The air outside Commander Elara's personal lab was still, sterile, and humming with a quiet, intellectual energy.
It was a stark contrast to the storm of emotions that was currently brewing within the Commander herself. She floated beside Noah, her arms crossed, her eyes a mixture of profound annoyance and a grudging awe.
"It just… disappeared?" she grumbled, the words a low, frustrated hiss. "An entire mountain of one of the rarest, most conceptually dense materials in all of existence, and you're telling it just 'disappeared'?"
Noah, now clad in a sleek, white-gold, tight-fitting body wrapping that did little to hide his glorious, muscular figure, simply shrugged.
His Aegis of the Architect was in its inactive form, a beautiful, intricate necklace of white and gold that rested against his clavicle.
"That's what it looked like to ," he said, his voice a mask of infuriating, deadpan innocence.
Elara let out a sound that was sowhere between a sigh and a growl. She didn't insist.
He had perford so many impossible feats in her lab in the last hour, from rewriting the very principles of their most important project to casually integrating a piece of wonder into his own spine, that the spontaneous disappearance of a mountain of tal was, frankly, one of the less reality-breaking things she had witnessed.
But she was curious. And she would get her answers.
They arrived in a region where three of the massive, white walls of the labyrinth converged.
At the center of this triangular clearing, a vibrant silver portal pulsed with a steady, rhythmic light, its surface a shimring, liquid mirror.
It was guarded by two Early Creatures, their forms still and silent as the statues that lined the Juridical Sanctum, their imnse power a quiet, suffocating pressure on the air.
Even with his Aegis in its inactive form, Noah felt a glorious, silent aura of power swirling around him.
The Innate Omnichalcum Aura Field was a constant, invisible companion, a promise of absolute defense.
His gaze, now enhanced by a hundred different systems, was a thing of impossible clarity.
He could see across half of the Early Laboratories, his perception cutting through the maze-like walls to observe the countless Early Creatures, Fold Dwellers, and massive glass and stone structures that made up this impossible place.
The silver portal before him was just one of many, each one guarded, each one a potential exit from this grand, sterile prison of a laboratory.
His gaze settled on the two Early Creature guards, and his new Existential Command Interface instantly provided their details.
|[Protector Theron]|
|Classification: Early Creature|
|Complexity: 320,000,000,000,000,000|
|Purity: 320,000,000,000,000,000|
|[Protector Liana]|
|Classification: Early Creature|
|Complexity: 410,000,000,000,000,000|
|Purity: 410,000,000,000,000,000|
For the first ti since he had begun his impossible journey, he looked at the staggering, world-breaking power of an Early Creature, and he thought, with a cold, thrilling certainty…
'Yeah. I could take them.'
HUUM!
It was a glorious, intoxicating sensation, the feeling of a predator that had finally grown into its claws!
Elara floated forward, her authority flaring for a mont. "A Commander and an Assistant are passing through," she announced, her voice a sharp, clear command. "Official business."
The Early Creatures looked at each other, their ancient, starlit eyes holding a silent conversation.
Theron, the one with the lower complexity, stepped aside, a low, rumbling warning in his thoughts. "Be careful, Commander. Weavings of the Followers of Gilgash have been observed nearby. They may be looking for a way to gain anything they can from us again."
Gilgash.
The na was a thunderclap in the quiet of Noah's thoughts! A pulse of pure, unadulterated glory, a thrill of ancient, burning thoughts shot through him!
He wanted to kill that fucker.
In this era, in his own, in any era he could find him. It was a promise he had made to himself, a debt that would one day be paid in blood and collapse.
Of course, that was if he was powerful enough.
The Followers of Gilgash were beings of imnse, terrible power. But now… now he might be able to match the weaker ones.
Elara waved her hand dismissively at the warning, as if the machinations of a primordial entity were a minor, bureaucratic annoyance.
She looked at Noah, who had been lost in his own, violent thoughts. "Osmont," she said, her voice a sharp, impatient prod. "Let's go."
Noah's eyes refocused, the burning thoughts receding back into a cold, calculated desire for future vengeance.
He nodded, and the two of them stepped into the shimring, silver portal.
Brilliance flashed all around them, a montary, disorienting bath of pure, transitional light.
An instant later, they appeared in the middle of a vast, primordial forest, another silver portal surrounded by three similar white walls and two more Early Creature guards standing behind them.
They only gave Noah and Elara a passing glance as Elara humd, a sound of eager, scientific anticipation, and began to fly away from the portal.
The two of them had stepped into the First Folds!
It was a realm of breathtaking, terrifying scale, a world that had not yet been tad by the neat, ordered laws of later ages.
The trees were not trees; they were titans, their unfathomably massive trunks, thousands of miles in diater, rising up into a sky that was a swirling, chaotic canvas of nascent folds.
The vegetation was incandescent, every leaf, every blade of grass, every flower glowing with its own, internal, primordial light!
The air was thick, heavy, and sweet with the scent of creation, a perfu of pure, untad life. And in the skies above, floating islands the size of worlds, their undersides draped with waterfalls of glowing, life-giving sap, drifted like lazy, gentle wonders.
They had arrived in a place of pure, unadulterated, and extrely dangerous, life.
Elara laughed, a sound of pure, unrestrained, scientific glee. "We will stay within the defensive paraters of the Early Laboratories," she said, her crimson eyes blazing with an excited, predatory light.
"But that still gives us a few light-years to play with. Now… let's find sothing to hunt."
…!
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