Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5395: Stripped! I

While one body crossed the dark toward a dying Observable Existence with his family on THE Loyal Reach, the rest of Noah kept moving, because his pace had never once been the kind that allowed for resting.

In THE Source Lands, the body that walked among the Gilded Ones had left the settlement behind and set off toward the treasure that Marxist and the Ealdor Gilded Ones wanted. Things had shifted a great deal since he stood on that wall and put Dietrich in a crater.

His power had climbed rapidly in the time since, and Existence around him had been moving too. Taylor of the Light had reached out to him with news. She and Adrastia had become Attendants of the Swords of Existence, and Adrastia had taken a mission into the Strand of Broken Scales to learn why the Source Beasts there were dying in greater and greater numbers. He had found Gilded Ones at the root of it, and he had blown the whistle immediately. Now Relictus and Swords of Existence were being dispatched, to the Strand and to every other region the Gilded Ones had quietly infiltrated.

Change was coming for the Gilded Ones whether Noah pushed it or not.

He weighed that as he traveled, because his pathways could shift quickly depending on how events flowed, and a being with a dozen bodies learned to read which roads were still worth walking. He did not have to keep playing the loyal Custos lost in the throngs of Gilded Ones grasping for a treasure. Eon wanted to change her people, and the change had already begun.

In THE Braneworld, Emotive was lighting the Luxuria uprising, THE Great Usurper was binding the Acedia chain under Unity, and Alexander carried the stripped power of millions. THE Primordial Paradox had sent word as well, that he and Erwin, the teacher and student who had spent ages trying to collapse one another, were now moving against the Gilded Ones together.

So change was definitely coming to the Gilded Ones of THE Braneworld. From every side at once!

Which meant the body wearing a Custos’s identity could afford to stop pretending. It could change its path.

---

Noah and Eon stood at the edge of a rising glacial landscape, and Ubergulden Dietrich stood before them wearing a hateful expression he had not managed to set down since the crater.

Rows of Gilded Ones waited behind them, and more rows stretched ahead, led by Marxist, the shrewd old man in beast-skin and bone who had welcomed Noah into the settlement with every grievance intact. The vibrant green forest they had crossed gave way here to massive glacial foliage, frost-rimed and pale, climbing toward a mountain that shone with the auras of hundreds of Source Beasts. Many of them sat at the Third Scale. Several burned at the Fourth. Whatever treasure the Gilded Ones wanted up that mountain, it was guarded by a slaughter’s worth of powerful beasts.

And the treasure was not enough to move Noah. Not enough to make him climb that mountain and kill hundreds of Source Beasts for the sake of a prize the Ealdor Gilded Ones coveted. He had no quarrel with the beasts, and he had stopped, a while ago, doing work that did not serve his own ends.

Well, and he even had the oath when he was sworn in as a Sword!

So he turned to Eon, and took her hand, and looked into her eyes.

"Do you trust me?" he asked, calm.

...!

His gaze was intense, and it made her tense, a brief tremble running through her at the directness of it. She bit her lip, a small uncertain thing, and then she nodded.

Noah nodded back.

"I promised you change for your people," he said. "I’m going to bring it. I’m just going to take a different route to it than this one. Okay?"

...!

Eon breathed out, slow, like a being steadying herself before stepping off a height. And she nodded again.

Noah turned around.

His gaze passed over Dietrich and the Gilded Ones behind him, and then forward, over Marxist and the rows ahead, over every Gilded One gathered at the foot of that frozen mountain, all of them waiting for the loyal Custos to lead the climb.

And then he spoke.

"O, Superbius."

HUUM!

He called upon his Osmontian Source Egos of Infinity, reaching for Superbius, the Ego of pride, and he released a glimpse of his Intent alongside it, masked still as a Primordial Intent so that no watcher would understand what it truly was.

The moment he did, gushing rivers of pride poured out of him!

BOOM!

It came down across the gathered Gilded Ones like a verdict existence had already passed, and any Gilded One within reach was forced to their knees! Gilded Ones! On their Knees!

Oh!

Dietrich went down incredulous, his hateful expression cracking into shock as his Silurian Paleozoic foundations folded under a pride that out-prided everything they were, the senior Ubergulden driven to his knees in front of his own House by the Luxuria he had warned!

Marxist and the other powerful ones erupted with their Intents.

They had time to do that much. The shrewd old man and the strongest Gilded Ones present called up their records and threw them against the wave, Intents blooming to defend against the thing crashing over them! 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

And the Intents shattered.

BOOM!

They came apart like they had been struck by an entire Observable Existence, the foundational records of Fourth Scale and Paleozoic beings breaking under the weight of Noah’s masked Egoic Intent, and the Gilded Ones who had raised them were smashed backward, their bodies hurled across the glacial foliage, injured, their defenses gone in an instant. Marxist tumbled with the rest of them. The Ealdor Gilded Ones, the ancient and the powerful, had their Intents broken and their bodies thrown, all from Noah doing nothing more than releasing his aura and a glimpse of who he was.

When it settled, only two Gilded Ones were left standing at the foot of the mountain.

Eon. And Noah himself.

Above the mountain, hundreds of Source Beasts went still with shock!

He stood there grandly in the frost, wrapped in a pride no Gilded One could have fathomed possessing, a pride that had not been engineered into him by careful methodology but forged out of an identity pf grandness! Around him, every other Gilded One knelt where the wave had pinned them or lay where it had thrown them, the proud Superbius and the wrathful Ira and the ancient Ealdor all brought down at once, their records broken, their bodies smashed away.

The whole gathering, humbled in a moment, by a Luxuria who had stopped pretending to be one!