He put on the suit.
The Lesser Existential Source Armant settled over him with the precision of sothing made to exact specification, the obsidian jacket finding his body, the white shirt beneath it, the obsidian tie sitting clean against the shirt.
He adjusted it without rushing, and the Source weaving in the composite recognized him the mont the last piece settled.
Taylor was still sitting on the grave she had dug.
"Wowee..." She shook her head slowly. "You really had to do a whole power move of changing right in front of like that?"
She said it like a complaint. Her eyes said sothing else entirely, shining with the appreciation of soone who had seen a great many things across a long existence and was filing this one under things worth having seen!
Noah ignored her and reached for the blade.
THE Sovereign Reckoning ca to his hand, the blue-obsidian sheath cool against his palm, and with the suit on and the blade in hand, the picture completed itself.
He looked grand! Magisterial!
Obsidian tendrils of light began to swirl around the suit, rising from the Source weaving in slow deliberate spirals, and over all of it THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian glowed across his entire body, the obsidian gold of it running beneath and around the obsidian suit so that the two layers of obsidian, the worn and the innate, complented rather than competed.
He floated above the golden sands.
"Persevere. Exelissomai."
BOOM!
The multicolored flas and the obsidian gold surged around him simultaneously, the two Pri Letters expressing at once, and the flas spilled outward across THE Early Veiled Shore and beyond it into the vastness of THE Infiniverse, the domain receiving the effects the way she received everything he produced now.
He kept uttering them, every second, the way he had been uttering Persevere, the two Pri Letters refining and elevating his existence with each repetition, THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian growing fractionally more terrifying with every utterance because that was simply what it did now!
Below, Taylor clapped her hands together and whistled, low and appreciative.
The obsidian tendrils that had been forming around the suit since he put it on activated.
He watched them closely as they wove together into a bubble of obsidian light, the Source weaving carrying out exactly what Sir William had described it would do, and the body inside the bubble disappeared.
WAP!
Another of his bodies descended to THE Early Veiled Shore a mont later. He had several to spare. The distribution of his existence across domains ant that sending one off to a trial did not leave him absent from anywhere that mattered.
But the one inside the bubble began crossing the vastness of existence, pulled forward by the chanism of the Source Armant.
---
Noah felt his existence being drawn across THE Undefined Gaps of existence, and once more, he left his Observable Existence entirely.
He knew what the Gaps were. He had sent THE Infiniverse into them. He described them as the unclassified regions between defined existence, the spaces of no definition where ordinary beings dissolved.
Experiencing them himself was a different thing from understanding them, and what he experienced was his existence being carried on unstable rivers of undefined potential, the terminal infinity within them pressing against his perception with a density that he could sense would have reduced Second Scale entities to paste through proximity alone.
The Source Armant handled it.
It had a set of directions encoded into its weaving, a destination it was pulling him toward, and it provided sufficient power and protection that he didn’t have to do anything but experience the journey.
He sensed the distant Undefined Weavings of existence moving around him, the raw uncategorized potential of the spaces between defined domains, the terminal infinity running through the obsidian rivers that carried him.
It was, he thought, a genuinely pleasant way to travel.
Surfing on obsidian rivers of terminal infinity in a well-cut suit with a Source Lifeform’s blade in hand, the most dangerous spaces in existence held at a comfortable distance by the armant’s protection.
After what felt like a few minutes, definition began to return.
He sensed it before he arrived in it, the definition of endings and catastrophe and apocalypses, obsidian gray light gathering around him as the Undefined Gaps released him into a defined domain. And the mont the definition settled, his existence recognized what it was recognizing, because he carried many Civilizations related to endings and Apocalypse sat at the forefront of them.
He arrived in a place that was dying.
This Observable Existence stretched around him in the state of sothing that had been mortally wounded and had not yet finished the slow process of expiring.
Weavings of decaying folds drifted through the space, half-dissolved, the structures that should have held them together failing in slow motion. Torn and destroyed Wheels of Existence hung in the distance, their architecture shattered, the cyclical chanisms that governed the domain’s continuation broken past any repair he could see.
He felt like he was standing inside the shattered remnants of a Primordial Realm, the scale of the destruction vast enough that individual catastrophes blurred into a single condition.
Split golden mountains burned in the distance with roaring flas of terminal infinity, the fire consuming what it touched and producing nothing, the fla of endings rather than transformation.
Entire portions of the dinsional space carried tears that looked like glass-like cuts across existence itself, the fabric of the domain sliced through in places where sothing had cut deep enough to leave permanent wounds in the structure of reality.
Everything here pulsed with endings.
Noah could tell, with the clarity of a being whose Civilizations were steeped in this exact truth, that this Observable Existence was on a path toward destruction. Not threatened with it. On the path to it, the outco already determined, the only remaining variable being how long the dying would take!
And yet, far ahead in this dying place, he saw a massive obsidian gold castle surrounded by towers.
The castle was full of life. Abundant life, abundant power, the vitality of an occupied stronghold standing in defiance of everything dying around it.
From the castle, an aura locked onto him and ca over.
Sir William Arthur arrived before him, gazing at Noah with his composed neutrality, and then blinked in genuine surprise at the aura Noah was radiating.
He took a mont, focusing, the assessnt of THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian and a faint expression of the Pure Primordial Essence that Noah hid visibly registering as sothing he had not expected to find. Then he set the surprise aside with the discipline of a man who set many things aside.
"One of the places to undergo trials to beco a Sword of Existence," he said, "are Terminal Observable Existences. Domains that have had their Cause destroyed, and by extension, the Observable Existence itself placed on a path toward destruction. It is a failure of existence when this happens. It is a deeper failure when it happens by the hands of others rather than through natural collapse."
He gestured at the dying expanse around them, at the burning golden mountains and the torn dinsional fabric and the obsidian gold castle standing full of life in the middle of all of it.
"Welco to THE Terminal Observable Existence, Chernobyl."
...!
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