I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 745: The Assault on Gilded Ones! II

In the face of supreme power, even amplified Egos and waves of Infinity could do nothing but burn.

The obsidian lightning came down on the settlement and the settlement stopped being a settlement! Oh! The reinforced walls, the trees lashed together and worked through with layered Pulses, came apart under the strikes one section at a time, the deadness in that light treating eons of fortification as a thing that had simply taken too long to die. Roars rose up from within, and shocked shouts after them, and through the gaps torn in the walls Achilles could see dozens of Gilded Ones scrambling, with many more inside structures built from the ancient trees and the bones of slain Source Beasts.

He watched the Relictus and the Swords of Existence move with no mercy in any of them!

The instant Sir George’s attack finished, others picked it up. Multiple Swords of Existence spoke their own Destruere, and obsidian waves of terrifying power thrashed out and carved through the Gilded settlement one after another, each strike folding into the last until the whole nest convulsed under the weight of it.

It was an eye-opening thing to stand near.

The Gilded Ones were not weak. Achilles had to remind himself of that as he watched, because the ease of the slaughter made it easy to forget. These were beings whose lowest members stood at the third tier of THE Third Scale, beings whose presence would have flattened everything in his stunted home Observable Existence, and they were being undone like brush cleared from a field. The gap between THE Third Scale and THE Fourth was not the kind of gap effort could close in a moment. It was a wall, and the Swords stood on the far side of it.

While they erupted, Achilles gathered. His Prime Cause of Assimilation was passively drinking the weavings of existence around him, perceiving as much as it could from the display, and the prompts came as he watched.

|The beings designated Swords of Existence, including Sir George, operate at THE Fourth Scale of Existence, THE Triassic Scale.|

|Each attacks with an Akashic Civilizational Intent, an amalgamation of their record across history and their immensity, which they use to convert existence into the weavings of their own power.|

|Example: a letter of THE Primordial Tongue uttered through an Akashic Civilizational Intent filled with records of cataclysm and endings will multiply the effectiveness and immensity of the letter by an unknown factor. The degree depends on the type and rarity of the Intent.|

|It is estimated that there are five types of Intents available to those within THE Fourth Scale of Existence.|

|More information is being integrated as you are exposed to more of this power.|

His eyes glimmered.

He was watching the shape of a higher rung, and a guideline was forming for how he might climb it. An Akashic Civilizational Intent was not a technique in the way Pulses were techniques. It was the being’s whole record made into a weapon, everything they had ever done and survived and become folded into a single expression that bent existence toward whatever truth their history had carved into them. A Sword whose record was full of endings made endings more easily. The history did the work. The power was just the history, sharpened.

The first idea to rise in him was the obvious one. Could he assimilate the Akashic Civilizational Intent of others?

He almost laughed for asking. He could assimilate everything!

Why would it matter that the Intent was the amalgamated record of an existence that had lived a thousand or a million years? A record was a thing. Things could be taken, and broken down, and made part of him, and he had never once found a category of thing his Cause refused except for the few that could still kill him for trying too early.

His eyes burned with the possibility as he watched the Gilded Ones erupt with their own answer, Pulses of THE Scales rising from the depths of the settlement alongside their own Akashic Civilizational Intents, the defenders bringing everything they had left to a fight they were not going to win. Their Intents were real. Some of them carried records long enough to twist the obsidian waves coming down on them, to buy a few seconds, to push back a Sword’s strike before it landed. But seconds were all they bought, and the Swords had a great many strikes to give.

But the result of the battle was not the thing that held him. He had expected the Source Lifeforms to win before they ever entered the forest.

What held him was a quieter question. When the corpses started appearing, would anyone care enough to look at them?

He watched Third Scale Gilded Ones near the broken wall fail to defend against the Fourth Scale Intents bearing down on them, their bodies split into pieces as those terrifying Intents smashed both their physical forms and their records at once. That was the cruelty of an Intent used against a lesser being. It did not only kill the body. It went after the history too, the accumulated record that made the Gilded One what it was, shredding both at the same moment so that what fell was not even a proper corpse but a scatter of physical and existential wreckage.

In the noise and motion of an ongoing battle, no one spared the pieces a second look. The Swords were already moving to the next target. The Relictus were tearing into the deeper structures. The whole army faced forward, toward the fight, toward the parts of the settlement still standing.

WUUU!

The moment he was certain of that, Achilles spoke to his own existence.

"Assimilate and direct all integrated existential biomass toward my Prime Cause of Assimilation, and toward my capability to generate Eridarch Ore faster."

HUUM!

The spores had risen from him long before, invisible to everything but his own perception, spread out across the surroundings and waiting for exactly this. Now they latched onto the shattered remains of Gilded Ones, and the decimated corpses began to disappear, a piece here and a piece there, nothing anyone watching the larger slaughter would notice. A fragment of an arm gone from the sand. A splintered length of record dissolving before it could fully disperse. Small disappearances, scattered, none of them large enough to draw an eye that had bigger things to watch.

|All incoming existential biomass is being funneled and integrated into your existence.|

|THE Prime Cause of Assimilation is growing grander.|

|Eridarch Ore generation frequency is slowly increasing.|

...!

His eyes stayed bright as he kept watching from the back, the picture of a weak and harmless Attendant who had wandered in over his head and was sensibly staying out of the way. It was a good disguise. Nobody questioned the new Attendant standing well clear of a Fourth Scale slaughter. Nobody wondered why the edges of the battlefield kept going quiet, why the wreckage of the fallen thinned faster than the chaos could account for.

He fed on the leavings of the massacre and grew, quietly, the way he preferred to grow!

He was waiting for one specific thing in all of it.

He watched for the death of the first Triassic Scale existence, the first Gilded One of THE Fourth Scale to fall in this fight, and he wondered, with real patience now, how it would feel when he assimilated the corpse of something that had formed its own Akashic Civilizational Intent!