Chapter 5235: Change! II
Chapter 5235: Change! II
The compressed Gilded One’s mouth opened.
Blood came out rather than words initially, and then the words followed the blood.
THE Great Usurper raised one hand.
"Yes, yes. I know all about it." He settled more comfortably into his kneeling position, his elbow resting on Abaddon’s knee. "My Unity has already spread inside you in the short period of time since you arrived here. Without you knowing, naturally. Can’t interrupt the process with consent requirements, it tends to slow things down considerably."
He tilted Abaddon’s head.
"You are unique, I will tell you that. It actually took me some dilated temporal weavings to get Unity in there. I really do have to give thanks to Osmont for all this..." He examined the ball with the academic interest of a researcher noting experimental conditions.
"Oh but what is this? You lost your Infinity? And you were fighting him?"
He laughed.
"You were actually fighting Osmont? Do you have a death wish?"
...!
He shook his head with the fond disappointment of a being who had observed poor decisions and found them more endearing than condemnable.
"Oh well. You are heavily injured, your existence is already almost fully under my Unity, and we have this lovely space and this lovely frost and all this collapsed mountain around us, so let’s you and I talk."
He leaned slightly closer.
"Meanwhile, we will take a look at your memories, yes? That works for me..."
The Gilded One had nothing available to consent or refuse with!
"If Osmont did what he did, there should be many more of you scattered around Observable Existence."
He straightened slightly.
"That is a lot of existences that know nothing about Unity. How lonely for them. How unfortunate that they are out there right now, in the inhospitable ends of Observable Existence, completely alone and probably frightened and definitely not yet acquainted with the profound comfort of being part of something larger than themselves."
He picked up the compressed ball.
Abaddon’s hand closed around it with the careful grip of a being handling something valuable rather than something defeated, and THE Great Usurper held the twitching Gilded One against his chest.
His Unity flowed into the Gilded One’s recovering foundations, the Authority of a being who had spent his time in Jotunheim expanding his hive consciousness through the chaos giants and was now exploring the specific interesting challenge of working it into the very different architecture of Gilded Paleozoic engineering!
The Gilded One’s wounds were beginning to close, not through their own physiology’s recovery but through the specific care of a being who needed his newest acquisition functional rather than collapsed.
"How about you and I go save all those poor Gilded Ones?" THE Great Usurper turned toward the procession of chaos giants, who had been waiting with the patient stillness of beings whose existence did not require them to have opinions about waiting.
"Show them the glory of what it could be to be under a single hive mind. Yes? Come on."
HUUM!
He began to move!
THE Great Usurper moved through the frosted landscape of Jotunheim with Abaddon’s massive frame and the chaos giants at his back and a compressed but healing Gilded One held carefully against his chest, and the devilish warmth of his smile did not diminish even slightly as his Unity continued its patient unhurried spread!
He had gotten his hands on a Gilded One.
And there were a great many more scattered across the furthest reaches of Observable Existence, sitting alone in inhospitable coordinates, currently unaware that Unity was on its way.
THE Great Usurper found this very exciting!
---
Near the shattered remains of a Shelter of THE Loom, the world still smelled of fire!
The Shelter’s structure stood in fragments around its former perimeter, its walls collapsed inward and its foundational weavings exposed to the open air of THE Wastes, the architecture of a place that had been built to keep something out now useless against whatever had passed through.
Alexander stood at the Shelter’s broken edge and looked outward, ignoeing the corpses of Early Creatures and Living Existences.
The Enneagram on his chest blazed with multicolored Infinity, the radiant nine-pointed configuration burning with the specific quality of Infinity that had been given rather than cultivated.
His eyes were cold and imperious!
In the distance, he saw two figures.
An Ira Gilded One and a Luxuria Gilded One, both heavily injured from their displacement, both carrying the shocked expressions of beings who had just discovered that the substrate through which all their cultivation operated had been administratively redirected away from them.
They were looking at their own hands with disbelief.
Alexander reached into his chest.
His hand pressed through the surface of the Enneagram and drew from within it a bow composed of arcs of multicolored Infinity that solidified in his grip with the patient ease of a weapon that had been waiting to be called.
The bow carried THE Genesis Monarch’s Infinity in its construction, the multicolored substance holding its form against the ambient air of THE Wastes.
He pulled back the bowstring.
His eyes did not waver from the two figures in the distance.
"For my peace," he said, "Many of you must die."
BOOM!
---
In THE Primordial Realm of Helheim, the obsidian sea burned with glory.
The Sororis Prima hit its surface alongside her Ira Custodes and went under, the obsidian water closing over both of them before they could arrest their descent, the displacement’s velocity carrying them deep before the resistance of the sea’s density slowed them enough to push back toward the surface.
They broke through into the open air of Helheim’s space together, both of them gasping.
The Sororis Prima looked at her hands.
"Can you...feel anything?!" Her voice was ashen with the specific flatness of a being cataloguing damage while in shock.
She looked at her Custodes, who was treading the obsidian water beside her with the automatic competence of a warrior whose body knew how to operate independently of his cultivation. "Infinity...can you feel any of it?"
Her Custodes’s expression answered before his voice did.
"Nothing."
...!
She closed her eyes briefly.
Around them, the obsidian sea of Helheim drifted in its slow dark currents, the surface carrying the faint luminescence of the realm’s ambient light reflecting off something that was not quite liquid and not quite solid, the substance of the sea sitting in a category of its own.
Neither of them noticed, at first, what the sea was doing.
The contact was too light. The leeching commenced at a scale too small for Gilded perception to register against the backdrop of their own depletion, the obsidian surface drawing against their skin with a patience that suggested it was accustomed to waiting.
By the time the sensation became distinguishable from the general wrongness of their current situation, it had already been happening for several minutes!