Chapter 5308: Barbarian! I
Chapter 5308: Barbarian! I
The old man finished speaking and Ruination’s prompts arrived before the silence after the words had fully settled.
|Ealdor Ubergulden Marxist- behavioral analysis.|
|Under standard Gilded social architecture, what you just did would have produced a very different response. A Luxuria humiliating a Superbius Gilded One in public, releasing Source pressure against an assembled group, none of that gets welcomed. None of that gets a philosophical monologue about pride being power. That gets corrected, hard, by whoever is senior enough to do the correcting.|
|Marxist is that senior. He is choosing not to correct you. The only reason a being of his standing makes that choice is that he assessed your power and decided it was worth more to him than the social cost of letting a Luxuria stand where you are standing.|
|He wants to use you for something. The welcome is real in the sense that he genuinely wants your cooperation. The goodwill behind it is not.|
Noah read through the analysis while keeping his face arranged around pleasant attention. Nothing Ruination had surfaced was surprising. He had already read Marxist the moment the old man walked through the settlement and laughed instead of escalating.
Marxist smiled.
"The prideful lead among us regardless of designation. You have demonstrated more than enough to stand in the company of Superbius leaders." He looked at Noah with warmth.
"What is your name?"
Noah smiled back.
"I gave myself a new name as I break the common mold of Luxuria." He held Marxist’s eyes. "I am THE Infinite Speaker, Ozymandias."
BOOM!
The name landed in the settlement.
Ozymandias! He had used the designation of one of the bodies contained within his own existence!
Marxist’s smile deepened. He reached down and lifted Dietrich from the crater with the authority of a man tidying up before company, dusting him off with two businesslike strokes of his hand that communicated, without any ambiguity, that Dietrich was furniture for the purposes of this conversation.
"Ozymandias." He tested the name.
"You came seeking opportunity. I will give you one." He gestured somewhere behind him, further into the interior.
"At a distance from here we were planning a push through a concentrated group of Source Beasts. The weakest among them are Galdr Source. They surround a resource of immense power connected to THE Primordial Source."
His eyes held Noah’s.
"As someone so supremely filled with pride and power, why don’t you act as one of our swords? Pierce through the Source Beast armies for us."
...!
Noah smiled brilliantly.
He had come looking for opportunities. He had found one, and the opportunity had found him at the same time, and both of them were now looking at each other and running calculations.
Marxist’s calculation: exceptional power, unknown origin, can be used as a battering ram against Source Beast armies and then disposed of or absorbed into the structure depending on what survived.
His calculation: a resource connected to THE Primordial Source, information about its location and what surrounded it, a Gilded settlement’s worth of collected intelligence, and a mission that conveniently pointed him exactly where he wanted to go.
He jumped down from the wall, keeping Eon close, and landed in front of Marxist and the circle of powerful Gilded Ones around him, all of them with Sources exceeding Galdr, all of them watching him coldly as their power was genuine!
His own...was just approaching there ridiculously because of spamming Persevere every second for thousands upon thousands of seconds!
He looked at them and smiled at all of them.
"Hey, for the glory of Gilded Ones, right?" He kept his voice pleasant. "It’s not like you’re planning on sending me to my death in those Source Beast armies. Haha!"
Marxist laughed.
"Bahaha! Right! Come, let us feast on some truly delicate Source Beast meat and we will set off soon after!"
The two of them looked at each other.
Both sides could read exactly what the other was thinking. It was visible in the eyes and the smiles that two beings produced when they had decided to cooperate while fully understanding that cooperation was a temporary state with an expiration date neither of them was going to acknowledge out loud.
It fit what both of them wanted. So they went along with it!
Noah moved deeper into the settlement, passing Dietrich on the way. Dietrich was containing himself with the visible effort, every muscle in his frame communicating fury.
Noah smiled and waved as he moved on.
Eon’s voice came into his mind as they walked.
"They...are still my people. I want to change them and how they do things. But it would be meaningful if the path wasn’t entirely built on slaughter. I know blood will be spilled. Let us just do our best that endless seas of Gilded blood don’t fall."
She was pleading for her brother. For her House. For the people she had been born into and had spent her existence among, regardless of what those people had chosen to become.
Noah mulled over her words as the settlement’s structures passed around them.
He nodded lightly.
Blood would be spilled. Rivers of it, probably. That was already decided by the decisions that had already been made by people who were not him. But rivers were not the same as endless seas, and he had some influence over the difference!
But while he made progress in THE Source Lands, he also sensed thr budding moment of progression for a certain Evolutionary Arms Race as he and THE Infiniverse were at the precipice of change!
Finally, the thousands upon thousands of spammed Exelissomai were about to show their effect!
---
In THE Infiniverse.
WUU! WUU!
Fireballs came from everywhere he was at once, plasmic clusters of condensed Osmontian Absolute Infinity released in every direction simultaneously, Quintillions of them spreading outward across THE Early Veiled Shore in a continuous omnidirectional release that turned the air around him into a field neither THE Creature nor Calypso could close distance through without eating whatever they ran into.
THE Creature had tried twice. Calypso had tried once. Both had pulled back.
Noah kept generating as his entire existence was running on an endless thrill of infinity!
Then the sea above moved and exploded!