Chapter 5559: Pride!
Chapter 5559: Pride!
The first one reached him and it was nearly twice his size!
Made human, an Outcast was still a body that had gone on growing past where a body stops, and no Word in existence was going to shrink a shoulder or unbend a spine or take back the reach of an arm that had continued. He had removed their power. He had not removed their mass!
And, since he had a river of nothing to draw on, he was going to have to do this with his hands.
So he opened his mouth as the shape came down on him.
"I AM."
HUUM!
The affirmation went through him gloriously!
There was no facet behind it, no Source Infinity, no Intent, nothing at all except two words of his own Tongue spoken by the existence that had written them, and that turned out to be enough. His frame filled. His arms went heavy in a way that had nothing to do with weight!
The declaration was not a spell being cast, it was an existence stating the plain fact of itself out loud in a place that had suppressed everything except the ability to do so, and existence had no argument prepared against a thing insisting it was!
He caught the descending arm at the elbow and broke it the wrong way.
CRACK!
Then he stepped inside the ruined shape’s reach and drove his palm up under its jaw, and the blow landed like a hammer coming off an anvil, and the head came back and the whole body followed it, and Noah went with it and put his other hand through its chest as...The Outcast came apart on the obsidian gold road.
Bloof began to flow!
Two more were already on him before he could even pause!
"I AM OSMONT."
He said it low, and the second affirmation stacked onto the first, and the road cracked under his heel as he pivoted. His hand came across in a flat edge and took the nearest one’s throat open, and he did not stop moving, because stopping was the thing that would kill him here!
These Outcasts were not soldiers. They fought like animals that had been in pain for a very long time and had finally been given something to put their hands on.
Compared to the army in the gardens, this was infinitely more dangerous.
So he weaved.
He went through the middle of them rather than around, because the road was narrow and there was nowhere else to be. A blow came in from his left and he was not there for it. A second closed on his shoulder and he broke the wrist attached to it and used the arm as a handle to put its owner into the path of a third as he smashed them together like sacks of grain!
"I AM HUMAN."
WAA!
He waved his hand as it cleanly cut through an Outcasts whole, their body split in two as they twitched hatefully below him!
An Outcast got a hand on him at that moment, actually got a grip, and for a moment Noah’s whole body was lifted off the obsidian gold with fingers closing on his ribs, and he reached back and took hold of the thumb and simply tore the digit off the hand, and dropped, and finished the thing while it was still deciding what had happened.
Blood came off them and splattered everywhere!
Because they were human now, and human things bleed, and there was a great deal of them!
Even so, he made certain not to be injured. That was not vanity. He had one Word, one Tongue, no Marrow to accelerate anything, and no Hepatarch waiting to bring him back a second time. Every exchange had to end with him whole, and so he did not trade a single blow he had not already decided he could avoid.
And in the middle of all of it, weaving between a dozen of them at once with his hands wet, he found himself looking at their eyes.
Murky obsidian, and mad, and full of pain!
As he felt their pain while destroying them, he couldn’t help but voice out...
"Why wait?" he asked, and put a knee through a ribcage while he said it.
"Why wait until the last moment to expand the search for your own legend? Ages of this. All these years, all this pain, an entire people ground down waiting for someone who was never going to appear from your own stock. And you had the ability to change things the whole time." He caught an arm, broke it, moved. "For what?"
|A matter of pride.|
The Ancestral Voice came calmly, without any defensiveness at all!
|A thing like THE Aurate Collar of the First Purity is an object that Descendants of Those Who Remain would come for personally if they knew it was here and understood what it was. Primeval Ones would come. Things older than either would come.|
|And you are asking me why we did not simply hand it to an outsider?|
|I and those like me decided this a very long time ago. It is ours. It grew here, and the water grew from it, and my people grew from the water, and every drop of that lineage was paid for in blood by us and by nobody else. Why should it go to someone who wandered in?|
|It is like taking hold of a beautiful woman with a big chest and an unfathomably big ass, and then being told that after ages of never once enjoying her, I must now present her to somebody else.|
Noah nearly missed a step!
What the hell was this Ancestral Voice?!
|I hate what is happening here. I hate it immensely.|
|But I hate what has been done to the Superpowered Lifeforms more. I have watched them die in rows in front of stones for ages, waiting on a promise I was too proud to loosen, and pride is a luxury for the living and I am neither living nor proud enough anymore to pay for it with them.|
|So. Let us see whether you can take it.|
|Because so far, and I say this reluctantly, the selection appears to be decent.|
...!
By the time it finished, Noah had run out of Outcasts.
He came out the far end of them the way a man comes out of surf, and there was nothing left standing on the road behind him. Thirty-six ruined shapes lay across the shimmering obsidian gold, and some of them were still twitching, and a few of the twitching ones were doing it in the small aimless way that has nothing to do with intent anymore.
The white and blue was gone from all of them. It had been dark to begin with and it was darker now!
Noah stood at the near edge of the empty road, painted from his hands to his shoulders to his jaw, blood cooling on him in the spatial dark, breathing hard for the first time in a long while, and looked back!
He had no facets. No Intent. No Causes. No Confluence, no Marrow, no appendages, no Pantheon, and no Infinity of any kind.
He had said some letters several times, and meant them!
Then he turned forward, and with a heavy gaze, he walked.
Because he was!
He was Human!