believed!
Maybe!
The Provenance of their leader was special! It was grand!
They believed.
Then... the Collector pressed as undeniable golden rivers crashed down.
The Provenance bent. From the mountain he rushed from with Thalia, Noah saw it bend, saw the edges of the Unfallen Vanguard curl inward under a weight that did not care what had been declared, and Aurelius Vasiliou, who had never once in eleven stands taken a step backward, took one!
Blood came out of his mouth.
This was an Immense One. His standing and Dimensionality was unfathomably higher as what could the Provenance of a single Provenance Lifeform do?
|Did you believe you had friends among my kind?|
The pressure ground down against the bending truth.
|Did you think, in your long quiet centuries, that you had earned a single ally among us who would stay my hand for the sake of your pleasant little lineage? There are none. Look around your torn sky. None came. None will come.|
|None can save you now.|
POOF!
Across the city, multiple Provenance Lifeforms turned to a puff of red dust as if the defenses of Aurelius did not even exist!
THE Immense One wss killing slowly as he had not even targeted Noah and Thalia yet, seemingly intent on destroying what Thalia knew as home to torment her first.
Noah gazed at the horrific power barreling down as he... did not throw a single attack.
He knew. That was the terrible clarity of it. His Infinite Sanguine Mana would do nothing. His Provenance would do nothing. His Mantle, his Teloi, the whole roaring arsenal of two hundred decillion quarks, all of it was a wrinkle in a cloth, and the cloth was up there deciding where everyone stood, and it would not so much as notice a strike from him.
The gap in Dimensionality was too vast.
He had learned that from a dead man only a short while ago, and he was watching the lesson be proven in the deaths of people who had never harmed him!
To throw power he knew was useless would be a lie. A performance of doing something, so that afterward he could tell himself he had tried. That he was somehow defiant and tyrannical.
So he did the only true thing available.
He took Thalia’s hand, and he moved!
He had a few plans he could initiate as he remembered Atlas’ words to be defiant on set rulings and existence itself. He began to implement a possible plan!
He moved toward the center of the thinning, toward the two figures at the heart of the dying light, and Thalia moved with him, the two of them crossing the burning air of the Elseworld while Provenance Lifeforms guttered on every side, closer, and closer, to Aurelius and Rosalia!
Rosalia had reached her husband.
She had come up through the air with no ceremony at all and taken his weight against her, and his blood ran down the front of her, and he was dazed as he said, "My defenses should have held. They should have...held!"
She held him tight as her Provenance flared and she roared!
The Collector pressed harder, and dozens more Provenance Lifeforms guttered!
Then Thalia forcefully let go of Noah’s hand and went up as she cried while looking at devastation, with Noah following her right after!
She climbed into the torn air in her soaked robe, and she hung between the Collector and her bleeding father, and she spread her arms!
"You came for what is yours!" Her voice carried across the whole dying Elseworld. "It was promised to you by this lineage, and this lineage does not break its word! Look at me, O Collector. I am the debt. I am standing in the open. Take the one who was promised, and leave the ones who only kept the promise!"
He knew she was trying to buy time as...
’My Provenance, please, what can we do?!’
She sent him a mental message thst showed her desperation!
The face in the sky considered her.
|THE UNPAID COLLECTOR looks at the daughter.|
|You fucking whore. Damaged goods should only feel the pain before they are torn apart soon after. Wait your turn, harlot.|
...!
The pressure resumed. Half the lineage of Provenance Lifeforms was gone now!
Aurelius sagged in his wife’s arms, and Noah looked at all of this with eyes of profound defiance!
He stopped thinking about power.
He had known. He had known the owner of that Provenance would come, and he had spent the intervening time Dual Cultivating and learning to build Elsedimensions and reading about Gu and being taught the difference between depth and magnitude by a dead man, and he had made no plan for this whatsoever because of many assumptions and things he had been told!
It was a horrendous oversight as he assumed and took the word of Aurelius that the could keep an Immense One at bay, and that he knew how an Immense One would react.
They were horribly wrong.
He continued reaching into an obsidian journal and he drove his Provenance into it, hard, into the page of the porch and the two cups, and he called.
A demand for a debt owed, not a request.
"You said I could reach you. I am reaching. I am calling the favor. Intervene in the Vasiliou Elseworld where THE UNPAID COLLECTOR is rampaging now for him to cease animosity against us!"
He sent the message.
And...
The page did not answer.
Above the Elseworld, the pressure found what was left of the golden tower and leaned on it, and the tower fell.
Multiple Vasiliou Provenance Lifeforms continued to rise and circle Aurelius and Rosalia as if they wanted to ensure their leaders did not die, and many of them turned into crimson gold mist!
Noah’s existence seethed as he sent his Provenance into the page again.
Nothing came. No response!
The book stayed shut in his hands while people who had done nothing but keep a promise died in every direction, and Noah, at this moment, truly felt powerless.
Completely!
He had the dead construct of a genius on his Existence and he was traversing THE Chrysalis that some didn’t even know existed, but so what?
Power was power, and his certainly did not match up at this time.
As he gazed at the devastation, a second eye finally opened in the sky.
It bloomed beside the face of the Collector, heavy-lidded, gold, and the dusk that came with it settled over the burning Elseworld and stopped the light from dying any further!
THE REMINISCING WIDOW.
She did not look at Noah as she looked at the Collector, and the Collector looked at her, and the gaze he turned on her was cold enough that the thinning halted on its own, the pressure pausing mid-act while two strands of Immense Ones considered each other across a sky that belonged to neither of them.
They spoke.
Nobody heard any of it, not even Noah.
It moved above him in a register that did not need his hearing, and what came through was the shape of it and not the words.
She said something brief. He said something briefer. She said something that took longer, and the dusk deepened while she said it, and at the end of it the Collector was silent for a moment that the whole Elseworld held its breath inside!
Then the Collector harrumphed.
|THE UNPAID COLLECTOR looks down upon the Vasiliou.|
|A lineage of lamps. Thousands of candles calling themselves a fire, and half of them snuffed by an afternoon of his displeasure. He is embarrassed to have been owed anything by them at all.|
The eye turned. It found Noah and Thalia, and it held both of them at once.
|I am not done with you.|
|Live in fear and doubt. At an undetermined time in the future, I may appear at any moment you hold her, and rip her in half.|
|Any...moment.|
HUUUM!
And in an instant, the face in the sky was gone.
The violet dome came back, torn in a way that would not heal for a long while, and the moss-stone arcs found their gravities again and settled, and across the Elseworld the thinning had stopped, and what it had already taken did not come back.
The second eye lingered.
It looked down at Noah through the dusk, and he could see it clearly, every line of it, and the words came without any halo to carry them, quiet, from everywhere for all those here to see.
|The favor has been paid, O Human Dreamer.|
...!
Then she was gone as well, and the evening she had brought went with her.
Noah did not move for a moment.
Then Thalia came down out of the air past him and went to her parents. Rosalia had lowered Aurelius to a moss-stone arc.
His blood had stopped and his Provenance was gone entirely, not guttering but gone. Fractured. Decimated!
His daughter knelt and put her forehead against his shoulder, and he lifted one shaking hand and set it on her hair.
"Its...okay. Such is existence, my daughter. Such is existence. I am just glad to have protected you from a being like that..."
...!
Aurelius said such words, but Rosalia gazed at Noah hatefully!
Around them, the lineage counted itself, and came up short.
Noah looked at the devastation of Provenance Lifeforms.
The Provenances forever disintegrated while he had been...
Powerless. That was the word, and it was not the same word as outmatched or outnumbered. He had faced things above his weight before and found an angle.
There had been no angle. There had been a wall, and a book that would not open, and seconds!
And when the help had come, it had come in its own time, which was never his. The Widow had arrived when she arrived, spoken as long as she chose, and left when the debt was square by her own accounting, and every second between his call and her eye had been paid for by the lives of many Provenance Lifeforms.
That was what relying on another meant. They came in their own time. They did things in their own way. The bill for the difference went to whoever was standing closest, and today it had gone to many!
He had assumed far too many things that turned out to be wrong.
He needed to do things differently. He needed to question everything he heard or thought he knew as there were no absolutes.
Noah stood in the decimated centerpoint of The Vasiliou Lineage as he stood tall while many accusing faces picked each other out of the rubble, their distate and hatred showing clearly whenever they glanced at him!
There was no tyranny to show or speech to give as this...was merely a glimpse of the power of Immense Ones and a heavy defeat that let it be known clearly...whatever rules others believed, Immense Ones did not have to abide by them.