Chapter 5361: Upheaval! I

In the next instant, existence cracked!

Fissures erupted from the depths of THE Maw, racing up through the obsidian crystal and the abandoned scaffolding and the lethal dark, and it did not feel like stone breaking!

It felt like the fabric underneath the stone breaking, like the idea that held the mine together had developed a flaw and the flaw was spreading. And in the middle of that cracking, Noah felt something grand.

He felt THE Prime Cause of Bellum of Arkethys move.

Move, with purpose, the war-truth of an entire Observable Existence turning like a head turning, and it imposed itself, deliberately, onto Dame Seraphine and the other Fifth Scale existence present. The Cause of an Observable Existence does not choose targets...normally. It is a foundational truth, not a creature with intentions.

And yet this one chose, and it chose the strongest beings in the mine!

Something Noah had done...in Chernobyl!

HUUM!

Sir William moved first, and the other Swords moved with him.

They closed around Noah and Seo-yeon, Sir William and Botswana and Richard and Lianna placing themselves between the pair and the depths of THE Maw, a wall of Source Lifeforms with their Armaments drawn, because every one of them knew exactly how prized the man and the child were, and every one of them had been told in their own way that protecting them was the point of being here.

It was discipline, fast and total, four Titan-rarity Swords arranging themselves around the two beings an Order from THE Domicile had sent them to keep alive.

|Alert: An unknown foreign will has imposed itself upon this location. It is asserting authority not through any visible body but through THE Arkethys Observable Existence itself, commanding the domain’s Prime Causes as extensions of its intent.|

The moment the words bloomed in front of Noah, something erupted from the depths of THE Maw, and it shook every existence present down to its foundations.

It came as a singularity at first, a spinning point in the deep dark from which the Unstable Pulse had been echoing the whole time, the heart of the conversion, the thing that had been beating like a buried organ beneath the mine. It spun and it pulled and the foreign nature poured off it in waves. And then, in a moment, the singularity cleared, the spinning resolving into stillness, and at the very center of it, where the dark had been, there was a hand.

A hand, cleaved at the wrist.

It hung in the deep of THE Maw, decrepit and gray-blue, the skin drawn tight and dried over what was underneath, the cut at the wrist clean and ancient, a thing that had been severed from whatever it belonged to a very long time ago. By itself it might have looked like a relic. A dead thing. A grim curiosity dredged up from somewhere it should have stayed buried.

Then Noah focused on it, and what he saw stopped being grim and became something far worse.

The dried muscle of it. The bones beneath the muscle. Every separate piece of that cleaved hand radiated an aura so profound, so dense, so utterly beyond anything he had measured, that each individual part of it, each withered finger, each ancient bone, exceeded Dame Seraphine!

Exceeded the other Fifth Scale existences. Exceeded every Mesozoic Scale being he had encountered since arriving in THE Source Lands. It was not a hand carrying a Fifth Scale aura. It was a hand whose every separate component was, on its own, more than a Fifth Scale being, and the hand was only a hand, only a piece, cleaved at the wrist from something that had once been whole!

It was horrid! To the extent he made a move right away!

He reached out and put his hand on Seo-yeon.

He did not explain. There was no time to explain, and the protective wall of Swords could not protect her from a thing whose fingers outweighed Dame Seraphine. So he brought the little girl into his existence and flung her through THE Infinite Cause that all his bodies shared, hurling her across the impossible distance between THE Maw and another of his bodies, the one waiting in THE Infiniverse, sending her out of this place and toward the safest location he owned in all of existence!

One breath she was on the edge of his perception. The next she was gone, away, somewhere the cleaved hand could not reach her.

And before he could do anything else, the hand moved!

BOOM!

|Existence declares that all spatial movements are restricted and locked down in this region for anything not given permission.|

...!

The decrepit fingers tapped out, one after another, and it happened in what looked like slow motion and was not slow at all. The fingers seemed to drift, unhurried, ancient and patient, and yet they moved faster than any of them could track, faster than Noah’s perception could follow even sharpened as it was, the gap between the look of the motion and the speed of it a thing that made his foundations recoil.

Dame Seraphine roared.

Her body blazed with brilliant light, THE Mesozoic Scale being gathering herself to do something, to fight or to ward or to put herself between the hand and the new Sword. And in the very next instant, she was gone.

She and Andro both disappeared, displaced, flung elsewhere by the tapping of those fingers, removed from THE Maw entirely, not killed, not struck down, simply taken off the board, as though the cleaved hand had looked at the two Fifth Scale beings present and decided they were not worth the bother of dealing with directly.

It had moved them aside the way a person sweeps crumbs from a table before setting down something that matters!

The fingers turned toward Noah, and Sir William, and the other Swords!

And every one of them felt their existence anchored in place, pinned, held, by a power none of them had ever faced and none of them had a frame to understand.

It pressed down on all of them at once, the oppression of a thing that did not need to act to dominate, that simply existed nearby and made existing nearby an unbearable weight.

For Noah, it was heaviest of all!

He felt the hand’s attention settle on him specifically, the bulk of that profound and horrid oppression turning toward him and resting there, singling him out from the four Swords arrayed around where he stood. It had swept Dame Seraphine aside as an irrelevance. It had pinned the Swords as an afterthought. And it had chosen him, out of everyone in THE Maw, as the thing worth focusing on.

|ALARM: Information is being received from the surrounding existence. This information does not originate fully from me. The unknown Source is radiating its own weavings of information into the environment, weavings that constantly break and transform the Infinity and Primordial Source around them, forcing the surrounding existence to carry the message and act on what it wishes. This is communication enforced as conversion. The surroundings themselves are being made to speak on its behalf.|

|Received transmission: You are being observed by THE Sealed One. Kneel and let go. Kneel and let go. KNEEL AND LET GO. KNEEL! LET GO!|

BOOM!

The information was not information. It hit like a physical force, the weight of a will old enough and vast enough that its mere instruction carried the mass of an impact, and even Noah, who had never once gone to his knees, was smashed backward by it!

His body tore through the air of THE Maw, the oppression slamming into his existence with the words themselves, KNEEL, LET GO!

Around him, the Swords clutched their heads and roared.

Sir William. Botswana. Richard. Lianna. Four Titan-rarity Swords of Existence, beings who had faced apocalyptic Gilded forces and never bent, clutching their skulls as the transmission tore through them, and then, one after another, falling!

Oh!

To their knees!

Their bodies forced down by a will that converted resistance into compliance, their eyes wide and filled with incredulity and shock and a horror that none of them had worn before, kneeling in the dark of THE Maw before a cleaved gray-blue hand, while the surrounding existence screamed its single ancient instruction into all of them!

The same instruction!

KNEEL.

LET GO.

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