Chapter 5337: Sword of Existence! V
The special treatment.
This was what Noah was supposed to receive, and the grand visage of Dame Seraphine locked onto him as she spoke.
"Step forward."
Noah raised his brows but followed, his steps light. He patted Seo-yeon’s head and communicated for her to wait, and she settled, watching with inquisitive eyes as he moved toward the Mesozoic Scale being holding the radiant obsidian sword.
He was genuinely interested in her, more interested than the ceremony itself warranted, because beings of higher Scales were the ones he most enjoyed studying. Peeling away the secrets of something that operated above his current tier was the kind of thing that taught him where his own ceiling actually was, and he had never met a ceiling he did not eventually want to break.
He arrived before her. She looked at him calmly. He looked back at her just as coolly, two beings taking each other’s measure across the gap of a full Scale.
Her power was immense, pressing against him with the suffocating weight of the Mesozoic, and her voice carried that weight when she spoke.
"To be a Sword of Existence is easy, in the end," she said. "All it requires is an Oath. An oath not to harm Source Lifeforms, and to work in the interest of existence. Are you ready?"
"I’m ready," Noah said, nodding calmly.
Dame Seraphine raised her sword and brought its flat side to shine above him.
"The first step to accepting the Oath," she said, "is to kneel."
HUUM!
To kneel?
Noah frowned at the word. A moment later, terrifying pressure descended from Dame Seraphine, stifling and heavy, pressing down on him from every direction. Her gaze remained calm as she repeated it.
"Kneel."
The pressure crashed down all around him.
|Pressure analysis: Dame Seraphine is exerting a Mesozoic Scale will-suppression. This capability is designed solely to suppress the will and force submission. It does not harm the target in any other way, deals no physical damage, and exists purely to compel a being to kneel through the imposition of overwhelming superior will. Resistance is a contest of will against a being one full Scale above you.|
Noah bore the pressure!
He felt it press against his foundations, against his will, the sheer weight of a being who operated a full Scale beyond him bearing down with the simple expectation that he would fold beneath it the way most beings folded. His knees were meant to buckle. His will was meant to yield!
The pressure existed for no purpose except to make a being kneel, and beings of every tier had knelt beneath it across the long history of the order.
He remained standing.
Dame Seraphine smiled when she saw it.
"Will that be a problem?" she asked, her tone carrying genuine curiosity rather than displeasure. "Will you not kneel?"
Noah looked up at the sword shining above him, at the Mesozoic Scale being holding it, and his reply came grand and unhurried.
"I kneel before very few in existence," he said. "I can kneel to hold my mother, or my child. I can kneel to hold my woman. You are neither of those things." His eyes held hers, inviolable. "So I cannot kneel before you."
BOOM!
His words were staunch, immovable, the declaration of a being who had decided long ago what his knees were for, and Dame Seraphine smiled brilliantly at them.
"Good," she said. "I had to know." She let the pressure ease. "Half of all who are sworn as Swords of Existence kneel beneath that pressure. Half resist it. There is no shame in either, and I tell every candidate this truthfully. Exceptional Swords have risen from both halves, beings of great accomplishment who knelt and beings of great accomplishment who did not."
Her gaze sharpened with something deeper. "But there is one distinction. Of all the Swords of Existence whose names have come to resonate upon Vakochev’s Scales of Existence, whose records etched themselves into the framework of reality itself, not one ever knelt beneath that pressure. They came only from the half that stood. To kneel or not to kneel is a choice made before existence itself, and existence remembers which choice you made."
HUUM!
Her sword began to shine with scintillating obsidian light, and her demeanor turned serious.
"Then we proceed to the Oath," she said.
She raised her voice, and the words that came filled the vast hall with a weight that pressed back against even the displayed regalia of every Sword who had come before, ancient and grand and glorious.
"Before THE Primordial Source, before the long unbroken line of Swords who came before, and before existence itself which keeps the only record that lasts, you stand to be sworn. You will be a blade that existence keeps. You will protect what must be protected and end what must be ended, and you will know the difference not by the comfort of the choice but by the truth of it. You will follow your own Way, for a Sword without a Way is only a weapon, and you will follow THE Source above all standards beneath it. You will not harm Source Lifeforms save in defense of existence itself. You will move when the powerful do nothing, and you will not count the cost of moving, for the cost of standing idle is always greater. You will carry this until your existence ends or until existence has no further need of you, whichever arrives first." Her obsidian eyes blazed. "Do you agree to uphold this Oath?"
Noah looked grandly up at the sword shining above him.
"I agree to uphold the Oath."
HUUM!
The moment the words left him, Dame Seraphine brought her sword down, and a brilliant obsidian light bathed Noah completely.
|Oath of the Sword of Existence: Taken.|
|You are now an official Sword of Existence, sworn before Dame Seraphine, THE Knighting Sword. The Oath binds your existence. Its terms will hold and cannot be set aside through ordinary means. The binding is deniable only by a being who exceeds power equivalent to Vakochev’s Fifth Scale of Existence, THE Mesozoic Scale. Below that threshold, the Oath holds absolutely.|
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