Chapter 5543: THE Mortal Coil! IV
Chapter 5543: THE Mortal Coil! IV
Ashkavaal’s hand came down to squish him.
It was the size of a small mountain and it moved with the full unhurried confidence of a being who had just done the math and found a human at the bottom of it, and it reached for Noah to close around him and be done with the whole ridiculous afternoon!
And Noah calmly read out a skill he had used years ago in dungeons.
"Fireball."
HUUM!
A ball of deeply cerulean flame formed in the air in front of him.
It was small, the humble first spell of a Rank F Hunter who did not yet know he would one day bring back Observable Existences and Steeds, except the mana feeding it now was Osmontian Source Infinity drawn through the narrow straw the domain allowed him, and even a single river of THAT ocean was not the same thing as a beginner’s mana at all.
The cerulean fireball smashed into Ashkavaal’s descending palm and flung the titanic hand away, scorched black across its whole surface, the giant’s arm knocked wide.
And Noah moved brutally.
More cerulean fireballs erupted in the air in front of him like bullets leaving a barrel, one after another after another, a stream of them, and they slammed upward into Ashkavaal’s chest and her body was shockingly thrown up into the air by the impacts, a mountain of a woman lifted clean off her feet!
And while she hung there more of them came in from other angles, fireballs curving in on separate trajectories that Noah’s narrow trickle of Infinity guided true, each one landing with a heavy wet impact that burst skin and blew muscle apart in cerulean flashes!
She could not scream in time. She could barely fall in time!
By the time THE Second Breath came back down she was no longer recognizable as a woman or as anything, only a spinning mass of ruined flesh turning over in the air, and it smashed down onto the scorched land seconds later and did not move, and there was no sign of life left in it at all!
Oh!
The most powerful Infinite True Lifeform in the garden. Dead! Killed by the first spell Noah had ever learned!
...!
A heavy silence spread across the whole ruin.
Noah stood in the middle of it, and he turned slowly and let his gaze move across all of them, every ashen face in the army.
"Kneel," he said, "and your deaths will be quick."
...!
HUUM!
The words were heavy!
Then one of the Infinite True Lifeforms reined in its fear, and threw back its head, and roared.
"HE IS ONLY ONE MAN!" it bellowed across the army with fear and rage!
"There are TENS OF THOUSANDS of us! SWARM THIS MOTHERFUCKER!"
And the army came!
And Noah...waded into it.
What followed was not a battle so much as a demonstration, brutal and one-sided and moving, a single human body crossing an army and unmaking it as it went. He reinforced himself where he needed to, pulling his narrow rivers of Osmontian Source Infinity across his skin an instant before impact so that a giant’s fist that should have pulped him instead broke itself on him.
Then he punched back, and where his fist landed the body of an Infinite Lifeform simply exploded, ages of existence blown apart by a jab!
He moved through them and they died.
He turned and threw a barrage of cerulean fireballs into a knot of charging shapes and they came apart in the air. He ducked under a swung arm and drove his palm up through a torso and out the other side. And at one point, hemmed in on every side by rushing bodies, Noah raised his hand and uttered a single word.
"Sever."
HUUM!
A bolt of blue lightning released from his hand, and it chained.
It leapt from body to body across the packed host, hundreds of them, jumping conductor to conductor exactly the way it had jumped across many enemies a lifetime ago, and every Infinite Lifeform it touched exploded as it passed through, a line of bursting bodies chasing the bolt across the battlefield!
Noah watched it chain and felt something warm and strange move through him.
Nostalgia.
He had loved this spell!
So he cast it again.
"Sever."
HUUM!
And again the blue lightning chained across the rushing army, and again hundreds of them burst apart along its path, and it was pure one-sided brutality, a man walking through an army of humans!
And after a certain point, it broke them.
Noah cut down the last surviving Infinite True Lifeform, and he cut down more than eighty percent of the entire army.
The rushing tide that had been trying to swarm him simply stopped, and reversed, and the beings who had come to end the reinforcements began to back away, and then to run, terror finally beating out fury as they fled across the ruined gardens in every direction!
Noah gazed at all of them coldly.
Anaximander came to stand beside him in the sudden quiet, stepping over a scorched corpses, his anger cooled back into the mild watchful thing Noah knew.
"I didn’t jump in because..." the scholar said, looking out at the fleeing remnants. "It seemed like you wanted to experience something. Thank you for intervening."
Noah nodded calmly.
He turned away from the scattering army, following the direction of Anaximander’s gaze, toward the obelisk that still shone its steady blue-gold through all the ruin.
Toward Theron Adranos.
The golden-haired man stood before the shrine, in the midst of the corpses of his own people, and he was looking at Noah with a heavy gaze. He nodded once to Anaximander, an acknowledgment between two who clearly knew each other, and then he spoke toward Noah.
"I cannot thank you enough for the intervention." His voice was low and worn. "I wish to take a moment to bury my brethren here. We are born ordinary in these lands, and we die ordinary in these lands."
He looked down at the white and blue bodies scattered around the obelisk’s base. "Sir Anaximander. Could you lend me a hand?"
...!