Chapter 5219: Darkness! II

Inside her own consciousness, away from the performance of composure she was maintaining for the assembled Gilded Ones surrounding her, the wound was considerably deeper than the physical ones.

She was Sororis Prima Prabhavati of the Maharanis House, a Royal bloodline that traced its lineage backward through five ages of the Gilded hierarchy without interruption. She was a member of THE Magna Sorora, The most exclusive administrative bodies in THE Braneworld Observable Existence.

She had earned her standing through eons of power that had pushed her to the upper reaches of Ordovician Paleozoic Scale. She had faced challenges that most Gilded Ones at her tier would have called insurmountable and had found them surmountable because she was who she was.

And this thing had chased her through the Wandering Territories like she was prey.

Like she was the quarry rather than the hunter!

Like the distinction between what she was and what it was did not register as meaningful information to whatever passed for its decision-making architecture.

"Fuck!"

She flung several Silurian Light Pulses at him with the specific energy expenditure of someone who knew the Pulses would not work and was deploying them anyway.

The Pulses smashed into his scales and were ineffective.

He gazed at her coldly.

And then his eyes, those crystalline blue things burning with the quality she had identified as controlled madness, seemed to smile. Not his mouth. His eyes!

She turned to the other Sororis Primas behind her and delivered her assessment.

"What we may be looking at is a variation of a being filled with THE Gamaidjan that has undergone some form of mutation or engineering. The madness quality in its eyes is consistent with THE Gamaidjan’s effects but it is operating with too much coherence for uncontrolled infection. It did not express THE Primordial Source even once during the engagement, which eliminates the Relictus classification."

She looked at the chains holding him. "As for why it targeted me specifically, I do not know. I have no prior engagement with a being of this description. But it is contained now, and contained means we have options we did not have seconds ago."

She looked upward at the hundreds of Gilded Ones maintaining the chain configuration, their Ira foundations locked in the tension of holding something that was actively trying to be elsewhere.

Then she looked back at him.

"Will you talk?" Her voice carried the cold authority of a Sororis Prima addressing something that had temporarily been elevated to the status of prisoner, which was a significant elevation from its prior status as threat.

"Or do we have to carve out your existence to get answers? You are now bound by weavings of Superbius and Ira. Egos you cannot comprehend. It’s best you talk now, little beast."

...!

The Gilded Ones were grand.

She believed this completely and without irony, because the evidence of the last several seconds supported it rather than contradicted it.

They had fought against Relictus for eons.

Even though this Beast of Infinity had killed one of theirs and sent two Sororis Primas scrambling through light-years of contested territory, they had contained him.

And yet.

There was a foreboding quality in the air that Prabhavati could not dismiss, a specific atmospheric weight that her Superbius foundations registered as a preliminary signal without being able to identify the source with enough precision to act on the identification.

The Beast of Infinity kept his eyes on her. The mad crystalline blue of them did not waver. Did not survey the chains or assess the surrounding Gilded Ones. Just...her.

His jaws opened.

"Pride?" The voice that came out carried the harmonic depth of a form built to project. "Wrath? Superbius? Ira?"

A sound emerged that was technically laughter and contained zero warmth. "You know nothing of true Pride. You know nothing of SUPERBIUS!"

BOOM!

Prabhavati saw it bloom from within him.

Golden Pride rose from the Beast of Infinity’s foundations and she experienced the specific vertigo of a Superbius Gilded One encountering an expression of their own foundational Ego in a configuration that exceeded what their own engineering had ever produced.

It was not the engineered Superbius of the Gilded caste system, refined across generations. It was something rawer and grander and more fundamental, as though someone had gone back to the source from which the Gilded engineering was derived and drawn directly from it rather than through the derived methodology.

It felt purer than her own.

The thought arrived and she rejected it and it returned!

The golden glow spread outward from his body and wrapped around the chains holding him, and where the glow touched chain, the chain’s resistance registered his Pride as a legitimate authority rather than a force to be opposed!

Dozens of chains came apart simultaneously, the structural integrity of their collective foundation failing not because his strength had exceeded it but because the Pride he was broadcasting had convinced the weavings that they were not in the presence of something they should be restraining.

He pulled on the remaining chains.

He took a step.

It felt like...an Infinite Step.

Prabhavati had time to register that he had closed every meter of the distance between them in no time at all before she registered anything else, and what she registered next was pressure at her chest, the specific pressure of something that had bypassed her defensive weavings completely.

His claws pierced through.

Her Heart of Civilization shattered.

The pain was absolute and immediate and total in the way that only existential damage at this particular location produced, the Heart not being merely an organ but being the anchor point of everything her Civilization was built upon, and its shattering sent fractures through every adjacent structure simultaneously.

And The Beast of Infinity...

He was smiling!

Brutally, completely!

His jaws opened wide.

She felt herself taken in, felt the jaws close around her Gilded existence with the comprehensive finality of an ending, her foundations beginning to break down under the devouring pressure of Infinity that consumed rather than coexisted.

Blood and bone registered distantly, the sensations of her Gilded physiology failing under conditions it had not been engineered to survive. The warmth of her own ichor. The grinding texture of structures that had held for eons giving way.

She.

A Sororis Prima of THE Magna Sorora.

Was dying?

She had not conceived of this outcome as a genuine possibility...ever.

Hundreds more chains erupted from the surrounding Gilded Ones, wrapping around the Beast of Infinity in overlapping configurations that exceeded the prior arrangement’s density, the collective desperation of the assembly translating into the most comprehensive restraint the assembled force could produce.

His terrible golden Pride strained against the new chains. The chains held at the edges of what holding meant.

But the darkness was already coming for Prabhavati.

Inexorable and patient!

And before he final femtoseconds, she heard...

"You shouldn’t...have tried to kill and replace me with your Custos."

BOOM!

...!

Her consciousness wavered as she held a realization, but...it was too late!

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