Chapter 4180: Do Not Fear, Young One II

She was beautiful in the way that natural disasters were beautiful...awesome, terrible, impossible to look away from!

Her body was adorned in tribal attire, obsidian-gold patterns that moved across the fabric like living things.

Her face held a beauty with features so perfect they made perfection seem inadequate. Eyes of pure obsidian that contained depths suggesting she had seen the birth of darkness and found it amusing!

Skin of polished bronze that caught light that didn’t exist.

Her dark hair danced with its own wind, moving like countless serpents that had learned to cooperate. In her hands, held with the casual grip of someone who had never needed to grip tightly, was an obsidian club that looked simple until you noticed reality bending around it, trying to get away.

Her face held an expression of tremendous innocence mixed with euphoria...the look of a child who had just discovered candy after a lifetime of vegetables.

"The air...feels so fresh," she said, her voice carrying the particular quality of sounds that had existed before language decided to organize them.

"Alive. Just like before. Before the endless years. Before that useless Shore that held no life..."

She breathed deeply, and several more buildings simply ceased.

"After so long, I can finally smell Living air again!"

Her words landed with weight that made the surviving Dukes above...those few who had weathered the initial assault, take involuntary steps back!

Some were gravely injured, reality still debating whether they should exist.

Others had died but hadn’t realized it yet, their bodies going through the motions while their essences departed!

The Early Creature looked around with the bright interest of a tourist in a new city, her gaze sweeping across the devastation she had created with no more concern than someone noting they had tracked mud indoors.

Her eyes found the Dukes above, catalogued them with dismissive interest, then turned toward Noah’s direction.

Her smile brightened to levels that made local space consider implementing sunglasses.

"Do not fear, young one," she said with the particular tone of an adult addressing toddler when she looked at Noah. "For the Early Creature, Nysteria, is here."

...!

The name landed like another impact. Nysteria. Even without context, the word carried weight that made reality acknowledge something significant had been labeled!

Her Haki pulsed outward again, not as attack but as existence...the natural radiation of something too powerful to fully contain itself.

Beside Noah, Sigrid’s Eye of Order blazed open, taking in the endless waves of death and decimation with growing fury. Her entire form began to shine with white-gold radiance as she prepared to-

Noah held her close, his arms tightening with protective certainty. His eyes flashed with solemnity as his perception tried to process what stood before them.

The numbers were staggering...dozens of quadrillions of complexity, each quadrillion representing power that could reshape Folds.

And this was a Dead Existence. An Early Creature that had passed through The Veil, bringing with it power that made their previous victories seem like sparring matches!

Yeah.

As always.

Existence... was unfair.

The thought carried no bitterness, just acknowledgment.

Existence had delivered exactly what he had asked for...opportunity for growth, wrapped in the form of something that could end him with a casual gesture.

—

Nysteria

In the Earliest Folds, this name was barely known. She was merely an Early Creature stemming from the Verdant River Tribe...one of countless such tribes that dotted the primordial landscape when existence was still deciding what rules it wanted to follow.

The Verdant River Tribe had carved their territory along waters that flowed upward, rivers that remembered being mountains and might decide to be clouds tomorrow.

They were builders, these Early Creatures, constructing monuments to concepts that hadn’t been invented yet!

Their greatest achievement was the Eternal Bridge...a structure that connected not places but possibilities, allowing tribe members to walk between what was and what might be.

Nysteria had been young by Early Creature standards, barely past her first million years of existence. She remembered the day everything changed with the clarity that trauma provides...every detail crystallized in memory like insects in amber.

The selection had come without warning.

Led by THE Living Existences, Early Creatures of impossible power, wearing authorities that made reality genuflect, had arrived at their tribe.

Half the tribe was chosen. The strongest, the most complex, those whose power had grown beyond the simple quadrillions into realms that numbers grew tired trying to describe.

Nysteria watched as her companions were selected.

They were taken. She was not.

She sat on the banks of their impossible river, tears streaming down bronze cheeks as she watched the selected ones depart through doorways that closed behind them with finality that transcended mere separation.

Around her, other Early Creatures who had been left behind sat in similar devastation.

"Why?" Nysteria whispered to the empty air where her companion had stood. "Why is it like this?"

Beside her, Gorath...an Early Creature whose stone skin couldn’t hide his hollow eyes, turned with the bitter wisdom of rejection.

"We were too weak," he said, each word a nail in the coffin of their worth. "We didn’t make the cut. Thirty quadrillion complexity? Fifty? It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough."

He looked at the space where the strongest had departed, his expression cycling through grief, rage, and finally settling on resignation.

"So now we’re left behind. Our fates will likely be decimation by what’s coming. Whether that’s Paradox or the Arbiters or whatever horror required our betters to abandon us...we’re the sacrificial remnants. The tribe left to tend meaningless shores..."

The words should have crushed her. Should have made her accept her designated worthlessness. Should have made her lie down and wait for whatever ending had been scripted for the weak!

Instead, they ignited something.

"No." The word emerged quiet, then grew. "No! I want to live! I want to be happy! I want to see what becomes of existence, not be discarded as insufficient before it even properly begins!"

She stood, her club materializing in her hands...still primitive compared to others.

"I will never let others decide for me my own worth! They think forty quadrillion isn’t enough? I’ll show them quintillions! They think we’re sacrificial? I’ll sacrifice them to their own assumptions! Fuck them and their selection! Fuck! Them!"

HUUM!

That was Nysteria. Unwilling to accept others’ definitions. Valiant in her refusal to surrender. Strong not because she had been born that way, but because she chose to become so.

She would spend the next eons proving that being left behind was not the same as being worthless. Even if it meant crossing through death itself to do so.

And Death...she became!

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