I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 740: The Strand II

Achilles began walking the beach.

The obsidian sand shifted under his weight, fine and dark and faintly warm, and he moved along the shoreline with his perception spread wide, taking in everything THE Strand of Broken Scales had to offer a being who had crossed eons of effort to stand here. The golden light from the distant flower-suns drifted across him in patches as he walked, lighting him and then leaving him in shade and then lighting him again.

He was not alone.

Source Beasts moved through the region, and the first of them caught his attention as it came down toward the water from the tree line. It was a large thing, four-legged and scaled, its hide carrying the same faint glow he had seen in the ancient bark, and its power pressed against his awareness with the unmistakable quality of THE Primordial Source running through living foundations. It looked at him as it approached the shore.

He readied himself, expecting the kind of territorial response such creatures usually offered intruders.

The beast’s eyes found the mark on his hand instead. Something in its bearing shifted, the attention it had given him dissolving into disinterest, and it simply continued down to the water and lowered its head to drink as though he were one more feature of a landscape it had known its whole life.

The marker. It recognized the marker!

His eyes shone brightly as he also didnt attack for now.

As he continued along the beach, more Source Beasts revealed themselves, in the shallows and among the distant trees and overhead in shapes that rode the dense air above the canopy. Each one that came near enough to sense him registered the Attendant’s mark and lost interest, going about whatever business such creatures had in a place like this.

He could walk this region freely. The mark made him a thing that belonged, and beings that belonged were not worth a Source Beast’s hostility!

But it also made him unable to freely assimilate beasts as was technically on their side!

He spent some time simply observing, building a picture of the place. The dying he had been sent to investigate was not immediately apparent. The beasts he saw were healthy, moving with the ease of creatures in their proper home, and whatever had been thinning their numbers was either subtle or confined to areas he had not yet reached.

Then something came ashore that did not belong at all.

He felt them before he saw them clearly, two presences rising out of the obsidian sea further down the beach, water sheeting off their forms as they walked up onto the sand. His perception sharpened on them and returned details that did not fit the place they were standing in!

They seemed slightly injured as his eyes opened wide with surprise!

He knew the auras of such beings as it was unmistakable!

|Gilded Lifeform. Superbius designation. Devonian Paleozoic Scale.|

|Gilded Lifeform. Superbius designation. Devonian Paleozoic Scale.|

Two Gilded Ones!

Both at the third tier of THE Third Scale. Both carrying the amplified Pride that marked their line!

And both of them froze the moment they saw him.

Achilles considered the situation with the cold attention it deserved. Gilded Ones should not be here. THE Source Lands were closed to them!

From everything he had taken from the Gilded he had devoured, access to this place was the single thing their civilization wanted most and had most consistently failed to obtain. THE Relictus and the Source Lifeforms kept them out. That was nearly the whole shape of the conflict between the two categories of being, the Gilded reaching for THE Primordial Source and being denied it, again and again across ages.

For two Superbius Gilded Ones to be standing on this beach meant something had gone wrong with that arrangement, or that something he did not yet understand had changed.

Their shock at seeing him made a certain sense. They had not expected anyone like him here. They certainly had not expected him to be a witness to whatever they were doing where they had no right to be!

He watched the calculation move across their faces. A witness was a problem. A witness with a connection to the structure that guarded this place was a worse problem!

They reached the same conclusion he expected them to reach.

The two Gilded Ones moved as one, their amplified Pride flaring as they brought their authority to bear, and Pulses tore loose from both of them and came screaming across the beach toward him.

HUUM!

The Pulses came at him fast, both Gilded Ones channeling THE Bellum Cause through their amplified Superbius Ego, the authority of conflict braided through pride into expressions that carried the accumulated weight of everything that Cause stood for. The attacks crossed the beach as twin lances of compressed violence, each one strong enough to unmake a Third Scale being that met it wrong!

Achilles did not meet it wrong. He did not really meet it at all in the way they expected.

He simply let it hit him!

His body took the Pulses the way dry ground takes rain, and instead of being torn apart by the Bellum authority slamming into him, he drank it. THE Assimilation Cause opened across his entire form at once, and the violence the Gilded Ones had thrown at him stopped being an attack the moment it made contact and became material.

He devoured the Pulses whole, the weight, the pride woven through them, the structured authority of THE Bellum Cause, all of it siphoning into him as though the attacks had been delivered specifically for his consumption!

Everything except their Infinity.

He left the Infinity alone. His foundations gave him the same warning they always gave when Infinity came near, the categorical refusal that told him in no uncertain terms he was not ready to swallow that particular thing, and he respected it.

He drank everything around the Infinity and let the Infinity slide off untouched, taking the Ego and the Observable Force and the Bellum authority while leaving the one ingredient his existence was not yet built to hold!

The two Gilded Ones stared incredulously.

Their Pulses had vanished into him and produced nothing. No wound, no stagger, not even the courtesy of a flinch. He stood on the obsidian sand exactly as he had stood before they attacked, and the only change was that he now held a portion of what they had thrown!

He pressed forward!

He could not assimilate their existence outright. They were Devonian Paleozoic Scale, the third tier of THE Third Scale, and even with everything he had become they sat far enough above his consumed Gilded foundations that their existence resisted instant integration the way Mansa Nguna’s had resisted, the way the truly powerful always resisted until he wore them down.

So he did not try to swallow them whole. He used his Cause to reach into them and siphon, drawing off their amplified Ego and their Observable Force in steady pulls, taking the things he could take and leaving the existence intact beneath them for now!

He took their Ego of Superbius thr most.

And that was when both Gilded Ones went frantic.

The amplified Superbius Ego was not decoration. It was the anchor. It was the specific structure their entire kind engineered into themselves for the purpose of holding Infinity without dissolving into THE Gamaidjan, and as Achilles drew that anchor out of them, the Infinity he had so carefully left alone began to answer the absence.

It went wild inside them!

HUUM!

He watched it happen with cold interest. The Infinity they carried, no longer held in check by the Pride that had kept it disciplined across their entire existence, started to slip its restraints. Their eyes were the first sign, a faint blue creeping in at the edges, and then their movements turned jerky and uncertain as the madness began settling into their minds.

The two Gilded Ones understood what was happening to them. He could see the understanding arrive, the horror behind it, the frantic recognition that the foundation they had stood on their whole lives was being pulled out from under them while the most dangerous thing they carried woke up and looked around!