Chapter 5159: Golden Wrath! II

What justice?! For someone like Aurelius Maximus?!

What justice for the being who had forced himself on a Primordial Architect woman while holding her consciousness open so that she could not escape the encounter by ending herself, who had killed her afterward and taken what remained as a souvenir, who had spared THE Creature specifically so that he could live with the shame of having failed to protect her across the remainder of his eons?

Hah. What fucking justice? What a word for the being Sororis Prima Elzyana was currently mourning with such evident tenderness.

What a configuration of values had produced a Sisterhood in which the mourning of such a being could occur with such unguarded sincerity!

Right after kissing the remnant skin, Sororis Prima Elzyana waved her hands coldly, and in the next moment, as if time itself was being rewound across the region above the mountain, illusory figures of THE Creature and Aurelius Maximus began to play out the recent past in reverse.

...!

Noah watched the reversing events with his eyes burning with defiance and his body already preparing for whatever came next, because the reversal was a playback mechanism that Sororis Prima Elzyana was clearly using to reconstruct what had occurred before her arrival.

The reversing figures played out across the sky above the mountain, moving backward through the strike that had carved Aurelius’s chest, backward through THE Creature’s transformation into his revealed form, backward through the summoning and the arrival, and as the playback continued into the earlier portions of the day, Noah’s attention sharpened on what he was watching.

The playback was not showing the truth.

Before Aurelius Maximus had arrived in the sky above the mountain, the playback showed Philemon Aristos and the other Primordial Architects of the gathering clique standing across the tiers of the ruined temples, intact and breathing, their bodies whole and their foundations undamaged.

The illusory figures of Noah and Emotive and Anaximander appeared in the playback as well, but they appeared as kneeling figures on the stone beside the Primordial Architects, paying the expected reverence to a Gerousia who had descended to receive it, their postures and expressions carefully rendered in the manner of Bounded Lifeforms who had been visiting the mountain to confer with the Gerousia on some unspecified matter.

Then the playback showed THE Creature appearing from nowhere, attacking without provocation, killing Philemon Aristos and the other Primordial Architects in rapid succession before turning on Aurelius Maximus himself, and in the reconstruction Noah’s illusory figure along with Emotive and Anaximander appeared to have survived only by the grace of THE Creature’s attention being entirely consumed by the greater targets before him.

Noah marveled quietly at what he was watching.

THE Creature had managed even this, had reached back into the substrate of what had occurred with THE Primordial Source and rewritten the history visible to outside reconstruction, and the rewriting had been calibrated specifically to remove Noah and Emotive and Anaximander from implication in the killing of the Gerousia!

The drawing away of rage that THE Creature had mentioned.

The devotion of the effort was striking, because THE Creature had been carving Aurelius Maximus alive at the same time he had been writing this alibi into existence.

But....

Sororis Prima Elzyana shook her head coldly as the playback reached its earliest reconstructed moments and then dissolved back into the ambient existence, and she finally looked down at Noah and Emotive and Anaximander and the remnant corpses scattered across the almost-flattened mountain below with a gaze that had shifted from grief back into the cold imperious composure of her rank.

Her expression was not exactly dismissive, because dismissiveness would have required her to consider the beings below her significant enough to actively dismiss.

What crossed her features was closer to clinical evaluation, the look of a being assessing a problem that did not particularly engage her interest but that nonetheless required resolution.

She spoke.

"In Lands of the Bounded, for a Relictus to appear amongst the Bounded means that others like him... could exist here."

Her amber-gold eyes swept across the mountain and the surrounding regions of THE Wyld.

"The threat this represents to the Gilded Ones is too substantial to leave undressed. Observable Existence and the Bounded Lifeforms within it...must all be accounted for, and the accounting must be thorough enough to prevent any further Relictus from emerging from the conditions that produced this one."

Her voice held no cruelty and no satisfaction, only the steady explanatory cadence of a being describing an administrative necessity!

"Any traces of Civilizations that produced a Relictus environment need to be further bound and severed. This is not a punishment. It is a...prophylactic measure."

HUUM!

She paused briefly as her mandala-eyes tracked across the figures below her.

"It is efficient. It is regrettable, in its small way. It is also, I am sorry to say, what the circumstances now require."

Noah gazed up at her as her words settled into the air, and his eyes burned with a defiance that he made no attempt to conceal beneath any more pragmatic expression.

He looked up with defiance because he did not fear.

He knew what the result may be. He knew. But his Infinity, his Quintessence, his very being...he truly could not allow himself to simply look down and bend the knee right now.

As much of a weakness and illogical this sounded, he truly could not do it!

And...

Sororis Prima Elzyana saw him.

His defiance registered in her mandala-eyes as a small interesting observation, and she descended slightly through the air toward him with the same drifting grace she had used to approach Aurelius Maximus’s remains, her tall slender figure lowering by small increments until she floated at a distance that permitted proper address.

She regarded him the way a being regarded an insect that had unexpectedly produced an identifiable expression, with neither hostility nor curiosity but with a flat detached interest in the anomaly for its own sake.

Her beauty was undeniable at this closer range.

When she spoke, her voice came out conversational, almost gentle, with the patient indulgence of a being willing to hear out a small objection before proceeding with the administrative necessity.

"O Bounded Lifeform who owes their life to the late Gerousia Aurelius."

Her amber-gold eyes held his without either warmth or enmity.

"You... do not agree?"

...!

At such a question, Noah kept his gaze locked to hers and spoke calmly, the calmness of his delivery matching the calmness of hers as if the two of them were peers discussing a procedural matter!

As THE Creature had said. All of them...were equal.

So!

"I... do not agree."

...!

BOOM!

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