I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 749: Mining I

Achilles took stock of where he stood, and what he found was not encouraging.

Everyone in the Expanse labored under the same directives he now carried. None of them could speak of the thing that had taken them. None of them could share even the simple fact of who their captor was or what it wanted, because the knowledge sat sealed behind something none of them could pry open. A being had been collecting Gilded Lifeforms and Infinite Lifeforms and Source Lifeforms for its own purposes, and the beings it collected could not warn anyone, could not name it, could not so much as point. The whole operation ran on silence enforced at the level of existence itself.

He turned the implication over. This could have been going on for years. Centuries!Swords of Existence vanishing one at a time, Gilded Houses losing members to nothing they could trace, and every soul who learned the truth made instantly unable to pass it on. The structure he had so recently joined did not know its people were ending up here. It could not know. That was the point!

So he set the question of escape aside for the moment and asked the only question that did him any good. What were they mining, and could he eat it?

If the ore was grand enough that an ancient thing had built a whole expanse to extract it, and if no one chained here could lift a hand to fight, then the only real move left to him was the one he always reached for. Find out whether his Cause could swallow the thing they had all been brought here to dig.

Beside him, Taylor ground her teeth and dropped her voice low.

"I’ll try Osmont," she whispered. "I can hint at this through my other body. He’s connected to all sides, and if anyone could do something about directives, maybe it’s him. I just...I have to find a way to..."

Achilles considered that, then shook his head slightly, not at her but at the hope underneath it.

"Try if you want. But for this, and for everything that comes after it, we rely on ourselves." His voice stayed even and low. "We don’t sit here waiting on the chance that someone notices, someone cares, someone comes. Nobody is coming. Existence is ours to get through, and the adversity in it is ours too. We dig ourselves out or we don’t get out."

Taylor looked at him for a moment, then exhaled through her nose loudly.

He moved forward.

The titan turned its cold eyes on him as he stepped up, and something in the motion seemed to satisfy it.

"Good. Some of you know what to do." Its voice scraped down over them. "Come."

HUUM!

The chains on their feet yanked.

Achilles felt the crimson-blue links pull taut and haul him forward, and beside him the others were dragged the same way, Taylor and a scattering of Source and Gilded captives all towed across the Expanse by a will that was not their own. They were pulled past working faces and rivers of churning Infinity, past the grinding procession toward the distant altar, deep into the mountain until the Warden deposited them in a section that stood mostly empty, its ore still in the walls, waiting.

"Mine," the Warden said.

Then it told them how, in the flat tone of something reciting instructions it had given ten thousand times.

"The ore holds concentrated Existential Biomass and it does not want to come out. You will wrap it in your Ego and your authority, and you will wrap both in emotion. Genuine emotion, the strongest you have. That is what lets the ore be handled. Strike it with bare authority and no feeling behind it and it will detonate, and it will take you with it. Many of you will learn this the expensive way regardless of my telling you. Begin."

Achilles put the instruction away with a flicker of real curiosity.

Why emotion? Why would Ego and authority wrapped in feeling do what raw authority could not? He turned it over as he approached the wall. The ore was Existential Biomass, the stuff of existence compressed and made volatile, and emotion was perhaps the most genuine expression of a living existence there was. Maybe the ore answered to the thing that proved a real being held it. Maybe feeling was the password that told the Biomass it was being handled by something alive rather than struck by a blind force. He did not know. He intended to find out by doing it!

He stepped up to the radiant ore embedded in the rock, blue and crimson light pulsing inside it, and reached out with the authority of his Prime Cause of Assimilation. He wrapped it the way he was told, his amplified Pride threading through the authority, the Neo Superbius Ego he had taken from a Gilded laboratory giving him exactly the kind of strong genuine emotion the work demanded.

It felt like holding a bomb.

The ore pushed back against his grip the instant he took hold of it, and when he tried to pull it free quickly the way impatience wanted him to, it answered. Waves of power burst out of the seam, and his skin ruptured where the force washed over him, thin splits opening across his hands and forearms before he even registered the pain.

HUUM!

Slowly, then. He eased off and worked it slowly, coaxing the ore loose rather than tearing it, letting his Pride-wrapped authority settle into the Biomass and convince it out of the wall a fraction at a time. It was tedious in a way that grated against everything in his nature, but the ruptures stopped spreading, and the ore began, grudgingly, to come.

He was halfway through freeing the first piece when a shout cut across the section.

"Aah!"

He looked over.

A Third Scale Gilded One had backed away from a buzzing ore in its own section, hands up, the thing in front of it shaking with a light that had gone wrong. The Gilded One had handled it too fast, or with too little real feeling behind the authority, and the ore had decided it was done being handled at all.

BOOM!

It detonated. Crimson lines of fracture lashed out across the region, thin and clean and fast, and they cut clean through the body of the Gilded One who had dropped it and through two others who had been working too close. All three collapsed where they stood, their existences split apart by lines they never had time to dodge.

WAA!

The other captives flinched and stared.

The Warden looked at the wreckage with no change in its cold face, then looked at the ones who had stopped to watch.

"Existence is vast and full of terrors," it said. "Do not fear what happens to others, and try not to meet the same fate. Keep going."

...!