Chapter 5813: Arrogance!
Chapter 5813: Arrogance!
His mind still buzzed with his proclamations!
Thirty-four Lesser Kryos still turned in the air around Noah, pale blue and cold, the last spoils of the nine Guards.
He did not intend to keep any of them!
He pressed them together four at a time. Each set flared, fused, and settled into a single genuine Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin, dense and huming, until eight whole Kryos hung before him and two Lesser ones remained, too few to make another.
Four went to Achilles. The king had swallowed the Long Night’s cold to make his day-old Root stronger, and Noah could afford to give to help him.
Noah sent the Kryos through his Legacy body, across existence, to the mountain where Achilles stood with Rose amidst the snow.
The other four went home, into THE Infiniverse and the Dream Engine, to three people. Two to Eon. One to Ul’moreth. One to Naldine, along with the last two Lesser Kryos.
He felt each one land!
And THE Tide answered!
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing has answered your giving.|
|Given: eight Kryos Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins and two Lesser Kryos, to four lives you hold dear.|
|Returned, as dreamed: Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropin x22.|
...!
Twenty-two blue-gold stars bloomed around him in the frozen dark!
He took them all, one after another, and felt each one spread through the whole of him at once. His existence climbed with every one!
|Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins integrated: 66.|
|THE Osmontian Culmination. Present saturation: 16%.|
|Estimated Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins still required: 334. The estimate will rise as your existence rises.|
...!
Sixteen percent! A long road lay ahead.
Then he looked at himself.
|Noah Osmont. THE True Human Emperor. THE Human Dreamer.|
|VERITAS: 999/1. PROVENANCE: 999/1. POTENTIA: Infinite. PONDUS: 999/1. OSMONTIAN MOIRAI: 999/1.|
...!
He frowned!
The numbers would not hold still. VERITAS read nine hundred and ninety-nine, then one, then nine hundred and ninety-nine again. PROVENANCE slid from one to nine hundred and fifty to seven hundred and back. Every line on the panel shifted between one and nine hundred and ninety-nine, never landing for longer than a breath.
He understood it quickly. His Root and his existence were one now, so there was no separate thing inside him for existence to measure. It was the same reason Ling’s panel read one in every line.
So he tested it!
He chose five hundred for VERITAS. It settled there and stayed. Nine hundred and ninety-nine, and it went there. One, and it sat quietly at one.
He stopped.
The panel was his to set anywhere in that range, and others read whatever he chose. Under it, the real thing kept climbing. The door to Immensity was shut, but his foundation could still be refined and his Provenance still elevated, and the ceiling existence had built hung over a road he no longer walked.
He left the panel at one. It seemed polite.
Then he closed his eyes and went looking through the memories of the dead!
Nine Guards,. Alone, each was a narrow corridor, one route through the frozen dark walked for longer than anything should have to walk it. He laid them over one another, route on route, island on rift on torn Dimension, and they began to fit.
|The memories of nine Guards have been combined. THE Basal Floor has been mapped.|
|THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer now extends across the whole of it. Every Empowered Hollow Night Lifeform upon this Floor dreams a little, and where it dreams, you may perceive it.|
...!
And Ruination went further!
|Master. The map is fixed, but they are not.|
|I have run their positions through my Root and recorded every probability of their movement. You now have them in real time, and where they will be for some while after.|
...!
Noah’s eyes opened, and they shone brilliantly!
He saw the whole Basal Floor at once, through his Dreams, with Ruination’s predictions laid over it like a lattice of light. Floating islands of ice by the thousands. Torn Dimensions hanging between them, and towering cold-filled trees. And moving among it all, small bright points where the Guards were dreaming.
Fifty-five of them!
He reached for each one and felt its weight. Every one was at the Naga’s level, some grander, a few a great deal grander. Fifty-five more of what had taken everything he and Ling had to kill nine.
Then he turned his perception north, and went very still.
A rift split the frozen dark there, blue and vast. The way down. He could feel it pulling at the cold in his quarks!
And coiled around its mouth, like a guard dog around a dor, was something that did not fit on the map at all.
It was colossal! The floating islands near it drifted in its shadow. He could not make out its shape. It had too many limbs, or none, or limbs made of the same frozen dark as the space around it, and a halo of stilled snow hung motionless over where its head should be.
Its aura was wrong!
It was Immense, and it was not. The weight he had felt on the Plain of Accord when the thrones filled was there, and then gone, and then there again, as though this thing had climbed toward the door of Immensity, stopped exactly halfway, and stood on that threshold for longer than anything should stand anywhere.
It was not asleep!
He refocused. He turned from the rift in the north to the fifty-five bright points scattered across the dark, and began, very calmly, to plan which one to kill first.
But...
Then he stopped planning!
"Why one at a time?" he said.
Ling looked at him. He was not speaking to her.
"I see all of them. Where they are now, where they will be, every path each of them will walk for some while yet. I see them as a sky sees the ground."
His voice was very calm.
"Fifty-five points. And I was about to choose among them as though I were one of them. As though I had to go to each in turn and stand before it and trade blows until one of us fell."
He looked out across the frozen dark.
"That is the common sense of this place. The Guard patrols its corridor, and the one who comes to kill it walks the corridor too. I do not need to walk their corridors."
He raised his hand, and began to build!
Not a weapon anyone else had made. He had none, and wanted none. Instead he reached into what he now was, Core Capabilities moving as one body, and chose the pieces.
First, the shape. THE Rendered Design drew it in the dark: a great curved frame rendered out of nested pull and push, its limbs sweeping outward and back, partitioned along the seams where a bow must bend and mortared at the grip with his own blood and Teloi so that it would hold under any strain. What he designed, held.
Then the draw. THE One Foundation settled into the limbs as weight.
Then the string. THE Living Grammar spun it from a single Sentence, spoken quietly into the air and drawn taut: I Dream of Your End. Whatever the string sent forward would go already carying that decree.
Then the arrow, and that was the part that made the frozen dark itself go quiet!
He reached into THE Sovereign of the Lived Hour. Every second he existed, he was refined as though far more time had passed inside his Dreams. He had never once turned that the other way. Now he did. He opened a deep Dream and let an Epoch pour into it, and then another, and another, time without end, and he did not refine anything with it. He dreamed it decaying.
Trillions of years of wearing down, of erosion, of stone to sand and sand to dust and dust to nothing, of every bond in a thing slowly letting go of every other. And then he dreamed that decay across trillions more years, and pressed all of it, every aeon of it, down into a single point, and drew that point out along the string into the shape of an arrow.
Last, the edge. THE Unkneeling Chill ran through the arrowhead, the Negative Immensity in his weavings that let his authority pass through any other, and the Kneeling Frost with it, the Long Night’s own cold, turned to hunt whatever was borrowed in a thing.
He closed his hand around the grip!
|THE Rendered Design, THE One Foundation, THE Living Grammar, THE Sovereign of the Lived Hour, and THE Unkneeling Chill have been combined.|
|Its string is the Sentence I Dream of Your End. Everything it looses carries that decree.|
|Its arrows are Epochs of decay. Each one holds trillions of years of time’s erosion on all authority, dreamed across trillions more, compressed to a single point. What an arrow strikes, it ages through all of them at once.|
|Its edge carries the Chill of Negative Immensity and THE Kneeling Frost. Its arrows pass through authority, and turn the borrowed cold within their targets against them.|
|THE Tide-Crowned Protagonist binds the whole: what the bow grants death to, its spoils flow to you.|
|Substrate: Dialetheic Infinity. Your Dream has no far wall. Its arrows have no end.|
...!
He looked at what he had made!
The bow was blue and gold and taller than a mountain, its limbs curving back at their tips like the horns of the crown of light above his brow. The same tendrils that burned beneath his skin ran through its frame, pulsing in time with his existence. It did not look forged. It looked dreamed, because it was, and it looked alive, because it was part of him.
He set his feet on the empty air.
Bare to the waist, skin dark diamond-jade, tendrils branching over his chest and arms, hair hanging weightless around that jagged crown, the bow in his hand, he looked like a fiend out of a dream. A dream archer, drawing on the dark itself!
And both his paths moved through him when he drew. The Fiend was the weight in the limbs and the density of the body holding them. The Empyros was the decree in the string and the Epochs dreamed into the arrow. An arrow from this bow would land as a mountain, and as a sentence, and as the end of more time than anything it struck had ever lived.
He drew the string back!
The arrow formed as he drew, and kept growing. Past the length of the bow. Past the size of a floating island. By the time the string reached his ear, it stretched across gigaparsecs, a spear of compressed aeons so heavy that the torn Dimensions near it began to drift toward it!
Space around him twisted. The frozen dark bent inward toward the arrowhead in long curving lines, and the Dimensionality of the whole region strained at its seams, groaning, as the thing he held pressed on everything around it just by existing.
The snow nearest the arrow aged as it fell, going grey, then brittle, then to powder before it reached the edge of his light.
Ling had backed away several islands’ worth of distance without seeming to decide to as her thighs vibrated!
Noah looked down the arrow at all fifty-five bright points at once.
He let go!
The arrow left the string and split. One became many in a single instant, fifty-five arrows of blue-gold time tearing away in fifty-five directions, each one gigaparsecs long, each one following a line of Ruination’s lattice to exactly where its target would be when it arrived.
An instant passed. And...
HUUM!
The first one hit!
It struck a three-legged titan of hail in the far east, and the titan aged. All of it, all at once. Its ice clouded, then cracked, then crumbled, trillions of years of forced Dimensional erosion arriving in the space of a single heartbeat. Its legs went to gravel beneath it. The island it stood on wore down to sand and drifted apart, and three torn Dimensions nearby went grey and brittle and collapsed like old paper in a fire. When the light faded, half the titan was gone, simply worn away to nothing, and the half that remained was flaking into gold, dreaming toward its end!
Then the rest hit!
Across the whole Basal Floor, fifty-four more flashes bloomed, each one a sphere of blue-gold light where a Guard had been struck by more time than its whole existence had ever held. The sound came late and all at once, one vast rolling roar that shook the islands in their drift.
Most of them survived the first volley. They were each at the Naga’s level or grander. One arrow wore away limbs, heads, whole portions of their existences, but it was not enough.
Noah drew again!
"I...can do this infinitely," he said. "My Dream has no far wall. It does not tire. It does not need to rest between one arrow and the next. So why should I not? Why walk up to each of them and trade blows, when I can stand here and draw?"
Another arrow formed, blazing, gigaparsecs long.
"I do not need to follow the common sense of anything else. I can do what I see fit!"
BOOM!
The third volley landed, and the first of them died.
The titan of hail went first, its dreaming half worn away to the last grain. Then a thing like a frozen jellyfish the size of a sea, far to the south, aged into a cloud of white dust. Then a pair of frost wyrms coiled around a floating island, both of them eroding to bone and then to nothing in the same flash. One after another, across the whole Floor, bright points on Ruination’s lattice went out and did not come back.
And the spoils came.
|A Guard has been granted death. Spoils: Lesser Kryos x10. Memories of a Guard.|
Then again, and again, faster than the prompts could keep up with, until Ruination simply began to tally.
|Guards granted death: 11. Lesser Kryos received: 110.|
Noah fused as they came, without stopping his drawing arm. Four Lesser Kryos pressed together at his hip into a genuine Kryos, then the next four, the fusing happening in the back of his existence while the front of it went on loosing arrows.
Every Kryos he made, he sent away, down into THE Infiniverse, into the dreams of his people, wherever someone he held dear was sleeping.
The Tide answered each gift, and he ate every Quintessential ECG the moment it arrived. Each one spread through the whole of him, and every arrow after it came off the string a little larger and a little more certain!
|Guards granted death: 24. Lesser Kryos received: 240. Kryos fused and given: 60.|
|THE Tide That Owes Nothing notes that gifts given to enemies now considered weaker than you carry less weight than gifts given with thought. Its returns have diminished accordingly.|
|Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins integrated this battle: 41.|
...!
Diminished due to weakness? Okay!
The Guards that could still fight were fighting back now. Storms of frost came howling at him from a dozen directions. A spear of black ice the length of a Dimension. A wave of cold that froze the air solid for a thousand miles. They broke against his outline, or dreamed away into haze before they arrived, or landed on him and were kept by THE One Foundation, and every ton of that pressure went straight into the limbs of the bow and came back out behind the next arrow.
Nothing they threw slowed his drawing arm.
|Guards granted death: 38. Lesser Kryos received: 380. Kryos fused and given: 95.|
|Quintessential Existential Chorionic Gonadotropins integrated this battle: 64. Total integrated: 130.|
|THE Osmontian Culmination. Present saturation: 29%.|
...!
Thirty-eight!
Seventeen bright points remained on the lattice, all of them worn and cracked and aged, several of them fleeing across the Floor as fast as their crumbling bodies could carry them. Following them would be easy. So would drawing until there were none.
He kept drawing!
But he was not looking at them.
His eyes had left the Guards some time ago. Every arrow found its target through Ruination’s lattice and his own Dreams, and he let them. His gaze was fixed somewhere else entirely.
North.
Where the blue rift split the dark, and the colossal thing lay coiled around its mouth.
It had not moved. Not once, through three volleys and thirty-eight deaths. It lay where it had always lain, the halo of stilled snow hanging over its head, its shape still too vast and too strange to resolve. Every arrow he loosed had aged the dark around it, and the dark around it had not aged at all.
It was buzzing!
He could feel it from here, a low vibration running through the frozen dark and into his quarks. Its half-present aura of Immensity was flickering fastr now, there and gone and there, as though something inside it were waking, or deciding.
Fifty-five Guards, and none of them had ever truly been his enemy. They were spoils. They were steps.
This was the only real enemy on the Basal Floor.
And even from here, with his existence packed and climbing and a bow in his hands that could empty a whole Floor of monsters, it was utterly suffocating!