Chapter 5270: Power! I

"Alright," Noah said. "Everything should be taken care of."

Taylor looked at him.

She looked at the surrounding space, which continued doing exactly what it had been doing before he spoke.

The multicolored seas of Infinity moved through the wreckage of the shattered Shelter without urgency. The Ragnar remains sat where they’d been deposited. Nothing had changed, and everything around them reflected that nothing had changed, and yet he’d said everything should be taken care of!

She looked at him again.

"What do you mean taken care of?" The suspicion in her voice was thorough. "Nothing has changed."

"I reached out to someone," Noah said. "They’ll reach out to whatever relevant party exists with a connection to THE Source. They communicated that it will be handled." He looked at the distant space. "So it will be handled."

He didn’t spend a second examining whether that confidence was warranted. THE Creature had sent back eight words through their Entanglement.

That was the exchange in its entirety, and it was enough, because some beings you extended complete trust to not out of naivety but because everything demonstrated across every previous interaction made doubt feel like a waste of attention.

THE Creature had never said a thing he didn’t mean and never meant a thing he didn’t follow through on. The eight words stood.

He looked at Taylor.

"You and Adrastia. Since you were the ones to come forward, we’ll get you back to your respective Observable Existences in due time. I’m a bit busy right now."

Taylor stared at him.

The stare lasted long enough that he counted several Persevere stacks pass through his foundations during it.

"Oh, you’re just a bit busy." She spread her hands wide. "While all of this is happening, and a Gilded Legion is assembling, and there’s a team of time-traveling assassins, and something absurd is clearly occurring in this Observable Existence right now... you are just a bit busy." She dropped her hands.

"Alright. No problem." She crossed her arms. "Could you at least give me your word? Your promise that you’ll keep us alive and get us back where we belong?"

His eyes sharpened.

Something happened in the surrounding weavings of existence the moment she asked. It was low and structural, a resonance moving through the dimensional fabric rather than through the air, the kind of shift that his Source registered before his conscious attention caught up with it.

Whatever Taylor of The Light was underneath her unremarkable presentation and her constant movement and her inability to stop talking, whatever she was at the level his Pillow Talk couldn’t reach... something connected to it was paying attention to this conversation.

He didn’t answer immediately.

Taylor watched the silence stretch and something changed in her face.

"Look." She straightened. Not the nervous straightening she’d done when confirming he hadn’t attacked her. The straightening of someone with something to say. "I know what you are. I know what power you carry. I’ve been talking about it, and existence has been feeding me information about you since I arrived, and none of it is small."

She held his gaze. "But what I’ve learned from ruling an Observable Existence and from everything existence has whispered to me across my entire life..."

She took a breath.

"It doesn’t matter what power an existence carries. I’ve met beings who could split observable existences with nothing but their foundations. I’ve encountered things that made those beings look preliminary. I’ve watched them rise from nothing to something that terrified everything around them, and I’ve heard existence cry." Her rapid eyes held still.

"What those beings had or didn’t have stopped mattering the moment they were gone. What Existence kept carrying forward, what actually persisted in the fabric of existence long after the power dissipated... was their word. Whether they kept it or broke it. Whether the beings they made agreements with could trust those agreements when the moment of truth arrived."

She looked at the consumed Ragnar remains and then back at him.

"You can move through existence as a shitty entity or as a remarkable one. The rankings, the tiers, THE Scales, none of that determines which one you are. The ones who are genuinely outstanding, across every era and every tier I’ve ever heard of, are the ones whose word functions above everything else they are. Power makes you feared. Power makes you capable. Power buys you options." She paused.

"Your word makes you trustworthy. And in the long run, across an existence that spans eons and produces enemies and produces allies and produces every possible category of relationship in between... trustworthy outlasts powerful every single time."

She stopped and ooked at him and waited.

Noah considered her for a moment that had nothing contemplative in it. The decision was already made.

He was simply looking at her before he confirmed it, looking at the being who’d fallen out of a dimensional flicker and talked too much and hadn’t flinched when telling him he could die.

He replied simply.

"I give you my word."

HUUM!

Existence squeezed.

Brief and complete, the space contracting once around the words that had just been spoken and then releasing, the dimensional fabric acknowledging something and ratifying it before returning to its prior state. The resonance he’d felt building from the moment she said promise had found its resolution.

|Verbal agreement entered: Noah Osmont and Taylor of The Light, The Baba Yaga.|

|Terms: Safe conduct and return of Taylor of The Light and Achilles Adrastia to their respective Observable Existences. Agreement witnessed and overseen by THE Primordial Source.|

|Failure to fulfill this agreement will invoke THE Source Curse of Existence upon your foundations. No exceptions.|

...!

He’d expected the notification’s existence. Not entirely its contents.

He looked at the woman near him.

"THE Baba Yaga." He let the designation sit. "Why are you classified that way?"

Taylor’s eyes went wide. It was the mortified expression of someone who’d hoped a particular piece of personal data would remain unmentioned and had discovered it would not.

"I’m actually a very nice person." She said this immediately.

"Every now and then, whenever I’m seriously wronged, I tend to go a little crazy, and I got that distinction carved into Vakochev’s Scales during one of my crazy times." She pointed at him. "Don’t pay attention to it. It’s not representative! I am actually a very nice person and I have many people who would confirm this!"

She said the last sentence like she needed it on the record specifically.

Noah nodded once and waved his hand in the direction away from him.

Taylor looked at his hand. Looked at him. Looked at his hand again.

"Are you shooing me away?" Her voice climbed half a register. "Where are your social skills? Who does that? You just made a formal agreement, overseen by THE Primordial Source, no less, with a ruler of a lower Observable Existence, who has personally convinced Gilded Ones to leave her and her entire Observable Existence alone by the way, and your response is to shoo her away?"

She stepped toward him instead of away.

"You could build a connection here. Expand your Entanglements. Do you know how you make yourself genuinely unkillable in existence? Not power. Power has ceilings. Connections don’t. The more beings across existence who are invested in your survival, the harder you become to erase from it. And I," she said, with the emphasis of someone who considered this their strongest argument, "am a very interesting person with a very unusual ability and a very broad network of existences who owe me favors."

She looked at the surrounding wreckage and the continuous flames burning through his form. "For you to be shooing me away, just what exactly is happening here that you’re so busy with?"

...!

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