Chapter 5306: Settlement III
Chapter 5306: Settlement III
The settlement had taken shape through the application of excess toward the production of impressiveness.
Bone-reinforced structures rose across the compound’s interior in tight clusters, the material coming from Galdr Source Beasts whose skeletons carried residual Source energy that the builders had incorporated deliberately, the walls and housing units and storage facilities all carrying the faint ambient warmth of things built from formerly powerful things.
The Superbius quarters were the tallest. The Ira barracks were the widest. The Acedia administrative structures sat between them with the functional sobriety of builders who had been told to make something useful and had done exactly that and nothing more.
Together they formed a settlement that communicated, without any particular subtlety, the hierarchy of the beings occupying it.
Dietrich moved through it quickly.
He and the others floated upward as they neared the perimeter wall, the alarm still sounding through THE Bellum Pulse of THE Scales in its rhythmic report, and the Gilded Ones throughout the settlement had stopped what they were doing. Dozens of them stood looking upward toward the top of the wall.
He followed their gaze.
Two figures stood at the wall’s crest.
The wall’s surface was actively trying to remove them.
THE Bellum Pulse ran through the entire perimeter construction continuously, the defensive mechanism pressing outward against any Source expression that contacted it, and the figures standing on top of it had their lower bodies vibrating with the pressure of the Pulse working against their presence with the full force of every Gilded One in the settlement whose power had been fed into its reinforcement.
They were standing there anyway!
Dietrich recognized his sister first.
Ubergulden Adelheid! Alive, standing, her Galdr Source burning with a density that made him blink because it was considerably more than even he, the development visible in how her foundations pressed against the surrounding air.
The Custos stood beside her.
The Luxuria. The one who should have been dead, whose absence from the thread outside THE Advent Wall had made things clear!
Yet...
He was not dissolved. He was standing on top of THE Bellum Pulse of THE Scales wall with his legs absorbing the Pulse’s continuous pressure without visible effort, the multicolored Infinity around his frame dense and concentrated and entirely unbothered by what the wall was attempting to do to him.
Dietrich floated up.
His eyes found his sister’s.
Then the Custos turned his head, and their eyes met, and the Custos smiled and lifted one hand and waved.
Then his left hand moved to Eon’s waist and pulled her in.
Eon’s expression shifted into something exasperated rather than protesting!
Something hot moved through Dietrich’s chest.
How dare this Luxuria put his hands on his sister like that?! In front of everyone!
Standing on the settlement wall like he owned the approach. He had warned that fucker. He had made himself clear in the Braneworld!
He had communicated the boundaries of acceptable behavior and this Luxuria had apparently filed that communication somewhere he couldn’t locate it.
Dietrich rose toward them.
"Little Thing." His voice came out cold. "I warned you, didn’t I? Come down from there."
He reached for his Galdr Source and extended a pulling force toward the Custos, the authority of his foundations pressing outward in the expression of a senior Gilded One correcting the positioning of a Luxuria who had forgotten the demarcations of his station. It was not an attack. It was a demonstration.
Yet...
The Custos floated where he was.
Nothing happened.
Dietrich’s frown went deep. He pushed harder. The Custos stood on the wall with the concentrated Infinity dense around him and looked back at Dietrich with the calm patience of someone watching a process run its course.
Eon opened her mouth.
"Don’t." Dietrich cut across her without looking at her. "Sister, say nothing. This Luxuria needs to be shown their place."
The Custos looked at him.
His eyes were cold!
"She was trying to save her brother from humiliation," he said. "A worthy effort. But some people can’t be saved."
He paused.
"You only live today because you share blood relations."
BOOM!
Dietrich met the ground before he understood what had redirected him toward it. One moment he was in the air, the next a force had found him, and the force crushed him down and left a crater in the settlement floor!
It left him at its center looking up at the sky with blood in his mouth and a ringing in his foundations that had nothing to do with THE Bellum Pulse.
He lay there!
He was Superbius. He was Ubergulden. He was Silurian Paleozoic Scale with Prime Cause integrations and the full weight of one of the greatest Houses in THE Braneworld behind his name. And a Luxuria Custodes had just put him in a crater in his own settlement!
Around the crater, the settlement had gone very quiet.
Dozens of Seidr and Galdr Source Superbius and Ira Gilded Ones stood in the surrounding space with incredulity!
A Sororis Prima at Galdr Source raised her hands toward the two figures still standing on the wall, her voice careful and powerful as she sensed something heavy between thr impact just then!
"What is this? We are all of THE Ubergulden House here, and clear demarcations exist. Why is the first thing you come with conflict?"
"We naturally came to advance the glory of Gilded Ones." The Custos looked down at her with the expression of someone sharing obvious information. "We came... for whatever intelligence this settlement has collected over the time you’ve been here. So we can use it to advance ahead and spread that glory further."
The silence that followed was the settlement processing what it had just heard.
A Luxuria speaking to a Sororis Prima this way was not a thing that happened. A Luxuria speaking to a Superbius this way was not a thing that happened!
A Luxuria standing on THE Bellum Pulse of THE Scales absorbing its continuous pressure without visible effort, having just put a Silurian Paleozoic Ubergulden in a crater, and then addressing the senior members of the settlement like he was conducting a briefing, was not a thing that had a framework for happening!
Nobody moved.
Nobody was willing to be the next one to test what happened!