Chapter 5268: Everybody Dies! |
Noah looked at Taylor and thought about what she’d told him and found that not all of it fit.
Some of it did. An assassination team sent from the future was dramatic but not conceptually complicated, beings with enough power and enough motivation and enough temporal capability to execute a retroactive kill had existed.
But the logic anf specifics had problems.
"." She straightened slowly. "But okay. The past is set. So what?"
Noah looked at her and felt something he hadn’t felt in a considerable time, which was the refreshment of a being who talked back. When was the last time someone had talked to him like that?
He shook his head and continued.
"Another thing," he said. "If they came back in time, why not alert the strongest Fourth Scale Gilded Ones here? Or Fifth Scale, if that power exists?" He looked at the Shelter wreckage around them. "They could kill me easily at those tiers. But they haven’t. There should be a reason they can’t, which contributes to the closed loop theory."
Taylor blinked.
Her eyes lit up. She floated toward him again, the fear of thirty seconds ago apparently fully processed and discarded, her face carrying the brightness of someone who’d heard a question she had information about.
Her hands moved as she talked, the gestures carrying a rhythm that matched her speaking cadence.
"That’s why they recruited anomalies. Because if they involve Ealdor Gilded Ones, they’ll be detected. She said they have to walk a fine line. Them being here is already bad because they have to make sure THE Primordial Source doesn’t recognize them, since existence would reject them outright. They aren’t from here."
She leaned closer.
"Since I found that out, I’ve been screaming in my head that they don’t belong here. Whispering it. Shouting it. Trying to send this information through my communication with Infinity and THE Primordial Source." She dropped her hands.
"Fucking nothing happened. So if you have a direct line to the Source, that might be the easiest way to deal with them. Because why face a bunch of Fourth Scale fuckers if you don’t have to?"
...!
Fourth Scale fuckers.
This was what wanted to interrupt the momentous occasion of THE Infiniverse becoming an Observable Existence. He’d just become capable of killing Silurian Paleozoic Scale entities, the middle tier of THE Third Scale!
The gap between that and Fourth Scale was not a gap he could currently close quickly.
But if he had time to continue allowing the spam of Persevere...
But for now, this Adversity didn’t need to happen.
A direct line to the Source. He didn’t have that. Not in the way Taylor was describing it, as a communication channel that could deliver a report and receive a response.
But he had a connection to something that did.
THE Creature.
THE Creature who held THE Primordial Source within his existence.
If Noah could get a message to him. If THE Creature’s connection to THE Primordial Source was direct enough to flag beings that didn’t belong in this time. If THE Primordial Source could be made aware, and if that awareness produced the rejection Taylor had described Vireth worrying about...
Then Noah wouldn’t need to fight Fourth Scale beings at all.
He’d just need to make a call.
"Hmmm."
The smile came back.
It spread across the Primus Apeiron form’s features with the slow devilish warmth. The multicolored flames of Persevere burned brighter around the smile, and the surrounding existence registered whatever he was thinking and held very still.
Taylor was watching.
Her eyes moved from his smile to the surrounding space and back to his smile.
"I... don’t like when you make that face," she said!