Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse Chapter 5138: Superbia! I

Midas.

Noah looked at the fat Abomination up and down with quiet appreciation. The amplified emotion of Greed was visibly bleeding into the creature’s morphology, showing in how golden and bloated and ringed everything about him was.

With how fat the thing had ended up, Noah almost thought Midas might have fit better as Gluttony, the slightly adjacent sin, the one that ate rather than hoarded. But the engineering had been Greed. The hoarding had been Greed. The fatness was a hoarder’s fatness, the body of accumulation rather than appetite, and Greed it remained.

The power was massive.

If he used sothing like Grimvault as a asuring stick, his Midas was worth more than five hundred Grimvault. About five hundred tis the power output. Ridiculous in itself, and even more ridiculous when he thought about Grimvault.

He looked up.

The invisible golden bubbles of Existential Singularities continued to flow into him from the targets he’d selected, and Grimvault was one of those targets. The fucker was almost drained dry at this point. He should barely have a tenth of his power left at this mont, scattered through whatever hole he’d crawled into in THE Wyld. He’d likely be dying well before the Civilizational Holy War even started. That dumb motherfucker would be the first to go. The others on the list would follow.

Behind him, Emotive ca drifting around Midas with bright eyes, looping the bloated Abomination in fast circles and inspecting him from every angle the way a child inspects a new toy. Her hair flickered through golds and electric pinks as she completed her last circuit and bounced back toward Noah.

"Ridiculously amazing work, sir!"

Her voice carried all of its usual mania.

"With this much power, and the information I have from those involved in the Civilizational Holy War. Mmm! It looks like you could assassinate a lot of them with this fatty here? Just send it to do your deeds across THE Wyld and be stress free! Think about it! Think about it! No more participants for them, no more contest, just rivers and rivers of dead Primordial Architects with golden ring-marks left on their corpses..."

...!

Noah looked at her calmly without replying.

The lack of response seed to make her even more interested. Her hair shifted into deeper golds. She floated back to her position with the contented hum of soone who had just been ignored by exactly the right being.

Naldine ca up behind him as Emotive settled.

"The problem are the truly powerful Primordial Architects."

Her voice held the calm caution she wore better than most. "THE Deliverance and others of his stature, in whatever communications they may have with the Gilded Ones. Before you get too loud and do too much, it’s best to understand this first. The reach of those at the top of THE Wyld is greater than the visible reach. You strike enough of the lower ones, and sothing further upstream begins to take notice. Better to know what’s upstream before you wade further in."

One woman wanted him to go wild. The other wanted him to be careful.

Both of them were right, and both of them were correct in different directions, and the synthesis sat with him quietly as he weighed it.

A lot of factors to consider. One of the biggest was information. If he understood things a little better, he could make better choices. Going wild was tempting. Going wild was efficient. But going wild blind was the kind of choice that closed doors he might have wanted to leave open.

He continued to steadily draw on Infinity, gathering information from the surrounding regions of THE Wyld in the background of his conscious attention. This battle against Octavius, the ergence of this glorious Abomination beside him, the engineering signatures he’d peeled out of the dissected bodies. All of it would soon be integrated into his own people. He’d amplify their Egos to make them grander. He’d consider the seven sins, and the seven virtues alongside them. The Gilded Ones had probably explored both directions, and there was no reason for him to limit himself to one half of the engineering when the full set was available to study.

But there was one critical source of information he could always tap into.

He wanted to do that first. He wanted to see if he could get a clearer picture about the biggest current threat.

THE Gilded Ones.

Noah stroked Midas’s bloated head absently, the bald golden scalp warm and slimy beneath his palm.

"Hold on a second while I consult my battery."

...!

His battery.

None of them knew what he was talking about, but it was, of course, none other than the entity he held a channel with that had functionally beco more like a wormhole at this point. The continuous influx of Observable Force from her existence into his had stabilized into sothing he barely had to maintain, a permanent draw, a current that ran whether or not he was paying attention to it.

He tapped his finger out.

A throne of multicolored Quintessence Infiniforce gathered behind him, the Civilizations woven into his Pillar supplying the shape and substance. He sat down on the throne, leaned back, and closed his eyes.

He tapped into his Quintessence Infiniforce within that distant Gilded One.

A part of his consciousness blood in her existence in the next mont.

---

The traversal was different this ti.

When he arrived inside her weavings, she was already there waiting. An illusory manifestation of her own existence sat on the multicolored waves of his Quintessence Infiniforce that filled her interior seas. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her golden eyes lifted to et his the mont he ford.

He took her in fully.

Ubergulden Adelheid was definitely a beautiful one. Tall, even seated, with the long slender lines of soone whose proportions had been refined across eons. Her skin held a soft pearlescent gold that ran beneath the surface rather than across it, the glow of an interior sun banked low. Her hair fell in pale gold waves down past her shoulders, every strand catching the multicolored light around her.

Noah had known beautiful won across his existence. But she...she looked like a being who had been built to receive devotion rather than to seek it, and the result was a quiet inhuman elegance that the other won in his orbit didn’t carry because none of them had been engineered with that specific intention.

She sat there as if she’d been paying close attention to his approach.

But she wasn’t looking at him with her usual imperious gaze. There was no anger.

She seed...oddly calm.

This caused him to frown. She seed different from the Ubergulden Adelheid he’d been ntally used to. And if she was like this...

"What happened?"

His voice was calm to match hers, but underneath the calm sat a sharper attention. Sothing had to be wrong!

Toward the question, Ubergulden Adelheid remained silent.

She looked him over, up and down, with the quiet thoroughness of soone taking inventory of a familiar object after a long absence. Then she raised her hands and let her fingers trail through the Quintessence Infiniforce around them, the multicolored currents responding to her touch with little ripples that traveled outward into her interior seas.

"Do you know why I have let all of this unfold for so long?"

Her voice carried steady clarity.

" leaving your Quintessence Infiniforce inside . Even now, the integration is not entirely irreversible. I would pay a heavy cost to remove it, but I still could. And you cutting it off and releasing it would be the easier option, the cleaner one for both of us. I could have done heavy-handed things to force you toward that option. I could have damaged the bond from my side until removal beca preferable. I could have made the cost of maintaining it unbearable for you. I did none of that."

She looked at him directly.

"Do you know why?"

...!

She spoke in a tone that was very serious.

Noah beca more serious with her. Fuck. Were things bad enough on her end to warrant this kind of plain speech?

He floated closer to her seated form on her wave of Infiniforce, and he shook his head.

"Why?"

She looked at him for a long quiet mont before she answered.

"I was inherently exhibiting everything I had learned as THE Secretive Eon."

"I felt like you and I were alike. I had lived eons as a Bounded Lifeform, the sa way you have lived as one. And that life, that long quiet life I had constructed as a Bounded among Bounded, was holding back from cutting the bond. I have realized sothing. I do not want all the eons I lived as a Bounded Lifeform to be for nothing. I was different then. I am different now, even if I did not want to admit the difference until recently. And as long or short as eons can be in the broader scope of existence, it would be a sha, a real sha, if I returned to being the sa Ubergulden Adelheid I was before all of that experience. When I have lived and seen and felt so much that the Adelheid of eons ago could not have imagined."

Her golden eyes held steady on his.

"That is why. I want to grow. I want to understand. I want to... evolve."

BOOM!