Chapter 4295: What is The Way? V
Chapter 4295: What is The Way? V
THE Weavers had uttered dreadful words.
As for the Fold Dweller... his eyes opened wide in absolute, soul-shattering shock.
In the next moment, he found that the distant stars he had always been staring at... he was now observing them right in front of his eyes, as if he could simply reach out and touch them.
...!
He was utterly, completely frightened!
When he opened his mouth to scream, no sound came out. He flailed around, a puppet in a stringless void, feeling the strange, terrifying absence of gravity.
In his terror, his mind, still a brilliant, analytical engine even in the face of its own annihilation, remembered the words of the three hooded women.
Simply ignore nature.
Do things your Way. If your Way was to be able to survive in space, then you could survive in space!
He thought this, his mind a desperate, pleading mantra against the crushing, absolute truth of the void.
Because he knew, with a certainty that was its own form of terror, that if he did not think so, he may just crumble and perish in the next moment.
And...
He breathed.
He opened his eyes. In front of him, the distant sun, Procyon, shone with a brilliant, beautiful light, and he was not burned to oblivion.
He was in space. He was alive.
He was breathing. Simply because he had chosen to defy nature, to defy the Way of Existence that had always been established.
He had chosen his Way.
He was an entity that had not even an ounce of mana or authority coursing across his body, and yet, here he was, floating in the silent, terrible beauty of the cosmos, having found his Way!
But he... was an anomaly!
It could almost be said with certainty that...nobody else could replicate what he did!
But that was his Way.
And his Way would lead to unfathomable grandeur!
—
In the same Earliest Folds.
At a different point in time.
Aethelgard.
BOOM!
Noah watched an unfolding war with a sense of peace, his gaze now that of a scavenger, a predator circling a feast of giants.
He looked for the scraps, for the casualties, for the glorious, terrible loot that the chaos of battle would inevitably produce!
And The Dead had begun to appear.
Well, not The Dead in the way his current Era understood them, not the self-resurrecting horrors that defied the very concept of an ending. No, these were simply corpses.
Grand, magnificent, and unbelievably valuable corpses of Early Creatures caught in the crossfire of this terrible, beautiful war.
Occasionally, a Justiciar, a pristine white scion of death, would break through the lines of Aethelgard’s defense and decimate a Young Early Creature or a Juvenile Early Creature, their bodies shattering into a million pieces of crystallized potential.
And then, in the next instant, an Elder Early Creature, a titan of bronze and fury, would descend and unmake the Justiciar in a single, retaliatory blow.
Forgemaster Vulcan and the others, their forms wreathed in the light of their own, terrible Principles, began to shred apart the Justiciar legion.
Their pristine white armor, once a symbol of unyielding Purity, now became canvases for the brutal, beautiful art of their destruction!
Some fell to the brilliant, verdant earth. Others crashed onto the Rampart itself, their broken forms a testament to the fact that even the most perfect weapon can be broken!
HUUM!
Noah watched it all, his eyes shining with an ever-grander brilliance.
Because this was the phase of the war he had been waiting for. The messy part. And he wathcdd it all with glory as the utilization of the many different Systems of Existence was a grand form of Loot.
In any war, there came a time when the elegant, strategic dance of the opening moves gave way to a brutal, chaotic brawl.
A time when bodies began to litter the battlefield, when the neat lines of engagement dissolved into a swirling, bloody vortex of mutual annihilation.
Such a thing began to happen now. This was a chance for Noah to reap a harvest of unprecedented proportions. But at the same time, due to the eyes that were potentially gazing at this battle, he had to ask himself... did the risks truly outweigh the benefits?
The more time he spent here, the more moves he made from a nameless background character to something more... all of it opened up a pathway for a mere gaze of an existence from a Higher Scale of Existence to land upon him.
And after that... was collapse.
He breathed out, a slow, deliberate exhalation in the heart of the storm, and he made a choice.
BOOM!
In the next moment, an Astral Arcana Glyph, a stray shot from the ongoing celestial artillery duel, smashed down onto the Rampart itself.
It was a Mountain’s Judgment, and its impact was a thing of terrible, beautiful finality. It was not aimed at him, but its purpose was the same: to decimate a group of Justiciars that had landed on the wall!
The deep impact was enough to cause an explosion that threw back multiple entities, their forms, both living and forged, sent hurtling through the air like discarded toys.
In this explosion, a nameless character saw his chance.
He saw the pieces of Justiciars and the shattered remains of Early Creatures being flung in different directions, and with a single, decisive leap, he joined the dispersal!
He was a leaf in a hurricane, a single, insignificant mote of dust in a storm of collapsing stars.
His Innate Omnichalcum Aura Field buzzed as it collected the vibrant Kinetic energy!
He moved past the Rampart and towards the vibrant, primordial earth outside of Aethelgard.
BOOM!
He crashed to the ground, the impact cushioned by the borrowed power that still coursed through his veins!
He...was not the only one.
Nearby, a Juvenile Early Creature, a being of 900 Quadrillion in Complexity and Purity, was locked in a desperate, final struggle with a Justiciar.
The armor’s chest was caved in, its pristine white surface now a spiderweb of cracks, its internal systems spasming and collapsing. It was on the brink of its own, final end!
Neither of these two titans, locked in their death-dance, saw the nameless background character who had landed near them, a silent, unseen observer in this grand, terrible play!