The laugh rolling out of Octavius was an ugly one.
It wasn’t the laugh of a being who had lost control. It was asured, scholarly, and almost delighted! He waved his hands upward as if surrendering to a tide he couldn’t turn back, the gesture so disarming it nearly sold itself as sincere.
"Alright, big guy."
His smile held the brilliance of a host welcoming a long-anticipated guest.
"You are far too complex for us little things. Which table would you like my body on so you can take a look? Whichever arrangent suits your research thodology, I’m happy to oblige. I have preferences myself, but I’m willing to be flexible on my preferences today."
...!
Sothing shifted in the weavings around the island.
|Warning: Civilizational Weaving of Unity has been detected.|
|The weaving is infused into the ambient Infinity and is attempting to propagate along contact vectors. Targets: Noah Osmont. Naldine Manthon. THE Living Emotive.|
|Effect Goal: Infiltrate existential foundations and establish infectious Unity bond with source entity.|
Noah’s eyes sharpened.
That was why Octavius was smiling. The surrender was theater. The welco was bait! He had already embarked on an attack the mont the words left his mouth, threading his Civilizational weaving through the ambient Infinity that was already saturating the island, using the density of the environnt as camouflage for a strike that would have rooted itself into the existences of all three of them before any of them had ti to notice.
It wasn’t even a bad attempt!
Against a lesser party, it would have worked. Against Noah alone, it might have given him pause for a fraction of a mont. But the weaving had reached not only for him. It had reached for Naldine too.
His eyes turned unfathomably cold.
It wasn’t the attack itself that did it. What cooled his gaze into sothing glacial was that the reach had extended toward Naldine, toward the Hadean woman floating beside him whose radiant white hair caught the filtered light of THE Wyld’s strange sky.
Grand and tyrannical and calculating though he was, there were weaknesses he had never bothered to hide from himself.
Won were one of them.
His won, specifically.
Once a bond settled between him and soone he counted as his, he beca overly protective in ways that his pragmatic self couldn’t quite discipline out of existence. If there was a single emotion associated with him that could have been amplified into an Ego that made him immune to the madness of Infinity, it probably wasn’t pride.
He wasn’t overly prideful. Rage and wrath ca when they ca, but they didn’t last long enough. Lust, though. If one wanted to make a case, Lust might have been it! Even though he knew for him and how he played with infinity, emotions shouldn’t be the answer of why he never went mad.
Such a thought crossed his mind in the space between heartbeats.
He shook his head once and focused down on the island.
"Okay," he said calmly. "Second option, it is."
...!
He wanted to test things.
Here were powerful Primordial Architects whose engineered capabilities he couldn’t properly gauge from observation alone. The seas of Infinity inside them told him they were stable. The amplified Egos told him they were designed to resist madness.
But the actual combat ceiling of each being, the exact pressure they could withstand, the point at which their engineered stability began to crack, none of that could be derived from inspection. It required contact.
So he struck with an attack that would have decimated soone like Grimvault.
He stayed where he was. He raised his hand, and with a simple motion he pushed it down through the air.
HUUM!
In the next instant, identical visages of his body appeared in front of each Primordial Architect gathered below.
Each copy held the sa posture. Each copy pushed its hand down with the sa slow deliberateness. The air between him and every single target collapsed into a Geodesic Weaving of infinity, a sea of infinity, one attack distributed across multiple points simultaneously, one movent propagating through the ambient Infinity until it arrived at every target in the sa instant it left him!
Because Infinity was pervasive, his attack beca pervasive. One gesture. Infinite vectors!
Oh!
Behind each pushing hand, a concentrated sea of Infinity pressed downward with the full weight of his Hadean physiology riding its current.
BOOM!
The island rocked on its foundations!
Every Primordial Architect below was hamred backward. The Rhyacian Tier scholar at the rear of the cluster was flung across the length of the island before her body even registered being hit. Two Calymmian peers slamd through their own apparatus, flasks shattering around them, bone towers toppling onto their crumpled forms. The research grounds that had stood for eons finished their rearrangent in less than a second.
Two figures remained standing.
Octavius and Valeria held their ground.
They had both been struck. He had seen the impact land on them, had felt the resistance his weavings encountered. But neither of them had been knocked back. Neither of them was even visibly strained!
Valeria’s crimson braids swayed once from the force and settled. Octavius adjusted the cuff of one erald sleeve with the fingers of the other hand as a faint sea of infinity swirled around him.
|The weight of Infinity and Quintessence Infiniforce distributed equally across all hostile targets.|
|Against all engineered Primordial Architects on the primary island, single-strike termination(one hit, one kill) was not achieved. Engineered stability exceeds standard Primordial Architect thresholds.|
|Result: Five of seven targets incapacitated or displaced. Two targets unhindered.|
|Octavius Kraethos and Valeria Morne have sustained negligible damage.|
...!
Noah’s smile turned dangerous.
"You try sending your infectious weavings of Unity to or those around again," he said, his voice drifting across the ruined island with the patience of a decision already finalized, "and I really won’t leave your corpse in one piece."
Octavius smiled brilliantly.
He rolled his shoulders. Cracked his neck once, a small sharp sound that shouldn’t have carried across the distance and sohow did.
"Big guy. Infinity-bearer. Infinite Conduit. Whatever na you want to take for yourself."
His pale gold eyes shone with a hunger that had finally found its proper subject.
"I do wish to tell you that we are not like any Primordial Architects you’ve encountered before. We are the Chosen. Our Egos burn brightly with Greed that radiantly resists the madness of Infinity, the sa madness that would have you drowning if you weren’t whatever exception you happen to be. If you thought this was going to be easy, I’m sorry to disappoint. The disappointnt...will be educational, I promise."
...!
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