Noah stared with bright eyes!
The Weave had not been repelled. It had not been negated. It had been... ignored. His attack, a thing of Quadrillions in power, had been treated as an irrelevant piece of data, a null value in the equation of Anaximander’s existence!
He felt the necklace on his chest grow warm.
The Aegis of the Architect, his symbiotic armor, was responding to his own, unspoken will.
"Let’s try something else," Noah murmured.
In the next instant, he was no longer a man. The Aegis materialized around him, a silent, perfect symphony of interlocking white and gold plates!
HUUM!
The golden visor flared to life, a sun in the growing twilight of the mountain. His entire being was now a conduit for a singular, terrible purpose: absolute Purity.
The armor blazed with a white-gold light so intense it seemed to burn the very concept of color from the air.
He raised his hand, and from his palm, a beam of pure, conceptual certainty shot forth, a torrent of over 500 Quadrillion in pure, unadulterated Purity!
BOOM!
It was a wave of absolute, unyielding truth...and it passed right through him.
...!
Anaximander stood, bathed in a new, even more glorious light, a look of profound, academic fascination on his face.
He even reached out, his hand moving through the beam of annihilating power as if it were nothing more than a curious, harmless hologram.
Noah stopped.
The armor, with a soft, almost disappointed hiss, receded, returning to its dormant, necklace form!
He stood in the swirling, snowy winds, a profound, almost frustrating, silence settling between him and this impossible being.
|Master, I have been analyzing the subject, Anaximander.|
|Conclusion: He is a unique, one-of-a-kind anomaly. I have cross-referenced his existential signature with all known data, and there is... nothing that fits. He is not immune to your attacks; he is simply not a valid target for them. To him, your authority is a language he does not speak, a force that has no context in his self-defined reality.|
|Recommendation: Further study is... essential. This being is a living, breathing loophole in the very fabric of existence. Understanding him may provide us with a new, unprecedented path to power.|
...!
Noah looked at Anaximander, who was now gazing at the dormant Aegis with a blinding light of pure curiosity.
"Wow," he breathed, his voice filled with a genuine, almost reverent, awe. "What is a suit of armor like that made of? Your existence feels much heavier with it, and if you can do all of this... ah, what a conundrum this is. Oh, just who are you, Friend?"
Who was he? The question, once so simple, was now a complex, multifaceted thing.
He had given his name freely to many. But to this... this beautiful, terrible, and utterly baffling anomaly?
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