I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 753: Trueness! II

The old woman’s cold eyes stayed on him, and Achilles decided she had earned a name in exchange for the beating she’d taken without flinching.

"I am Adrastia. A newly selected Attendant of THE Swords of Existence." The title still fit strangely, like a coat he hadn’t finished breaking in. "We had just begun clearing Gilded Ones from THE Strand of Broken Scales in THE Source Lands when the thing holding the form of a Gilded One sent us all here. The thing that imposed these chains. The one we can’t even talk about."

He let that sit, then asked the question that had been pulling at him since the prompts named her Scale.

"You are?"

Her eyes flashed, and the cold in them sharpened into something older than anger.

"I didn’t know his influence had already spread into THE Source Lands that far." She said it half to herself.

"I am Vienna. An Original Source Lifeform, though you may not know what that means. Me being locked in here is a bigger travesty than anything else in this rock, because I need to get word back to THE Originals. The others like me, and the ones more powerful than me. All across THE Infinite Carcosa, our people and more are already being imprisoned and used to feed an enemy we did not know had risen again."

She lifted one thin wrist, and the crimson-blue links dragged against the stone.

"But these chains. Those directives."

She shook her head, and for a heartbeat the imperiousness cracked and showed the exhaustion underneath.

Achilles looked down at the chains on his own feet. At the Directives sitting inside his existence like splinters he wasn’t allowed to name. They made a being unable to share information, unable to attack, unable to organize so much as a whisper of resistance. That was the whole architecture of this place. No revolution was possible here because the tools of revolution had been sealed inside every prisoner individually.

If only.

Achilles blinked.

He paused. His whole existence paused, every body, every thought, the way a man stops walking when he realizes he’s left something burning at home.

He blinked again.

He could not possibly be this stupid. Right?

"..."

He could assimilate anything. That was not a boast, it was the load-bearing fact of his entire existence. He had already been assimilating the ores of this mine, slowly, carefully. He had assimilated a Gilded One, a Miniature Cause, the memories of a Singular Cognizance, an ore that made Eridarch Ore, letters he had no right to speak.

Why had he not thought, even once, to try assimilating the chains binding him?

Or the Directives themselves?

DUN!

His heart beat hard enough that he felt it in his throat, and his breathing came heavier. The mine went on around him, the churn of the rivers, the bitter metal taste of the air, and inside all of it he stood very still while his mind ran.

Fuck!

Set aside whether he could. He asked himself the real questions. How much attention would it draw? Would THE Sealed One itself feel a Directive vanish, or was something lesser running this domain while the master slept and fed? And deeper than both, would anything even register at all, when he wasn’t breaking the chains, wasn’t fighting them, was simply making them part of himself the way he made everything part of himself? A broken chain screamed. An assimilated chain just... stopped being separate.

The more he turned it, the harder his heart drummed. The possibilities stacked up like ore in a rich vein!

And if it worked on him, could he do it for her? This terrifying old woman whose people he couldn’t even gauge the caliber of, who needed exactly one moment of freedom to call down something enormous?

"..."

He argued with himself for a moment longer, the careful part of him listing everything that could go wrong, the rest of him already crouching toward the decision the way he always did. Then he looked at THE Original in front of him.

"If." He kept his voice low, under the sound of the rivers. "If I could get you out of these chains. Could you alert truly powerful lifeforms to get here instantly? After nanoseconds? Seconds?"

...!

He was mapping every branch as he asked it. If a force like that descended on this Expanse, the Wardens would have far bigger problems than one quiet worker. He could assimilate ore freely in the chaos, openly, greedily, with no eyes to spare for him. And he would be free of these chains and the Directives both, and out from under a quota that fed a waking horror.

Vienna blinked at him, calm and slow, looking at him exactly the way one looks at a madman who has said something insane in a very reasonable tone.

Then she answered anyway.

"In an instant." No hesitation in it. "My Intent is unfathomably True. It is a Primordial Intent, and it can reach out along my branching Lineage of THE Originals and set off an alarm without my saying a single thing the Directive forbids. I would not need words at all. And a force would arrive here whose weakest member stands at THE Fifth Scale."

Her cold eyes held his.

"And whose strongest stands at THE Sixth."

BOOM!

The words landed in him like a struck bell.

"If you can truly do such a thing," she added, dry as the rock around them, "you will be rewarded handsomely."

She said it the way people promise payment to lunatics, kindly, expecting nothing. He could see it plain in her face. She half believed he was a fool, and half pitied him, and underneath both there was a sliver, just a sliver, of something that had not existed in her a minute ago.

Hope!

Achilles’s eyes shone in the blue and crimson light.

He breathed out once, long and slow. Then he bent down and laid one hand on the chains at his feet and the other on hers, cold links under both palms, and he spoke the only word that had ever mattered.

"Assimilate."

...!