Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 4252: Justiciar! VI

The white flames were a silent, terrible scream.

They did not roar or crackle; they burned with a profound, absolute quiet that was more unnerving than any sound!

Aeternitas Glacies, once a magnificent citadel of crystalline beauty, a monument to the serene, ordered power of the Living Elementals, was now a funeral pyre the size of a portion of the Folds.

The flames consumed everything...the shattered ice, the powdered diamond, the very memory of the lives that had been extinguished...and left nothing but a clean, sterile, and unending whiteness.

Prompts buzzed in his mind.

|Master, the post-event analysis of the Quantum Relocation Protocol is complete.|

|The Justiciar’s descent was faster and slow. The window for intervention was 1.7 nanoseconds.|

|Results of the emergency evacuation:|

| - Transcendent Wheels of Existence successfully relocated to a secure location in this Fold: 37 out of 37.|

| - Living Elementals (All Tiers) forcefully transported to the periphery of the blast zone: 30%.|

| - The 5 Dukes of Aeternitas Glacies were warned 0.8 nanoseconds prior to impact. Their decision was to stand and fight.|

|Analysis: A tragic, yet statistically significant, success. We have preserved a seed of their civilization that would have otherwise been completely erased.|

”...”

The silence was heavy

Noah and Khor floated in the void, silent witnesses to the aftermath. The sheer, brutal efficiency of the slaughter, the absolute, unyielding nature of the Justiciar’s power, had left a heavy, chilling silence between them.

”My current power cannot take that thing down,” Khor finally said, her voice a low, flat statement of fact. It was a rare, almost shocking admission of weakness from a being who had once devoured impossibilities for breakfast.

Noah nodded, his gaze fixed on the burning city. ”Have you seen anything like it before?”

Khor was silent for a long moment, her abyssal eyes lost in the depths of her fragmented memories. ”Maybe,” she whispered, the word a fragile, uncertain thing.

”In the Earliest Folds... I remember the memories of some of the Inevitabilities. They showed... a certain Tribe of Early Creatures. They were builders, artisans of destruction. They made things like that. But the memories are scattered, broken.”

Her form trembled, not with fear, but with a rage that was so cold it threatened to freeze the very space around them.

”I am going to kill every last one of them, Outsider,” she hissed, her voice a venomous promise. ”All those who aided in doing this to the Inevitabilities. THE Living Paradox... all of them.”

The silence that followed her vow was heavy, absolute, and filled with the promise of a future reckoning. And then, a new, chilling voice cut through the quiet.

|Master.|

RUIN/EDEN’s calm, analytical tone was a stark, jarring contrast to the raw emotion of the moment.

Noah looked up, and his expression, already grim, became even graver. Above the silent, burning city, the white flames began to flicker, to coalesce.

Horrifically, illusory scenes, replays of the carnage that had just unfolded, began to play out like a ghostly, silent film.

They saw it all again. The magnificent, desperate charge of the Royals and the Honored. The Justiciar’s casual, brutal negation of their power.

The quiet, sickening crunch of the diamond golem. The dimming of the lightning Elemental’s light. The silent, blossoming flower of white flame that had erased a thousand beings from existence.

It was a montage of absolute, pitiless slaughter, playing on a loop for all of existence to see.

|This only further affirms the conclusion, Master.|

|This action was meant to evoke strong emotions. The harvest of Emotive authority mixed with Everythings was the primary objective.|

|This public display... it is meant to evoke fear for all those who come after.|

Those who come after.

The words were a chilling premonition. And not long after RUIN/EDEN spoke them, they began to arrive!

Portals of ice and fire, of stone and storm, ripped open across the void.

Dukes of Living Elementals, their forms blazing with a furious, disbelieving light, appeared.

Behind them, legions of Royal and Honored Elementals materialized, their numbers in the tens of thousands. They saw the burning pyre that had been their home, and a collective, soul-shattering roar of grief and rage echoed through the silent Fold.

A few of the Dukes, their faces ashen masks of fury, shot towards Noah and Khor, the only other beings present in this graveyard.

”What happened here?!” one of them, a being of pure, molten obsidian, demanded, his accusatory glare a physical force.

Noah looked at them, at their paltry 100 Trillion in Complexity, and he felt... nothing.

A glimmer of his Haki, a faint, almost thoughtless pulse of his tyrannical will, washed over them.

They faltered, a sudden, suffocating pressure crushing their rage, their very authority groaning under a weight they could not comprehend.

”Can you not see in the flames?” Noah asked, his voice a cold, dead calm. ”The one who did this did not hide. They made it perfectly clear.”

The Elementals paled, their fury momentarily forgotten in the face of this new, oppressive power.

They turned their gazes to the burning city, to the silent, ghostly replay of the massacre, and they watched in a new, horrified silence.

Soon, others arrived. Living Temporals, their forms flickering with the echoes of a tragedy they were too late to prevent.

Living Quantums, who saw not just the destruction, but the million potential futures that had just been extinguished.

Living Origins, who looked upon this scene of absolute erasure with a profound, instinctual revulsion. The space around the burning citadel became a silent, somber congregation of the powerful beings in the Folds.

A Living Elemental Duke, a woman whose form was carved from a single, flawless glacier, her eyes burning with a cold, blue fire, roared.

She rose above the white flames, her hands raised to the void.

”DWINDLE!” she bellowed.

A torrent of glacial waves, a river of absolute-zero ice that could have frozen a star, cascaded down, seeking to snuff out the white flames.

But horrifically, the moment the ice touched the fire...

BOOM!

Tongues of white flame lashed out, not with heat, but with a pure, conceptual hunger.

They consumed the ice, the cold, the very authority of the attack. The glacial waves were swallowed like nothing, and the flames, now brighter, more arrogant, smashed into the Duke.

She was flung back, her form a screaming comet of shattered ice, a massive, gaping hole torn through her chest.

HUUM!

A chilling, absolute dread permeated the assembled crowd. The Duke, her entire front scorched by a fire that did not burn, roared, her voice now a screech of pure, unadulterated terror and fury.

”Call in an Emergency Kleos Concordat! Call it in! CALL IT IN!”

Her voice was a catalyst. A decision. The Living Existences had to understand what had happened here!

They had to prepare.

As Noah watched this new wave of chaos unfold, he received a new set of prompts from RUIN/EDEN, a quiet, analytical report in the midst of the storm.

|I have captured and analyzed the signature and the unique weavings of the Justiciar, Master.|

|I have scanned all known facets of existence for any matching signatures or similarities.|

|The only weavings that match... are those from the Earliest Folds, accessible through the possibilities of your Early Atlas of the Folds.|

|There is a place you can traverse into with accuracy.|

|Answers regarding the Justiciar may be there.|

Noah’s gaze, which had been watching the unfolding drama with a cold, detached curiosity, now sharpened with a new, focused purpose.

The Earliest Folds. The path forward was, once again, a descent into the past!