Chapter 5313: Sword III |
He put on the suit.
The Lesser Existential Source Armament settled over him with the precision of something made to exact specification, the obsidian jacket finding his body, the white shirt beneath it, the obsidian tie sitting clean against the shirt.
He adjusted it without rushing, and the Source weaving in the composite recognized him the moment the last piece settled.
Taylor was still sitting on the grave she had dug.
"Wowee..." She shook her head slowly. "You really had to do a whole power move of changing right in front of me like that?"
She said it like a complaint. Her eyes said something else entirely, shining with the appreciation of someone who had seen a great many things across a long existence and was filing this one under things worth having seen!
Noah ignored her and reached for the blade.
THE Sovereign Reckoning came to his hand, the blue-obsidian sheath cool against his palm, and with the suit on and the blade in hand, the picture completed itself.
He looked grand! Magisterial!
He floated above the golden sands.
"
This Observable Existence stretched around him in the state of something that had been mortally wounded and had not yet finished the slow process of expiring.
Weavings of decaying folds drifted through the space, half-dissolved, the structures that should have held them together failing in slow motion. Torn and destroyed Wheels of Existence hung in the distance, their architecture shattered, the cyclical mechanisms that governed the domain’s continuation broken past any repair he could see.
He felt like he was standing inside the shattered remnants of a Primordial Realm, the scale of the destruction vast enough that individual catastrophes blurred into a single condition.
Split golden mountains burned in the distance with roaring flames of terminal infinity, the fire consuming what it touched and producing nothing, the flame of endings rather than transformation.
Entire portions of the dimensional space carried tears that looked like glass-like cuts across existence itself, the fabric of the domain sliced through in places where something had cut deep enough to leave permanent wounds in the structure of reality.
Everything here pulsed with endings.
Noah could tell, with the clarity of a being whose Civilizations were steeped in this exact truth, that this Observable Existence was on a path toward destruction. Not threatened with it. On the path to it, the outcome already determined, the only remaining variable being how long the dying would take!
And yet, far ahead in this dying place, he saw a massive obsidian gold castle surrounded by towers.
The castle was full of life. Abundant life, abundant power, the vitality of an occupied stronghold standing in defiance of everything dying around it.
From the castle, an aura locked onto him and came over.
Sir William Arthur arrived before him, gazing at Noah with his composed neutrality, and then blinked in genuine surprise at the aura Noah was radiating.
He took a moment, focusing, the assessment of THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian and a faint expression of the Pure Primordial Essence that Noah hid visibly registering as something he had not expected to find. Then he set the surprise aside with the discipline of a man who set many things aside.
"One of the places to undergo trials to become a Sword of Existence," he said, "are Terminal Observable Existences. Domains that have had their Cause destroyed, and by extension, the Observable Existence itself placed on a path toward destruction. It is a failure of existence when this happens. It is a deeper failure when it happens by the hands of others rather than through natural collapse."
He gestured at the dying expanse around them, at the burning golden mountains and the torn dimensional fabric and the obsidian gold castle standing full of life in the middle of all of it.
"Welcome to THE Terminal Observable Existence, Chernobyl."
...!