Chapter 5363: Upheaval! III |
There is a thought people like to comfort themselves with.
The unstoppable force meets the immovable object, and existence holds its breath to see which one gives, and the question is supposed to be grand and unanswerable and a little bit beautiful.
It is a nice thought.
It belongs to beings who have only ever met forces and objects.
Because somewhere above the unstoppable and the immovable both, older than the framing of the question, there are things that do not care for the contest at all.
Things that were ancient when the first force learned to push and the first object learned to hold. Things that look at the grand unanswerable question the way an adult looks at two children arguing over which of them is stronger, and that reach down, without much interest, and pick the argument up, and end it, because the argument was never theirs and the children were never anything but small.
The decrepit hand was one of those things.
And so it met almost no resistance.
---
Moved, the way a hand moves a curtain it intends to walk through, the gigaparsec-grade authority of THE Source Barbarian set gently and absolutely out of the way.
And at that moment, with the hand passing through everything he had ever built, Noah bellowed in defiance.
He looked like an ancient fiend dragged up out of some buried age, his mentality gone cold and callous and clear, the specific clarity of a being who has stopped feeling fear because fear has nothing left to offer him!
His entire body, his skin, began to shine with multicolored jade-like brilliance, the Infinity and THE Primordial Source surfacing through him until he looked less like a man and more like some ancient treasure unearthed from a place that should have stayed sealed!
And behind him, summoned by the crisis of their own volition, the illusory manifestations of Ruination and THE Infiniverse bloomed into being in boundless multicolored Infinity, both of them roaring, both of them furious, two beings who had never been afraid for him before!
Ruination’s churning Infinity lines surged forward and pressed her hands flat against Noah’s back, pouring everything she was into bracing him. THE Infiniverse drew back an illusory spear of boundless multicolored Infinity, and struck, the spear passing straight through Noah’s own form to drive at the decrepit hand reaching for his chest, an entire Observable Existence throwing its weight behind a single thrust to protect the man it answered to!
HUUUM!
The hand showed something that might, on an ancient and decrepit thing, have been surprise.
It was not surprise for long.
In the next moment, seas appeared behind the cleaved fingers. Boundless Primordial Source and boundless Infinity, vast beyond reckoning, and the two of them were not held apart the way every being in the current age held them apart.
They were melded together, tightly, in an ancient and seamless manner, fused into a single thing the way nothing in this age could fuse them, and that fused sea pushed.
The spear of THE Infiniverse, the thrust of an entire Observable Existence, was decimated instantly. The boundless crystalline jade brilliance across Noah’s skin was torn away.
And the hand drove on, into him, the gray-blue fingers tearing through his Hadean skin and into the musculature beneath it, through the Osmontian Infinite musculature and into the bones beneath that, through the nine Prime Cause marrow channels and the Infinite meridians and the nerves, parting the entire terrifying architecture of his body that had been forged across apocalypses.
It pierced all of it. Skin, muscle, bone, the whole foundation that had withstood the weight of two Observable Existences in THE Undefined Gaps, and it arrived in his chest cavity, and there, at last, going through that much, the decrepit hand finally showed a sense of tiredness.
It was noticeably weaker now. The passage had cost it something. Tearing through a foundation like Noah’s, even for a thing that sat above forces and objects, was not free.
But its job was done. It was in!
And once inside, surging toward his multicolored heart, it almost hesitated, because it saw how much there was. So many organs. So many systems. THE Osmontian Organ of Existence producing Observable and Unobservable Force, the marrow channels, the meridians, the whole impossible interior of a being who had built himself into something no framework accounted for!
For a moment the hand seemed to face the difficulty of choice, spoiled by the sheer abundance of foundation to plunge into, like a thief who breaks into a vault and finds it too full to know what to take first.
In the end, it chose decisively.
It went for the heart.
Weakened, tired, having spent more than it expected on the passage in, but in, and closing on the multicolored heart at the center of everything Noah was, and its transmission rolled out domineering and patient and almost gentle.
|Transmission received: I will take good care of your body.|
|From the moment you arrived in this place, the pull from you has been intoxicating. I did not think a foundation like this could still exist in these times. I had given up expecting it. And there is so much more you are hiding, I can feel it, layers and layers you have not shown anyone. It is all right. It is over now. Stop fighting. It is over now.|
HUUM!
Inside his own body, Noah roared.
And at that moment, boundless seas of Osmontian Absolute Infinity surged up from the depths of his existence and rushed toward his heart, not to attack the hand, but to wrap. To contain!
He poured his identity-forged Infinity around his own multicolored heart in compressed layers, wrapping it again and again and again, and he did it with a structure pulled from the deepest weavings he knew, folding the Infinity around his heart the way a Calabi-Yau manifold folds dimension into dimension, layer within layer within layer, infinite restriction packed into finite space, a prison whose walls turned back on themselves endlessly so that the thing inside could never find an edge to push against!
He was not trying to kill it. He had understood, somewhere in the cold clarity, that he could not kill it. So he did the only thing left to the desperate and the very clever, the same thing its own jailers had done to whatever it had been cleaved from. He could not destroy it. So he would seal it!
|An extremely powerful foreign influence has breached all defenses and entered the heart. It continues to impose a terrifying influence, seeking to alter and control your Infinity and your Primordial Source, to convert your foundation toward its own nature and take your body as its own. Direct destruction is not possible. The influence exceeds all measure available to me.|
|Containment in progress. You are wrapping the foreign influence in compressed, self-folding layers of Osmontian Absolute Infinity, a restriction with no accessible edge, exploiting the manifold structure to deny it any surface to push against.|
|Critical factor: The foreign influence is weakened. The passage through your Osmontian architecture cost it more than it anticipated. The strength of your foundation, the bracing of my Everything, and the strike of THE Infiniverse have reduced its power below its full expression. The reduction may be sufficient. The reduction may be just barely sufficient. Continue wrapping. Do not stop. Do not stop. The Osmontian Absolute Infinity is the last defense and it must hold against something neither of us can fully understand, so you must hold it, you must hold, you must hold, you must hol—|
BOOM!
The Infinity raged, layer folding over layer over layer, his identity thrown around the foreign thing as the final wall between himself and a fluency that had eaten beings since before THE Scales!
And then, everything went dark.