The air outside Commander Elara’s personal lab was still, sterile, and humming with a quiet, intellectual energy.
It was a stark contrast to the storm of emotions that was currently brewing within the Commander herself. She floated beside Noah, her arms crossed, her eyes a mixture of profound annoyance and a grudging awe.
"It just... disappeared?" she grumbled, the words a low, frustrated hiss. "An entire mountain of one of the rarest, most conceptually dense materials in all of existence, and you’re telling me it just ’disappeared’?"
Noah, now clad in a sleek, white-gold, tight-fitting body wrapping that did little to hide his glorious, muscular figure, simply shrugged.
His Aegis of the Architect was in its inactive form, a beautiful, intricate necklace of white and gold that rested against his clavicle.
"That’s what it looked like to me," he said, his voice a mask of infuriating, deadpan innocence.
Elara let out a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a growl. She didn’t insist.
He had performed so many impossible feats in her lab in the last hour, from rewriting the very principles of their most important project to casually integrating a piece of wonder into his own spine, that the spontaneous disappearance of a mountain of metal was, frankly, one of the less reality-breaking things she had witnessed.
But she was curious. And she would get her answers.
They arrived in a region where three of the massive, white walls of the labyrinth converged.
At the center of this triangular clearing, a vibrant silver portal pulsed with a steady, rhythmic light, its surface a shimmering, liquid mirror.
It was guarded by two Early Creatures, their forms still and silent as the statues that lined the Juridical Sanctum, their immense power a quiet, suffocating pressure on the air.
Even with his Aegis in its inactive form, Noah felt a glorious, silent aura of power swirling around him.
The Innate Omnichalcum Aura Field was a constant, invisible companion, a promise of absolute defense.
His gaze, now enhanced by a hundred different systems, was a thing of impossible clarity.
He could see across half of the Early Laboratories, his perception cutting through the maze-like walls to observe the countless Early Creatures, Fold Dwellers, and massive glass and stone structures that made up this impossible place.
The silver portal before him was just one of many, each one guarded, each one a potential exit from this grand, sterile prison of a laboratory.
His gaze settled on the two Early Creature guards, and his new Existential Command Interface instantly provided their details.
|[Protector Theron]|
|Classification: Early Creature|
|Complexity: 320,000,000,000,000,000|
|Purity: 320,000,000,000,000,000|
|[Protector Liana]|
|Classification: Early Creature|
|Complexity: 410,000,000,000,000,000|
|Purity: 410,000,000,000,000,000|
For the first time since he had begun his impossible journey, he looked at the staggering, world-breaking power of an Early Creature, and he thought, with a cold, thrilling certainty...
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