I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 752: Trueness I

Achilles found his rhythm in the deep mine, and he kept it.

He worked a section far enough in that no eyes reached it, and he mined the way the others mined, slow and careful, so that anyone glancing his way saw only a diligent worker earning his keep. But when the passages emptied and the churn of the Infinity rivers covered him, he stopped pretending. He laid his hands on the ore and took it whole, and THE Akashic Seed drank down another record, and his existence grew a little grander in the dark where nothing watched. Step by step. It was a good arrangement. He intended to keep it!

He was halfway through a vein when the commotion reached him.

The sound carried down the tunnel, a wet crack and a body hitting stone, and Achilles turned toward it the way anyone turned toward violence, to learn whether it was coming for him. It was not. A different Warden had a worker pinned against the wall in the next hollow, a chained figure it struck again as he watched, and the strange thing was who the figure turned out to be.

An old woman. Haggard, bent, her skin loose over sharp bones, her clothes worn to rags on her frame. And her power, when he reached for it, stopped him in astonishment.

|Source Lifeform. THE Fifth Scale, THE Mesozoic Scale.|

The Fifth Scale. The same as the Wardens. She stood among the ore in chains that held even that down, and her eyes, when they lifted, held a cold so deep it had nothing to do with the mine. It was the cold of a thing that had been imperious for longer than most Realms had existed and had not learned, even here, how to stop.

The Warden struck her again anyway.

"Look at you," it said, and its voice carried the flat cruelty of something that enjoyed its work. "Mesozoic Scale, and you can’t meet the quota of a common laborer. You’re losing biomass. Dying slow. Every day a little less of you, until there’s nothing left to feed the altar at all."

It leaned down over her.

"You want to be proud? Be proud. Die proud. You’ll die exactly like a common dog regardless, and whatever you were out there, whatever throne you sat on, it won’t mean a thing in this rock. Someone with your power should mine this ore in her sleep."

It straightened and pointed down the tunnel, straight at Achilles where he’d stopped.

"Even a weak little thing like that meets his quota. So do fucking better."

It struck her one more time. Her chained body smashed against the wall, hung there a moment, and slid down.

Then the Warden left, unhurried, already bored, its footsteps fading up the passage until only the rivers were left.

Achilles stood where he was.

He had a surplus. He always had a surplus now, more ore in him than the quota would ever ask, and it would cost him nothing to press a piece of what he’d taken toward her offering, quietly, and buy the old woman another day. Nothing except the one thing he could not spend freely here. Notice. A worker who was supposed to be weak and invisible did not have surplus to give. A worker who helped a dying Source Lifeform meet quota was a worker worth a second look, and in this place a second look could be the end of everything he was building in the dark.

He weighed it the way he weighed everything.

Then he sighed, somewhere inside where the Directives couldn’t hear, and went to her anyway. He wasn’t sure, even as he crossed the hollow, which part of him had decided to help. Maybe the part that reminded him of his own mother. Maybe something else.

He crouched a respectful distance from her, close enough to speak low.

"Why not play along for now," he said. "Meet the quota, keep your biomass, wait for an opening. There’s always an opening, if you’re alive to take it. But if you die here, you die completely. Nothing comes back from that. Not even you."

The old woman pushed herself up off the wall.

She dusted the rock from her rags with slow deliberate movements, as though the Warden’s beating had been an inconvenience and nothing more, and when she looked at him her cold eyes held something that was almost amusement and was not quite kindness.

"My Intent won’t allow it," she said. Her voice was dry and old and carried further than it should have. "I have carried it a long time, longer than you have been anything at all. If I deviate from it, even a little, even to save my own life in a hole like this one, then my Trueness fades. And I have always been true. I will always be unfathomably true. That is the whole of what I am."

HUUM!

The words came with weight, and the weight was heavy!

Achilles felt her existence vibrate as she spoke, the chains straining as something in her pushed against them, not to break free but simply because a thing that true could not help but press against anything that tried to make it false. Her gaze had gone imperious! so imperious thst they exceeded any Source Lifeform he had met so far as this being...reminded him of THE Osmontian’s eyes!

Eyes of someone undeniable.

...!

He stayed crouched there, astonished, and revised every easy thought he’d had about her.

She was not proud the way the Wardens meant it. She was not clinging to a dead throne. She had built her entire existence on a single truth and would rather be ground to nothing in this mountain than spend one day pretending to be something she was not.

He had come over thinking he might save her.

He understood now that she would not thank him for it, and that she was, in her own terrible way, freer in these chains than half the beings walking free above!

Oh!