Chapter 5811: Brutality! II
Chapter 5811: Brutality! II
<THE True Human Emperor>
The Naga’s words had barely finished falling when all nine Guards moved at once!
They came from every direction, above and below and to every side, the ring they had formed around the dream closing like a fist. The whale dove. The wolf’s three heads howled in three different ages of the same voice, and the spider’s glass legs stabbed down through the dark.
Across the ring, the owl’s hundred faces turned toward them in perfect unison, and every one of those closed human eyes began, very slowly, to open.
Noah had perhaps half an instant to think.
Nine of them. Each one at the crow’s level or higher, and the crow alone had killed him once. Ling at his side, shining with the Quintessential ECG he had just thrown her. The Lent Clause already sitting in her like a coat. His eight Core Capabilities, untested in a real fight, all of them still more promise than proof.
As brutal and painful as this would be...it was a great test of what he had become as he welcomed it with unbound tyranny, his body erupting with golden clouds of infinite dreams!
"You first," he said, looking at the Hydra.
Ling was already moving.
The hydra reached them first because it had nine heads and did not need to see where it was going. Its necks of icicle lashed out in a blind fan, and Ling went straight through the middle of them. Her leg came around in a blur of blue silk and shattered one head, then another, then a third, the ice bursting into glittering fragments as her thighs were packed with enough density to crush trillions of Dimensions!
The heads grew back before the fragments had finished falling.
That was a problem. Noah watched the regrowth once, saw where the cold of THE Long Night flowed up from the hydra’s chest to rebuild each head, and knew where to put his hand.
He had wanted to test the frost on something living. Here it was. He could also control THE Long Night!
He flew in under the fan of necks, his Provenance pressuring the creature as if he weighed infinite density, and he laid his palm flat against the hydra’s breast, and tugged on the cold inside it.
It was the easiest thing he had ever done. The Long Night’s cold lived in his quarks, and the cold inside the hydra was the same cold, borrowed, poured into it by the winter to keep it moving. He simply told that cold to face the other way.
HUUUM!
More than a hundred Provenance Essence burned in his body, but...
The cold did what he commanded it to do!
It turned inward, and froze the hydra from its heart outward, nine necks locking rigid one after another, until the whole creature hung in the air as a single sculpture of blue ice.
Ling kicked it as grandly...
It exploded into powder!
BOOM!
Result: With enough Provenance burned, the frost worked on even a Hollow Night Lifeform. It did not touch what was truly the creature’s own, and there had not been much of that in a Guard.
His new Foundation and Tide worked without him doing a thing as he stood above the corpse of another lifeform, his mouth open as blue gold lava like mist leaked from him, his eyes shooting beams of light as he looked fiendish!
|A Guard has been granted death.|
|The Chapter it carried has concluded.|
|Spoils: Lesser Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin x10. Memories of a Guard.|
...!
Ten!
Ten small snowflake crystals spun out of the drifting powder and into his hand, and behind them came the memories, a thin cold thread of them, sinking into his mind.
He did not have time for much thinking or memories as...
The wolf’s three heads came down on him from above!
The pup’s jaws closed on his left arm, the prime’s on his right shoulder, the grey elder’s on his throat. And he felt it all as their Provenance burned!
They were not biting through his body. They were biting through his time. The pup’s bite made his arm young, soft, unfinished. The elder’s made his throat old, thin, failing. Between them, the prime held him and tore.
It hurt. It hurt in a direction he had not known pain could come from!
But he had met THE First Gu of Time and had felt the death of time itself!
So fuck this motherfucker!
Noah reached for THE Sovereign of the Lived Hour, and drew the wolf’s time into his Dreams.
HUUM!
A dreaming hour moved as he wished it to move. The pup’s jaws went slack, then soft, then aged in a heartbeat into the jaws of something ancient. The elder’s jaws went the other way, back and back, until they belonged to a newborn that could not close them at all.
Suddenly all three heads were the same age: old, older, oldest, the whole creature pouring through its own lifetime in the space of a breath.
He dreamed that an infinite time ravaged across its existence!
It died of old age with its teeth still in him.
He pulled its jaws off his throat and let the corpse fall!
|A Guard has been granted death. Spoils: Lesser Kryos x10. Memories of a Guard.|
Twenty. He had twenty now Lesser Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins now!
He took eight of them, pressed them together in his palms, and felt them fuse. Four into one. Four into one. Two genuine Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins lay in his hands, cold and humming.
He did not keep them.
He sent them down through his own existence and into THE Infiniverse, into the Dream Engine, into the dreams of the people sleeping on the golden shore. One to his mother. One to Seo-yeon. He felt them land, felt each one settle into a dreaming existence like a stone dropped into a well, and felt the Tide notice at once.
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has answered your giving.|
|Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin x5.|
Five blue-gold stars bloomed at his side.
He ate them one after another, without stopping, while the spider’s glass legs came stabbing down around him, and each one went into him like a sun and packed itself down into his Root!
The attacks did not stop even as he sought to advance!
That was how it went, after that. He stopped counting the minutes.
The scorpion caught him from behind and put its stinger through his chest. Whatever dripped from it was colder than frost, colder than the current Long Night, a cold that did not freeze but ended. He died...well, not really.
The golden clouds caught him and spat him back out, and in the instant of coming back he dreamed that death through once, slowly, from the inside. He learned the cause of the dreamed death. He learned the angle and the timing and the exact shape of the Dimensionality that had killed him.
The scorpion stung him again with its concentrated cold and Provenance, but this time...
It went nowhere. The stinger slid off him as though it had struck a wall, and the scorpion recoiled, confused, and Noah reached out and broke its tail off at the base with one hand, his Dream of it ending covering its body as a cloudy light covered it, and it began to flake off!
"OOOOOH!"
Not even screaming did a damn fucking thing.
Ling finished it. She came down on its back with both heels and drove it into a floating island so hard the island split in half, and she kept kicking until the scorpion stopped moving and the island stopped being an island. Its stinger stabbed Ling many times, but she was healed instantly for anything that passed through!
|Spoils: Lesser Kryos x10. Memories of a Guard.|
He fused eight. Two Kryos, down into the dreams of Henry and Adelaide.
|Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin x5.|
He ate them all.
What he was doing now almost became second nature as he killed, he gave away, and he got back even more in return!
But the brutal battle was still ongoing.
The owl opened its eyes.
All hundred faces at once, every eye in every one of them snapping open and fixing on the two of them, and the weight of that gaze came down like a mountain! It was a perception so total that it did not just see them. It held them. Ling froze mid-kick, locked in place, her mouth opening in a silent scream as a hundred human gazes crushed down on her Root.
Noah was not held.
He looked at the owl, and the owl could not quite find him. Its hundred faces kept sliding off him, searching, blinking, their eyes watering with the strain. What could not perceive him could not touch him, and even with a hundred faces, this thing could not see him properly.
He walked up the length of its gaze, into the space between its hundred faces, and dreamed its end.
He looked magisterially grand as tendeils of blue gold leaked out of him as he stared tyrannically into a monstrous beast, his Provenance beginning to flood into it.
He looked at it with total certainty, and the owl began to dream away. Its faces went first. One by one, their eyes closed again, and they flaked off into golden dust and drifted into him. Then its feathers. Then its body. Ling dropped free and caught herself in the air, gasping, as the last of the owl’s hundred faces went soft and gold and gone.
|Spoils: Lesser Kryos x10. Memories of a Guard.|
The loot was fused and sent to Barbatos. And another to Adelaide, because he could!
|Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin x5.|
He ate them.
He was getting stronger. He could feel it now, not in steps but in a steady rising pressure, as a flood rises behind a wall. Every Kryos he gave away came back to him as something grander, and everything that came back to him he swallowed, and his Root drank and drank and would not stop.
The remaining Guards had noticed as the pressure he radiated has nearly fucking doubled as it was insane.
He finally felt like he was returning to his old self!
The Empowered Hollow Night Lifeforms pulled back. The spider, the elk, the whale, the headless titan, and the Naga, all five of them drawing out of reach and circling, wary now. Four of their number were dead. They had come to bury him, and he was burying them instead!
Ling came up beside him, bleeding from both arms and the side of her head, her gold-violet light flickering where the owl’s gaze had crushed it.
Noah asked her mentally, in a few words, whether she could keep going. She told him, in fewer, exactly where he could put that question. She was smiling when she said it as her fair complexion looked extremely murderous!
He put a hand on her shoulder and turned the Lent Clause up even more.
"Then let’s finish it," he said.
The spider had spent the pause building. Its web stretched between three torn Dimensions now, thick with frozen bodies, every strand of it humming with a cold that caught and held. It flung the whole web at them at once.
Noah rendered.
A shape bloomed in the air before him, and another inside it, and another, a nested design of partition. He did not burn the web or break it. He found its seams, the natural lines where it had been woven together, and cut along all of them at once. The web fell apart into a thousand clean pieces, and the frozen bodies tumbled loose and drifted away into the dark, and the spider was left standing on its glass legs with nothing between it and him.
His golden clouds how now become a sea as they crashed down into it!
The elk lowered its chandelier antlers and every small pale flame on them flared white, and the light that came off them was a light that erased. Where it touched, things stopped having been. Noah felt it take a piece of his shoulder and leave nothing behind, not even a wound.
He spoke.
"I Dream of Your End."
And while the elk’s erasing light was still pouring across him, he composed another Sentence in the moment and spoke it onto Ling. She carried it at once, the Clause settling onto her, and she flew straight through the elk’s white light untouched and kicked its antlers off its head.
BOOM!
His Provenance and her ridiculous existence imposed itself on thr creature simultaneously as it could do nothing else!
The elk dreamed away into gold.
|Spoils: Lesser Kryos x10, and again x10. Memories of two Guards.|
Four more Kryos, fused and given. His mother again. Seo-yeon again. Henry. Emotive, still dreaming in her Earliest Folds.
Well, there were Kazuhiko and Erikson and others, but their time would come.
|Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin x10.|
He ate them all!
WUU!
Simultaneously...the whale came down on them like a falling Dimension.
It was the largest of the nine, the size of a contnent, and it simply swam down onto them through the dark, meaning to crush them flat against a floating island under the whole weight of its frozen body and the drowned Dimensions inside it.
Noah did not move out of its way.
He let it land on him. All of it, the whole impossible mass pressing down, and THE One Foundation took the weight and kept it. Did not lift it. Did not resist it. Simply kept it, and built on it, and every immensity of that pressure hardened into more of the floor beneath him. He stood under the whale and felt himself grow heavier with every heartbeat it spent trying to crush him!
Then he pushed up as he looked like a fiendish dreamer bearing the weight of all of existence!
The whale rose. It was lifted, slowly, bodily, by a man standing under it, and Ling came in from the side and drove her knee into its eye as she struck like a sharp blade, piercing into it!
Noah’s Provenance added on as he dreamed it dead, and between the two of them, they broke it open along its spine. The drowned Dimensions in its belly spilled out into the dark, frozen, silent, and the whale went still.
The headless titan charged before the whale had finished falling.
It came on its horse of snow with a sword of black ice as long as a river, and its first swing caught Ling across the waist and threw her half a Gigaparsec!
Noah’s eyes flashed coldly.
He let his Provenance divide.
The Closed Crown rose out of him, arms crossed, dark gold at the edges, a smaller shape of himself burning with every scrap of his tyranny, and he did not hold it back. He stepped aside and let it act in his stead. Seas of infinite Dreams raged out and converged on it!
It met the titan’s next swing with its bare forearm and shattered the sword with boundless dreams, then took the titan’s horse by the neck and snapped it.
Last, it took the titan by the stump where its head should have been, and pulled, and the titan came apart in its hands like a doll made of frozen straw.
Across the dark, Ling got up. She wiped the blood off her mouth and looked at the Closed Crown, and then at Noah, and did not say anything at all.
|Spoils: Lesser Kryos x10, and again x10. Memories of two Guards.|
More loot was fused as this time, Kazuhiko and THE Emperor Penguin got something!
|Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin x10.|
He ate them.
And then there was only the Naga.
"..."
Noah stretched and cracked his neck as he breathed out lava like blue gold flames while staring ahead.
It had not fought. It had watched, coiled at the edge of the dark, six arms still and its hood of frozen eyes open wide, while every other Guard died in front of it. Now it rose up before him, its tail vanishing into the distant islands, its six blades of rime lifting together.
Its beautiful face was no longer smiling.
Noah looked at it, and he affirmed it was the strongest of the nine by a wide margin. He could feel that, and he could also feel, underneath all its composure, that it was afraid!
So he began to dance.
THE Kindled Circle, the dance Ling had taught him in the golden dream, the dance her father had passed down to her. His arms swept out in a wide, unbroken arc, and his body turned with it, and his feet struck the empty air, heel and ball, a stamp that rolled out across the whole Basal Floor like a drum!
The Naga struck at him with all six blades at once.
He turned through them. Every blade that came at him found only the arc of his turning, the flowing, seamless motion carrying him through the gaps between the strikes, and as he turned he struck back, each stamp of his feet a blow, each sweep of his arms a cut. A blade came off in his hand. Then an arm. Then another!
His Provenance of THE Human Dreamer became sharp and deadly!
Ling came in from above, and together they took the Naga apart.
He drew closer to his Root with every turning. He could feel it happening, faster now, faster than it had in the golden dream. The Root and the man, leaning into each other, the gap between them closing.
On the ninth turning, he tore the Naga’s head open, and every frozen eye inside it brust!
On the tenth, he took its last two arms.
On the eleventh, he reached into its chest, where its cold heart pulsed around its Kryos, and closed his hand.
The Naga looked at him with its beautiful, fiendish, terrified face.
On the twelfth turning, he ripped its heart out, and it died!
|The last Guard has been granted death.|
|Spoils: Lesser Kryos x10. Memories of the Naga.|
...!
And his existence caught fire!
|THE Kindled Circle has been performed to its Truest Essence.|
|The distance between you and your Root has closed entirely.|
|Your existence and your Root have become one.|
...!
It was like nothing he had ever felt. The Root at the center of him had always been his, spinning, turning, a heart of Immensity he carried. Now there was no center to carry it in.
The Root was everywhere. It was in his skin and his blood and his packed quarks, in his Provenance and his dreams and the cold of the Long Night inside him. He...did not have a Root anymore.
He was one.
His entire existence buzzed with utterly overwhelming power, a pressure so vast and so total that the snow stopped in the air around him, and the torn Dimensions drifting in the dark trembled, and across the whole Basal Floor, everything that could still feel anything felt him.
He hung in the frozen dark among the corpses of nine Guards, with Ling beside him bleeding and staring, and sensed what he had become.
And he knew, with perfect clarity, that he could not take it any further.
He could feel the door. Exactly where it should be, at the very top of everything he now was, the place where a Root became Immense. And it was shut. Simply not there to be opened, because existence had decided there would be no more Immensity, and existence had meant it!
He could not make his Root Immense. Not now. Perhaps not ever.
Noah looked up into the falling snow as it fell more and more heavily.
"Do I...have to be Immense?"
His voice carried across the whole dark expanse.
"Is Immensity the only path? If existence itself makes becoming Immense impossible, does one... simply give up?"
The snow held still around him, as if it were listening.
"I have advanced so much since merely shooting fireballs," Noah said. "Can I...not do something unfathomably Quintessential here?"
...!