The warmth arrived first.
That glorious warmth of Infinity in its most concentrated state, pressing against every surface of his dissolving weavings with the patient embrace of a dium receiving sothing back into itself. Noah was smiling inside it!
A genuine smile, the specific expression of a being who had just had an extraordinarily good ti doing sothing that had ended badly and was already ntally replanning the next attempt.
He replayed the battle.
The mont Ragnar’s fist had landed before his perception had finished calculating where Ragnar’s fist was going. The mont his tail had driven into Ragnar’s midsection and found nothing to devour because the man drew on Pri Causes rather than Infinity. The specific quality of being held and swung and driven face-first into the Wandering Territories.
He replayed it again.
And again.
The exhilaration was not diminished by the outco. It was produced by the outco, the specific pleasure of battle that had genuinely exceeded his current capacity and had shown him exactly where his current capacity ended and what the space beyond that ending looked like. He needed to know these things!
Calibration through comfortable engagents produced comfortable calibration. Calibration through Ragnar V49 produced brutal but accurate calibration.
He could feel his power across the brief duration of his recovery.
It had grown. Not dramatically. But asurably, genuinely, the foundations he had brought into THE Apeiron Hadean Organ of Infinity carrying a slightly different density than the foundations that had entered the engagent in the Wandering Territories.
THE Bellum Cause integration had deepened through the fight, the Pri Cause settling more naturally into his foundational architecture now that it had been tested under actual Paleozoic Scale pressure rather than only under Dreamstone contact.
He had to fight and war more to gain an even deeper integration!
The flow of Infinity through his Apeiron form had beco more familiar, the Observable Force channels more responsive, the relationship between what he intended and what his body produced tightening toward the automatic that mastery produced.
Ten minutes.
That was his return window as THE Primus Apeiron. And the Gilded Ones in the Wandering Territories were currently sitting with significantly reduced Infinity reserves, the gigaparsec-radius detonation having reduced their cultivation capacity in ways they had not anticipated and could not imdiately replenish.
They would not expect him to return. They had watched him get ripped apart. The reasonable assumption was that whatever he was, it was finished.
The singular obstacle was Ragnar.
He turned the entity over in his mind with the specific attention he gave to problems that had clear solutions that he hadn’t found yet. An Ira Gilded One operating at Silurian Paleozoic Scale, integrated with THE Dominion Cause and THE Bellum Cause at levels that made the Pri Cause authority a native expression of his foundations rather than an accessed capability.
No Infinity in his body for the Devour to grip. A body that treated Noah’s most powerful strikes as mild ambient information. Speed that bypassed the Hadean Mind’s perception extensions.
And behind Ragnar, a Superbius Gilded One who had not even entered the engagent, standing back with the cold composure of a being who had sent their instrunt and found the instrunt sufficient, which ant the being controlling Ragnar’s deploynt was operating from a position of such genuine confidence that Ragnar’s capabilities had not prompted them to contribute.
Silurian Paleozoic beings were not to be underestimated!
Gilded Ones truly were genuinely powerful!
The other thing that sat in his mind was the specific detail Pillow Talk had delivered just before the collapse. Ragnar V49. Not Ragnar. V49, which implied a versioning system, which implied that V49 was the forty-ninth iteration of a cloned and engineered Ira Gilded One built to the sa specifications.
Which ant there were at minimum forty-eight other versions of this entity sowhere in the broader arrangent, potentially hundreds, potentially a production thodology that could generate more on whatever tiline the engineering frawork required.
The Gilded had manufactured dozens, possibly hundreds, of monsters at Ragnar’s level.
With the sa face.
And this might only be the surface layer of what they actually held!
He breathed out, and multicolored rivers of Infinity ca out with his breath, the exhale carrying the full density of Nearu Absolute Infinity in a visible current that illuminated the interior of THE Apeiron Hadean Organ of Infinity with shifting color.
There was a sensation he was becoming more familiar with in this elevated domain. Not quite vertigo. Moreso sothing like...the imposter syndro.
The specific quality of a being who had arrived in a space where the other inhabitants had been present for billions of years, where the entities moving through the arrangents of power and politics and cultivation had been doing so across spans of ti that made his entire history, from the first dungeon to this mont, fit inside a margin of error too small to be aningful by their scale of asurent.
He had started as a man struggling against monsters in dungeons.
The distance between that and standing in Observable Existence fighting cloned Silurian Paleozoic Ira warriors while simultaneously occupying the lips of a Royal Gilded One inside a Magna Sorora vessel im THE Braneworld Observable Existence and touching Pri Cause Dreamstones in THE Sanctum Velanthra was a distance that, if any other mind had been required to hold it, would have collapsed under the weight of its own implications.
The idea alone, of going against beings who had been alive for eons, who had actively directed THE First Cause and its power while he had been learning how to produce a fireball, would crumble most minds before the engagent began.
He thought it freely.
"Hoooo."
He breathed out again, slower, the multicolored rivers of his breath dispersing into the warm Infinity surrounding him.
He had to remind himself every now and then he was not an imposter.
He belonged where he was. He fought to be where he was. He was just as grander...if not grander than the monsters that had lived for eons.
What if they were Gilded Ones? What if they steered THE First Cause itself? He was steering his own Infinite Cause. He had his own Scales. He had his own frawork that operated outside every frawork they had spent seven ages building!
He mattered. His dreams mattered. His ideals mattered. The Bounded woman his existence had co from mattered, her Infinite Cause originating sothing the Gilded had never managed to produce despite their eons and their engineering and their Pri Cause access and their seven ages of thodology!
He was ridiculously young in their terms.
That was not a weakness.
HUUM!
Infinity buzzed through the Organ as his form rebuilt with the specific quality of sothing returning grander than it had departed. The strength flowing outward confird it, the rebuilt Primus Apeiron configuration carrying the sa asurable growth he had registered in his first monts of recovery, the battle’s adversity having done exactly what adversity was supposed to do.
He checked his other bodies.
One was in THE Braneworld Observable Existence, inside the Ubergulden vessel, in a situation that involved the specific risks of tasting the lips of a Royal Gilded One as he tasted her existence while surrounded by Magna Sorora and a Superbius brother who had recently attempted to throttle him.
A challenge and a risk of an entirely different category than Ragnar’s fists, but a challenge and a risk nonetheless, and the power augntation flowing from the Primaris Bond was genuine regardless of the social danger of the context producing it.
One stood before THE Cognitio Dreamstone in THE Sanctum Velanthra, his palm making contact as the stone had begun to illuminate. Old Man Zeke was presumably watching.
Maybe before he returned to the Wandering Territories and resud the battle with Ragnar, he would have another Pri Cause integrated into his foundations!
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