Chapter 5558: Outcasts!
Chapter 5558: Outcasts!
<THE True Human Emperor>
The suppression arrived before he had finished stepping.
It came as waves rather than as a wall, rolling through him one after another and settling in the places where his facets lived, and although Noah had felt suppression before, this was something else.
This was procedural. It did not fight him. It simply went through his existence closing doors!
|Welcome to THE Ancestral Grounds of Ymnaros.|
|The vast weavings of authority are suppressed here. All facets of your existence are locked, and will remain so. You will be permitted to keep a single thing.|
|What within your existence do you wish to keep?|
Since he had perhaps two heartbeats before the question stopped being an offer, Noah did not spend them being surprised.
He weighed all. His Osmontian Source Infinity was the deepest well he had, but a well is only useful if you can carry water in something. His Ananke Intent was the second order and it had never once failed him, and yet Intent needed a shape to press through. THE Collision of Causes was an engine and engines needed hands. And every appendage he had was a hand that would be closed by whatever had just closed the rest.
Of course, there was only one thing on the list that was not an instrument at all.
"My Osmontian Tongue," he said.
HUUM!
The gold and black seas around him churned, and the prompts came down.
|Selection accepted.|
|All facets of your existence are hereby unusable. Osmontian Source Infinity: locked. Volume: locked. Output: locked. Trueness: locked. The Nine Foundations: locked. THE Ananke Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian: locked. THE Collision of Causes: suspended. All appendages: sealed. THE Quintessential Confluence: unavailable.|
|Retained: THE Osmontian Tongue. Five Letters and one Word.|
HUUM!
When the churning cleared he found himself standing on a road!
It ran out of the darkness beneath his feet and continued ahead of him as far as he could see, shimmering stellar obsidian shot through with gold, and there was nothing else anywhere. No ground beside it, no sky above it, only an expanse of spatial dark in every direction with a single path drawn through it, and it went on past any point where seeing stopped being useful.
Noah stood and looked at that for a moment, and did not step.
|In existence, the unknowns always exceed the known.|
The Ancestral Voice came differently in here. Some of the imperiousness had gone out of it, and what had replaced it was closer to melancholy.
|This is true for almost every lifeform that has ever drawn breath, and most of them live comfortably enough within it. THE Ymnaros was blessed to have an unknown. It was cursed because the unknown it had was far too grand for it.|
|That grandness made my people into Superpowered Lifeforms. It also guaranteed, from the first age, that it would eventually be the thing that brought them to cataclysm, because a small people sitting on top of something enormous will always eventually be visited by something that wants it. That has been the shape of our entire history, and the shape was set before any of us could read it.|
|And in all those ages, my people never produced a single one who could grasp that grandness. Not one. So in the final moments, having run out of our own, I have expanded the search externally.|
|Now here you are.|
Noah listened to all of that calmly.
"What made me fulfill the requirements," he asked, "when someone like Hvitrmarr didn’t? Or Damodred. The dragon and the titan out there. Both of them are considerably more than I am."
|Potential.|
|There have been Superpowered Lifeforms across our history more powerful than you are at this moment, and some of them stood on that sand and were declined. The standard was never a measurement of what a thing is.|
|In existence, what could be is always greater than what is. A finished thing has a ceiling and can be priced. An unfinished thing cannot, and that unpriceable quantity is what the collar was made to answer.|
|However.|
|Potential is also the easiest thing in existence to stifle, waste, or simply lie about. Anything can look like it might become something. So it must be tested, which means you must be tested, and I take no pleasure in the necessity.|
There was a pause, and the melancholy went out of the voice and something drier came in.
|If I had the capability, I would take THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity in my own hands and give it to whomever I chose, and I would have done so ages ago, and a great many of my descendants would still be alive. But existence does not work that way. It always has to be so fucking complicated.|
|So. The first test, as you walk this path.|
|When you have lost almost all of your power, except one thing, how do you fight?|
...!
Ahead of him on the road, auras began to rise.
They rose in a line across it, blazing up out of nothing, and they were humanoid, or had been.
Each shape held roughly the proportions of a person and then failed them somewhere, a shoulder carried too high, an arm that had continued past where an arm ends, spines where a spine should not surface, the whole silhouette reading like something that had been correct and had then kept growing.
And each of them wore white and blue!
The same suits. The same simple cut Theron Adranos wore, the same chest sign designed to be recognized at a distance by frightened people, ragged now and stretched wrong over the shapes underneath, but unmistakably the same.
Their eyes were full of a murky obsidian light, and there was nothing behind it but madness.
Compared to the invaders in the gardens, they gave off nothing at all. Not one wave of authority, exactly as Theron gave off nothing, exactly as every one of their kind gave off nothing. And yet standing at the near end of that road, Noah felt the pressure of them come down the obsidian gold like weather rolling off a mountain.
"These are..." he said slowly, "mutated Superpowered Lifeforms?"
|Across existence, accidents are inevitable.|
|The emergence of a Superpowered Lifeform is not always so pretty as the ones you have met. The Blooms resolve an existence into a truer version of itself, and most of the time that is a gift. Sometimes the truer version is a horror, and the water does not consult anyone before it finishes the work.|
|And there are the others. Superpowered Lifeforms who took what the Blooms gave them and used it to oppress, to press down on their own, to decimate whatever was smaller than they were. In those cases the rejection does not come from us. Their own existence rejects them, and turns into this.|
|These are THE Outcasts. The dark underbelly of every accident and vileness THE Ymnaros has produced, kept here, on this road, because there was nowhere else to keep them and because someone walking toward the collar should have to look at them.|
|Pass through them, and you may continue on your path.|
Noah looked ahead and counted.
Thirty-six of them, standing across the road!
Each one carried an oppression that measured as grand as a Cenozoic Scale being at minimum, and several of them read heavier than that, which raised a question he did not have time to answer properly.
Were they all S-Rank? SS?
The Outcasts did not wait for him to work it out. They came, all at once, thirty-six ruined shapes surging down the obsidian gold road, and Noah stood there with his facets locked, his Intent sealed, his Causes suspended, and one Tongue in his mouth!
And...
"THE MORTAL COIL."
Blue light flashed out around him.
|THE DOMAIN OF THE MORTAL COIL has been laid.|
|Within its bounds all authority is designated absent. Every Scale, every Intent, every Pantheon, every Cause, every claim of power stacked upon an existence. Beings within stand as only what a human is beneath it, a life that can dream, and hope, and end.|
|Wielder privilege: as THE True Human Emperor, you retain the standing of an F-Rank Hunter.|
|Note: the domain does not require access to your locked facets. It is a Word of your own Tongue, and a Word is not a weaving. It is a truth spoken aloud, and a truth cannot be suppressed by a ground that has no opinion on whether it is true.|
Although the domain had worked exactly as intended in the gardens, Noah had not forgotten the one detail that mattered.
Theron Adranos had stood inside it and felt nothing. Whole, unchanged, himself.
Ruination’s reading of that was that Superpowered Lifeform strength was not authority at all, and therefore not the sort of thing the Word could take.
So this time, as he spoke it, Noah did not aim it at authority.
He aimed it at everything. He pressed the intent through the Word with a specificity he had not used before, at power and at not-power, at authority and at whatever else a thing might be carrying instead, at the whole of every existence on that road down to the plain mortal animal underneath, regardless of what framework any of it belonged to!
Everything here would be human!
OOOOH!
Ahead of him, THE Outcasts sensed it.
The change went through the line like a wave breaking backward, and thirty-six ruined shapes threw back their heads and roared, and the sound in it was not rage. It was pain, and it was fervor, and it was the noise of things that had been kept in the dark on a road for ages suddenly feeling something take hold of them that they had not felt since whatever they were before.
Then they surged, all of them, straight at him!