Chapter 5393: One Step! I
Sometimes an ability so terrifying appeared that even Noah had to take a moment.
He held THE Loyal Reach in his hand, the Quasi-True Armament still crying out across THE Infiniverse, and he took the moment.
THE Tide That Owes Nothing was terrifying. There were other terrifying capabilities among the nine Foundations, plenty of them, but this one held the spotlight for now, because this one broke the basic math of giving. So he sat with it, and he asked himself the question he always asked when existence handed him something obscene.
How could he absolutely abuse this?
How could he take an already broken capability and bend it into doing things no other being could even imagine, the way he had bent every advantage he had ever been handed since he began?
As he was thinking it...
BOOM!
Seo-yeon barreled into him, laughing with pure joy, and the speed and momentum of her small body alone carried perhaps a quarter of what a deadly strike of the late Sir William’s Destruere would have brought down. Noah raised his hands and caught her out of the air, and his mother appeared beside him in the same instant, reaching out to pull gently on the child’s cheeks.
"This little girl," Amelia said, "does not know the first thing about holding back."
...!
There was only love in her eyes as she said it. And Noah, who loved seeing his mother happy more than many things, simply watched her fuss over the child for a moment before he gathered Seo-yeon into his lap. The unique little life form settled there, boundless energy still humming off her, and looked up at him with bright innocent eyes, and he asked her something.
"If you could have anything in existence," he said. "Anything at all. What would you want?"
He could give to a great many people around him, and he intended to. But he had started by giving things to Seo-yeon, and the returns from giving to Seo-yeon had been so shocking, so generous, that he had no hesitation at all about giving her more. He would happily pour the world into this child’s hands and watch a thousand times the world come back.
Seo-yeon took the question seriously. She thought about it, her small face going thoughtful in the way that always made her seem older than she looked, and then she answered.
"I hated the feeling of an unobservable existence," she said. "When I was holding the pain. The dying, and the failing, and all of it, the way the Causes hurt when they go. I felt all of it for so long."
She looked up at him. "So if I could have anything, I would want to help. As many dying Observable Existences as I possibly could. Because I can still feel some of them, you know. Even from very far away. I can sense their pain, the cries of the ones that are ending, and it pains me and it makes me so sad that I can hear them and not do anything..."
...!
What?
She could feel and sense the cries of a Terminal Observable Existence? From across the gulf of existence, a child sensing the death-pain of dying Existences?!
Noah’s eyes shone at her words.
"If you can sense the cries of the nearest Terminal Observable Existence," he said slowly, "then guide me there. Point me toward it. And I’ll see what I can do, the way I did once before."
...!
"Really? Okay!"
Seo-yeon’s eyes went big and enthusiastic, the sadness chased off by the prospect of actually helping, and Noah smiled at her.
He released the blade in his hand, and THE Loyal Reach expanded as it left his grip, growing until it was the size of a massive ship, its split-blade surface burning steady with Infinity and the Primordial Source. He stepped up onto the flat of it, the cerulean fire holding his weight easily, and he nodded to his mother, who smiled and came over to join them on the blade.
Then he called out.
"Henry!"
HUUM!
Infinity burned, and in the next instant his son appeared, and Henry truly did look like a younger version of him, a man in his early twenties with the blue-gold hair and the familiar bones, a younger Noah without the years of apocalypse carved into him yet.
If Noah was going out, he might as well do it while spending time with his family. He had just adopted a daughter, and he was not about to neglect his son in the doing of it.
Henry came over with easy confidence and reached out to fluff Seo-yeon’s hair where she sat in Noah’s lap.
"What’s up?" he said.
"A trip," Noah answered, as the great blade began to rise from the Early Veiled Shore. "We’re going to heal some Terminal Observable Existences, and find out exactly what returns come from it. And while we’re at it, you’re going to do everything you can to get stronger." He glanced at his son.
"Little Seo-yeon might accidentally collapse your Source if she ever gets serious, at the rate she’s going. I’d rather she didn’t have a sibling she could break by accident."
...!
Henry’s fingers froze mid-fluff in the child’s hair.
Seo-yeon tilted her head up and smiled at him, sheepish, caught.
"I won’t hurt Brother Henry," she said. "I promise!"
...!
With that thoroughly incredulous reassurance hanging in the air, the great blade rose fully out of the Early Veiled Shore, climbing rapidly through the realms of THE Infiniverse, and then it warped, instantly, carrying the four of them out of the domain entirely to appear in the space beyond it.
Outside, the scene was vast and grim and familiar.
Another of Noah’s bodies hung there, bound by countless chains, straining to drag the immensity of THE Infiniverse behind it through the dark, the eternal grueling labor of pulling an Observable Existence onward. But it was different now. With the emergence of his Intent and his Osmontian Source Infinity, the bound body looked ready, at last, to take a true step forward, the chains taut, the strain finally on the verge of becoming progress, and through all of it the body kept uttering the words it always uttered, every second, without pause.
Persevere. Exelissomai!
HUUM!
And one might wonder, somewhere in all of this, where the neat tidy description of Noah’s Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian had gone. What, precisely, did it do? Every other capability had its details, its breakdown, its defined edges. Where was the Intent’s?
The answer was that there wasn’t one, because everything that had been happening was the Intent. It was not a power among his powers. It was the thing underneath all of them. Him living by his identity had unlocked the Egos. His Intent and his Osmontian Source Infinity had elevated all fourteen of them.
His Intent had reached across existence to guarantee that THE Tide That Owes Nothing paid out. His Intent had pulled a blade from the corners of Existence because his identity demanded the giving be answered. To list all the things it could do, one would have to fill entire pages, because it touched everything, ordered everything, sat beneath everything as the foundation the rest was built on.
But if one needed something neat. Something small enough to grasp the whole of it in a single breath...
|THE Egoic Intent of THE Quintessential Osmontian: Existence itself must conform to who Noah Osmont is.|
...!
Yes.
Sometimes, some things were just too terrifying!
