Infinite Mana in the Apocalypse - Chapter 3757

Chapter 3757: Unbound Tyranny II
We stood.

The three of us.

Myself, Romulus, and Velmior Thal-Veyr.

The Dead Wheel, fractured and groaning beneath our weight, offered no protest. It understood.

Even silence understood when monsters stood in argument.

The Dead Prime Frequency of the End…I had not been looking at it, but it had unraveled to such a terrifying extent that it was now hard to recognize.

My Lattices shimmered behind me in full bloom. My ten Resistances sang together, harmonized truths cutting through the dying air.

Romulus shifted beside me. He was quiet. Not out of hesitance.

But due to power.

The Witness, or his record let’s say, stood still behind us. Watching.

Velmior’s Temporal Lattices spun like solemn Omniverses around him. Vast. Heavy. Authoritative.

But uncertain.

And that, more than anything else, deserved to be addressed.

So I did.

My voice broke across the weavings of death all around.

“If you have any threats to throw,” I said coolly, “now is the time.”

Velmior’s eyes narrowed. I continued without pause.

“Not when your Lattices are collapsing. Not when your bones are cracking beneath Paradox. Not when your Source sputters to finish a sentence.”

My hands folded behind my back as my gaze hardened.

“Go on. Tell us. That in the end, we’ll die. That there are greater forces coming. That we are ants beneath the Chronosect of Threadbound Folds.”

My tone was not mocking. It was factual.

If he had any last illusions of authority to uphold, I was giving him this chance to air them out, before we rewrote the narrative.

Velmior did not flinch.

Instead, he exhaled.

And shook his head slowly.

“In time,” he said, “many things are possible.”

His voice wasn’t filled with the smugness of a condescending master. It was sober. And it carried a strange weight. Not fear. But experience.

“In time,” he continued, “you will come to understand. You and others like you, who have obtained keys, true keys, and think to wield them like children swinging blades, you will invite disaster.”

He looked at me, then Romulus.

“When beings like you obtain the unspoken, and do nothing with it…”

His voice tightened.

“…you shake pillars that should not tremble. And tremble they will. At a time when those greater than even Primarchs are growing nervous, the rest of you should be crawling where you stand. Pissing in your pants.”

That was the first time he had spoken like that.

With something I almost wanted to call reverence, or dread.

From such a powerful being?

Romulus raised an eyebrow.

But I beat him to it.

My voice remained soft. Unhurried. “What,” I asked, “could make something greater than a Primarch nervous?”

Velmior’s Temporal Lattices spun tighter. His jaw flexed.

And then he smiled.

A sad, defeated sort of smile.

“The weavings of the Nullvein Gravewake Folds have been changing for the last thousand years.”

That made me pause.

But what he said next, it wasn’t just speculation.

It was declaration.

“Those who oversee all paradoxes,” Velmior said, “may act soon.”

I blinked once.

My expression did not change.

But something within me turned.

Paradoxes?

Overseen?

By whom?

I tilted my head, voice like steel wrapped in curiosity.

“Who exactly oversees all paradoxes?”

Velmior’s gaze flicked to me.

Then to Romulus.

And then back.

He looked at us with incredulity. No, more than that. Disbelief.

“You don’t know…”

He said it as though it were heresy.

“You really don’t know!”

He looked at us again. Not as enemies.

But as fools.

“Did you think,” he began slowly, “that in all the infinite eons of the Gravewake Folds, no entities had ever risen? That none had ever claimed these endless regions? That no authorities exist beyond the whispers of the Dead and the Living moving across the Folds?”

Romulus’ face was unreadable.

I remained still. But my mind moved rapidly.

“You both think you are some explorers,” Velmior said quietly. “That these lands are wild. Open. Untouched. Free for you all to leave your now Dead Wheel and explore with wonder?”

He raised a hand, gesturing around him.

“The Gravewake is not unclaimed. The Folds are not wild. They are already spoken for. They are paradoxically made stable and unbreakable. They are ruled.”

His eyes turned into slits.

“By beings beyond Primarchy. Far, far beyond. Unfathomably beyond!”

Something cold bloomed within my existence.

Not fear.

Information.

A framework settling into place.

Velmior stepped forward.

And his voice dropped.

“The ones who oversee all paradoxes are not named. Not because they hide. But because their names are Unspoken. Because their very Titles cannot be remembered unless given permission.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Who gave them that permission?”

“They did,” Velmior answered. “They carved laws into paradox before paradox had shape. They forged Thrones out of impossible conflicts. They created their own Absolutes, beyond the ten that we know. Untouched Resistances of their own definition as we cannot even dare to wound them. Incapable to even try.”

HUUM!

I felt Romulus’ Lattices buzz for a second.

And Velmior pressed on.

“You want to know who destroyed my Chronolegion?” he asked coldly.

I did. Romulus did. We destroyed your Sentinels…

“You think it was you? Or entities like you?”

His head shook. Fury rippled through his Lattices.

“It was not Paradoxical Resistance that broke my Legion,” he growled and laughed lightly. “It was actually ignorance.”

His voice cracked like falling timelines.

“I watched the destruction of my Time Sentinels not by greater powers, but by fools who do not even know anything.”

He stepped forward, his face now drawn with something truly ancient.

“Beings who stumbled into the Gravewake Folds and devoured what they didn’t understand. Who shattered Continuities just to taste their echoes. Beings who touched paradox without any resistance, because they had none, and were consumed, and didn’t even know it.”

His words landed like meteors.

And finally, he said it.

“The Nullvein Gravewake Folds are not a map of wonder and possibility. They are an endless graveyard of kings.”

He looked at me directly.

“You both are children. Strong, yes. Tyrannical, terrifying, brilliant, but children still.”

Romulus said nothing.

I did not blink.

And in that silence, Velmior’s expression shifted once more.

He looked tired.

“And they could be watching now,” he said softly. “The Ones who wrote paradox into breath. The Sovereigns of the Deepfold. The…ah, I should not speak much lest I wish to draw their ire and attention.”

HUUM!

Romulus’ entropy shuddered.

My Lattices tightened.

So.

There were wonders of unfathomable complexity behind the endless Folds.

Watching.

Ruling.

Deciding.

And I smiled.

Because that changed a few things, but not really.

Because my path still remained the same.

“You should run,” Velmior said. “While you still can.”

I shook my head, calm as ever.

“I never run from Fables.”

And Romulus?

He finally spoke.

“We’re not children,” he said, raising his entropy.

“We’re storms that learned how to walk. From a Wheel of Existence you could never understand.”

BOOM!

The Dead Wheel howled.

And the final clash began.

Romulus moved before me.

A blur not of speed, but of certainty. His entropy roared, not like flame, but like cold revelation. Velmior’s Lattices answered him, time folding in elaborate countermeasures, layers of delayed reactions and recursive feedback loops that would send any other into temporal stasis or madness.

But not Romulus.

Not me.

I watched.

I listened.

And I remembered.

“…a favored born of paradox shall rise where even the Folds dare not dream, its shadow cast across broken time and Living flame.”

Ozymandias’s words. A thread plucked from the Absolute Infinitum Prophecy.

Spoken in a realm where dead echoes prayed for silence.

Could it be this?

Was this battle, this convergence of Chronosect and Collapse, the fulfillment of that line?

My thoughts stretched further, beyond Velmior’s theatrics, beyond even the golden Witness Romulus had resurrected.

What was the Favor?

And what did it mean for a being like me, one entangled with both the Living and the Dead, yet beholden to neither?

I had become unbound.

And now I saw…

Velmior wasn’t just reacting and fighting for his life.

He was waiting.

Not for a gap in our attack.

For judgment.

For balance.

My mind buzzed.

Those whose names even the Chronosect did not speak aloud.

What were they?

Architects? Tyrants? Originators?

If the Folds had owners and Rulers, if they truly weren’t vast, unclaimed wonderlands of broken possibilities…

Then every one of my Resistances…

Every Lattice…

Every Sigil I stole…

Every path I carved into the Folds…

May have already been walked by those monsters.

BOOM!

Romulus broke through another wall of compressed moments. His Lattices spiraled outward like the ribs of a decaying star.

Velmior countered with staggering elegance.

He controlled not time.

He controlled rhythm.

His body pulsed like a metronome with teeth. Each movement synchronized with a thousand alternatives he could choose to overwrite.

It would have worked.

Had I not existed.

I got out of my contemplations.

“Enough.”

I whispered it.

Not to be heard.

But to be obeyed.

All my Lattices moved.

I stopped holding back.

Each Resistance roared into activity.

Law, Concept, Spirit, Time, Element, Emotion, Quantum, Origin, Space…

And Paradox.

The 9th Lattice of my Lineage bloomed then. An obsidian spiral of fractal complexity. Its edges bled gold and blue. Its center, a hollow eye of logic that devoured all pretense of cause and effect.

| You have gained: Paradoxical Resistance +2%. Total: 3%. |

My collective added Resistances across all 10 now equaled 12%.

I stepped forward and exerted the influence of this collective 12%.

And time buckled.

Not because I struck fast.

Because I struck definitively.

Romulus knew. He adjusted instantly. His entropy surged to meet me like an old friend shaking hands with ruin.

Velmior tried.

He really did.

He fought like one who had endured the death of aeons.

But I unraveled him.

Not with speed.

With understanding.

That was the secret of my Lineage.

It didn’t overpower you.

It made you legible.

My Lattices wrapped around his own.

And I read them.

Every structure.

Every Truth.

I fed them to the fire of my understanding. And what I understood, I could rewrite.

Velmior staggered.

Romulus didn’t hesitate.

He moved like a wonder given shape. His entropy cascaded into the fractures I created.

I created holds and gaps, and Romulus filled them.

His Lattices filled Velmior’s timelines. Not with death.

With endings.

There is a difference.

One is a cessation.

The other, a conclusion.

Velmior’s defenses shattered as his Resistances failed to hold the flood.

I felt it.

The cracking of an apex Entity.

The collapse of a higher being’s certainty.

His True Source of Interval stuttered.

His Lattices hiccupped.

And in the span of a heartbeat drawn across infinity, Velmior Thal-Veyr, Grand Conductor of the Whenfolds, fell.

His form, stitched from orchestrated sequences of time, tore open into raw history. His final echoes played across our battlefield like a broken record.

His body disassembled.

His gaze was impassive as this happened.

No pain. No hatred.

Only disdain.

“You two,” he said, voice low and hollow.

Romulus and I both turned toward him.

“You think you’ve won.”

I tilted my head.

He coughed. Not blood.

Chrono-runes. They fled from his mouth like insects escaping collapse.

“You… fools.”

His body trembled, entropic rot devouring what remained.

“You think you’ve pierced the veil, that you understand what lies beneath the Folds.”

His eyes locked onto mine.

Cold. Disappointed.

“You know nothing.”

And finally, Velmior died.

Not with a scream.

But with silence.

And I stood there, chest steady, many Lattices forming as my True Source of Loot burned with his final unraveling.

| Constructing Paradoxical Primarch Loot Cache… |

Romulus didn’t speak.

Neither did I.

There was no need.

Because we both knew.

This wasn’t the end.

It was the invitation.

To the vast Chronosect of Threadbound Folds.

To other unimaginable wonders.

And somewhere, deep within the paradoxes and collapse of the Nullvein Gravewake Folds, unknown dangers and wonders became ever present!