Chapter 1938: Brutal Battles The fact that this entity was speaking was shocking enough, but the intent behind its words could not be denied, and every Primordial here felt a chill run down their spine that was different from anything they had ever felt before. It was as if they were looking at something that should not exist, yet it did. At this moment, Eos felt a bit of regret that he had not informed the Primordials of the threat posed by Enoch, but at the time, his reasoning was sound, and even now, the fact that the Primordials were not aware of what they were fighting was a good thing. Eos knew that Enoch suffered restrictions that he did not yet fully grasp, but one thing he had noticed was that the knowledge of Enoch seemed to give him more power over those who knew of him, and the words that he spoke to the Primordials might seem like just a threat on the surface, but Eos knew it went much deeper than that. If the Primordials had known that what they battled was a fragment of Enoch’s consciousness that seemed to be able to take over the body of a Reality, then that knowledge may have left a gap in their consciousness and this would no longer be a battle, but a slaughter... this may seem insane, but Eos believed that ignorance was the only reason his New Primordials could fight. But he had his work cut out for him in controlling the battlefield and not allowing anything to emerge from it. Eos knew there was a great opportunity here; if he could fully subdue this creature, then his knowledge of Enoch and the mysterious power he controlled would be easier for him to decipher. However, he felt a twinge of unease, but this was not coming from the horror that he had contained with his Primordial; it was coming from deep inside Limbo, and not from the direction of the realm of Death, where battle still raged but in the opposite direction. Eos’s connection to the Incarnation he had sent towards the Cradle of Enoch was strong, and over the last one thousand years that the Incarnation had spent traveling across Limbo, he had seen various marvelous sights, but one thing was prevalent throughout the length of Limbo that this Incarnation had traveled through, and that was death and devastation. From his calculation, the Incarnation should be halfway towards his destination, and the unease he was feeling was growing; naturally, Eos could also feel it. It would appear that the threat would not only be coming from the broken reality of Eosah, but from the Cradle of Enoch. "My action has finally stirred the beast," Rowan muttered, but his speed did not reduce as he pushed himself to move faster... if there were a threat on the horizon, he would need to delay it at least, to give Eos the time he needed. Around him, the ten Archai following him on this trip readied for whatever would be coming ahead. ® The eruption of power from the Primordial of Blazing Benediction did not fully vaporize all the fallen horror that emerged from the shattered body of the abomination. There were still millions of them, each the size of galaxies. These autonomous fragments had forests of arms and screaming nebulae for faces. They scuttled across the Road on legs of dark energy, gnawing at the Primordials’ bodies, and a rapid scuffle broke across their ranks as they slaughtered these chunks of abominable horrors, but this created a slight gap where they were not attacking the abomination... and reading the flow of battle, it took advantage of it. The abomination folded into itself as it tore through space and time. It had learned to exist in the same place as its own severed parts, and although the Primordials quickly shattered all the chunks of the abomination flesh, they were slightly too late as one remained, and this single chunk was all that it needed for it to appear in their midst. Limbs reattached before they finished falling, before expanding and elongating, and like a blooming flower, all of those limbs exploded into billions of arms. New heads opened mouths that inhaled light, sound, and the concept of forward momentum, and they screamed their curse to warp the space around them. The New Primordials suddenly found themselves running in place while the Road flowed backward beneath their feet as space and time went insane, their bodies could not respond in the right manner, and for a brief moment, they were stunned and locked in place. "Enough!" Staff, the Primordial of Endless Eclipse, roared as she lashed out with a chain of compact time. The links were given to her by Chronomancer Prime as a gift, and they were made from individual seconds he had mastered and bound into a whip. In their current disoriented state, it would be hard to call upon their powers, but they still had tools. The whip struck every screaming heads at once: past, present, future. In this manner, it was impossible for the abomination to avoid it, and ten thousand necks snapped in perfect unison. Bone made of dark matter shattered like glass. For one heartbeat, the Abomination listed, stunned. However, this abomination was learning as it fought. Ten thousand new necks erupted, each crowned with a halo of embryonic universes still dripping cosmic placenta, and they roared, unleashing another wave of madness. The creature was smaller, but its abilities were growing the closer they brought it to death. Circe, the Primordial of Endless Kindling, was a being of hope, but she was also the daughter of the storm. Her adaptability was among the strongest here, and disregarding the wave of madness, she transformed her primordial body and rose as an ocean that had never known a shore. She became a tsunami of primordial water carrying the drowned corpses of every world that had ever drowned, and she slammed into the abomination. The wave crashed down with the weight of extinct gravity. It punched straight through the Abomination’s torso, exiting the far side, dragging ribbons of inverted causality that resembled massive intestines but were loops of time where effect murdered cause and bled upward into nothing, and the scream of madness turned into one of pain. It was almost as if the creature could not imagine it could be hurt in this manner. Where the water touched the Road, new galaxies tried to sprout like barnacles. They lived for three seconds and were reabsorbed before they could finish their first rotation. The abomination staggered backward as it convulsed, vomiting a hole. Not a black hole. A true hole: a non-shape that devoured shape, color, sequence, and memory. Eva, the Primordial of Revelation, who had been silently observing everything that had been happening, suddenly made her move when she noticed the power of this hole. She folded herself into a spear of pure thermodynamic fury and dove straight down the hole’s throat. Inside, she burned the concept of inside, revealing its hollow core, and the hole... screamed. The scream warped as the hole and collapsed into a newborn big bang that hurled both combatants apart in a sphere of incandescent genesis that would have killed a lesser Primordial. Shattered, bleeding starlight and causality, the Abomination shrank again. Now only galaxy-sized. But density made it worse. Its surface became fractal. Every square inch unfolded into an infinite regression of teeth, eyes, mouths, and from those mouths were vaginas birthing smaller mouths. The cries emerging from this creature transformed again, into a song of madness, and it moved through space and time in an erratic manner as all of the mouths all over its body had learned to bite the idea of distance. Thenos, the Primordial of Hollow Victories, phased through its chest, intending to emerge inside the core, but the teeth closed on the concept of "inside." Thenos was spat back out, missing thirteen seconds of his own existence, stumbling, suddenly older in places and unborn in others. However, he was grinning because his concept was that every victory that was earned against him was hollow, and, depending on how much he was willing to sacrifice, his enemy would receive a million times more damage at the minimum. This was the reason why Rowan considered him to be the Primordial that had a chance of killing all the other Primordials here, even if they came at him all at once. Thenos reached towards the abomination and in a single motion, ten thousand massive beating hearts holding all of its essence that would have appeared if its body was destroyed ten thousand times were wrenched from the screaming abomination, who could not comprehend how it had been hurt so terribly. The hearts were hung around his neck like a necklace of pulsar strings, still beating, still screaming, and he crushed them one by one. Black blood, which was the absence of information itself, sprayed across the void. Where it landed, the future was erased from everything that would ever live. The Abomination shrank to solar-system size, and a vicious look appeared in its eyes. Fifteen seconds had passed, and now the real brutality began.