Chapter 5330: A Flicker of Quintessence! IV

Even amid the broader fighting, even with the Swords and the Relictus and the dozens of other Gilded Ones locked in their own engagements, the destruction of a Fourth Scale Ragnar in a single exchange registered. Heads turned.

Luxanna, locked in her Intent-contest with Sir William, watched coldly, her malevolent eyes narrowing.

Noah did not pause!

The second and third Ragnars came at him together, their Quiescent Verdicts merging into a combined stilling pressure, and Noah amplified THE Prime Cause of Apocalypse through his Aura.

The sky above the two Ragnars filled with meteors. Not ordinary meteors, but condensed masses of THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian shaped by the Apocalypse Cause’s truth that endings were transformative, decillions of them forming in an omnidirectional spread and crashing down toward the two Ragnars from every angle at once.

The Quiescent Verdict tried to still them, to convince the meteors that falling was too much effort, but the meteors carried Noah’s record, and Noah’s record did not still!

They crashed into the two Ragnars and through them and past them, the impacts detonating across the gray Fourth Scale frames, and where the meteors landed, the Apocalypse Cause expressed its truth, the Ragnars’ endings becoming the violent beginnings of their conversion. Their bodies broke apart under the bombardment, and Noah’s Aura devoured the remnants.

Three.

The fourth and fifth he addressed with THE Prime Cause of Paradox!

He manifested a box around them, formed of his Aura and backed by the Paradox Cause, and the box existed and did not exist simultaneously, the two Ragnars inside it both alive and not, both present and absent.

The Quiescent Verdict could not impose stillness on a state that was already a contradiction, because stillness required a stable thing to still, and the contents of the box were not stable in any direction the Intent could grip. Then Noah snapped the box closed.

The contradiction resolved violently in the only direction Noah permitted it to resolve, and the two Ragnars inside were crushed by the collapse of a paradox that had held them suspended between states, their bodies compacting into a point and then dissolving as the Aura took them.

Five!

HUUM!

Seo-yeon watched all of it from beside him, her small hand in his, her eyes wide with inquisitive wonder rather than fear. She tracked each manifestation of his Aura with the fascinated attention of a child watching something genuinely interesting, occasionally tilting her head at a particularly novel expression, entirely unbothered by the titanic violence occurring around her!

The sixth, seventh, and eighth Ragnars came at him in a coordinated descent, their combined Quiescent Verdict reaching its strongest expression, three Fourth Scale Intents merged into a single overwhelming stillness.

Noah manifested a Primordial Realm around them.

It bloomed from his Aura, a contained domain of flames, the obsidian gold and multicolored fire of THE Source Barbarian filling the space the three Ragnars occupied, and within the realm, decillions of fireballs formed and roared with the expression of everything Noah was.

The three Ragnars hung in a sea of his fire, and the combined Quiescent Verdict tried to still the flames, to convince them that burning was effortful and cessation was natural, but the flames were Noah’s record, and Noah’s record burned without exhaustion because it had been forged in cycles of apocalypses and had never once gone out!

HUUM!

The fireballs scorched the three Ragnars from every direction, the manifested Primordial Realm becoming a furnace that the Acedia Dredges could not still and could not escape, and their gray bodies blackened and broke under the bombardment until nothing coherent remained, and the Aura devoured the ash.

Eight.

The ninth and final Ragnar reached him alone, its Quiescent Verdict blazing with whatever the engineering had loaded into a single unit, and Noah simply reached out with one hand wreathed in THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian and the Prime Cause of Tyranny.

The Tyranny froze it. One instant, the foundational truth of hierarchy pressing against the soulless Ragnar’s capacity for autonomous movement, and in that instant Noah closed his hand.

THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian, carrying the full weight of his existence and the thousand-fold amplified Pure Primordial Essence, crushed the Fourth Scale Ragnar’s foundations the way a man crushed something that had stopped being able to resist, and the gray body imploded into Noah’s grip and dissolved into the obsidian gold light, devoured like all the others!

BOOM!

Nine.

Nine seconds had passed!

Noah floated in the sky above Chernobyl, unblemished, holding a little girl’s hand, THE Aura of THE Source Barbarian radiating off his frame with a density that pressed down on the entire battlefield. The blue and obsidian radiances of the Blessing still wove through the obsidian gold, the Pure Primordial Essence still pouring into him, and the combined expression of all of it made the space around him feel heavy.

Oh, so heavy!

The battlefield had gone silent.

Every Gilded One that could see him had stopped, the broader fighting faltering as the implication of what had just occurred reached them. Nine Fourth Scale Ragnars, even soulless Acedia Dredge configurations, were not a small force. They were a force that should have required the combined attention of multiple Source Lifeforms to address. A being had just removed all nine in nine seconds while holding a child’s hand and never once appearing to exert genuine effort!

The Swords of Existence had paused in their own battles. Even Sir William, still locked in his Intent-contest with Luxanna, had shifted a portion of his attention toward Noah, and his composed features carried something that had not been there before, the recalibration of a being who had suspected Noah was exceptional and was now revising the assessment upward past where he had set it!

Luxanna stared, her malevolent eyes wide, her covetous hunger sharpened into something that bordered on need.

Noah looked across the assembled Gilded Ones.

The Aura of THE Source Barbarian pressed down from him, oppressive and grand, and his expression carried the calm tyranny of a being who had just remembered something he enjoyed and had decided to indulge it.

"You know," he said, and his voice carried across the silent battlefield with the weight of everything radiating off him, "I haven’t gone all out in quite some time. I keep finding reasons to hold back. Conserve. Be efficient. Handle things with the minimum required."

He looked at the dragon, at the Fourth Scale Gilded Ones behind her, at the dozens of others scattered across the reborn sky of Chernobyl.

"But Gilded Ones continue pissing me off again and again..."

The Aura blazed.

"Today seems right," he said. "Today seems right to go all out."

BOOM!

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