I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 754: I AM!

Achilles’s palms pressed against the chains, his and hers both, and the word did its work.

"Assimilate."

The crimson-blue links did not fight him. That was the strange beauty of it. A chain resisted breaking because breaking was violence against its purpose, but assimilation was not violence at all. The chains simply stopped being separate from him, their substance and their meaning draining into his existence link by link, and the light in them dimmed and flowed into his hands like water finding a lower place.

|You have Assimilated the Crimson-Blue Chaos Chains.|

|You are not free of the chains. You have become the chains’ distinction. The anchor recognizes you as itself. The binding recognizes you as the binder.|

|You may now walk THE Elvarna Mining Expanse as its shackles do, going anywhere the chains reach, unquestioned by the weavings that enforce them.|

He almost laughed at the shape of that. He was not a prisoner who had slipped his bonds. He held the same standing as the bonds themselves! The mine’s own architecture of control now counted him among its instruments, and instruments were not watched.

Then he went deeper, into his own foundations, hunting the splinters that had sat inside him since the crimson light took him. The Directives. The sealed silence, the daily tribute. He found them woven through his existence like threads through cloth, and he commanded his existence plainly.

"Assimilate these as well."

|You have Assimilated the Weavings of Imposition of THE Sealed One’s Directives.|

|The First Directive is yours. You may now speak of THE Sealed One freely, and you hold the weaving that silences others, to study or to unmake.|

|The Second Directive is yours. You owe no tribute. The weaving that devours a tenth of a failing worker’s biomass is now a thing you possess rather than a thing that possesses you.|

...!

Vienna saw the chains vanish from her wrists, and for one heartbeat the Original simply stared.

Then the shock burned off her face and something firm and ancient replaced it, and she erupted. An obsidian pillar of power billowed up out of her thin frame, punched through the ceiling of the mountain above them, and kept going, stone and ore and a hundred tons of rock blown skyward as her Primordial Intent rang out along her Lineage with no words in it at all. The haggard old woman was gone. What stood in the rags was tall and terrible and true.

Achilles was already working.

The instant his freedom settled, he threw his awareness wide and found Taylor outside the mountain, her spark unmistakable among the chained thousands. Distance had stopped mattering to his assimilation long ago. He locked onto her chains and drank them from afar, and while he was at it he swept his reach across the nearby sections and took the chains of Sir George too, and the fiery-haired Sword, and one Source Lifeform after another, shackles dissolving off ankles all across the Expanse like frost off a window.

Taylor’s shock lasted about a second. Her power came flooding back and her mind snapped toward him, and he was already sending the message.

"I helped a Mesozoic Scale Original Source Lifeform get free. Help is descending any moment. If you want to make this more chaotic, call whoever you can call."

He could feel her grin from here.

Vienna turned to him amid the falling rubble, and her cold eyes had changed. The decrepit face was gone entirely now, and the entity looking at him radiated an authority that made the deep mine feel small.

"You have done something of incredible service," she said. "For your choices, you will be rewarded tremendously."

...!

So she said!

And then...

Then the sky answered her!

Existence above the whole region began to shake and tumble, and obsidian seas erupted across the heavens, wave after wave rolling out from tears in the sky, and through them came the Originals’ answer. One Mesozoic Scale aura descended, then another, then another, each arrival pressing down on the Expanse like a hand on a drum, titanic figures pouring through the wounds in reality with the unhurried fury of beings who had just learned their kin were being farmed.

Across THE Elvarna Mining Expanse, the Wardens looked up with rage.

They rose to meet the descent because there was nothing else to do, and boundless chaos broke open across the mountains and the rivers of Infinity, Fifth Scale powers colliding in the air while thousands of the newly unshackled scattered below, some fleeing, some turning on their captors with everything they had saved up through years of chains.

And in the middle of it all, Taylor’s voice rang bright in Achilles’s mind.

"Haha! Osmont somehow figured out it was THE Sealed One I couldn’t talk about, and now that the chains are gone I sent him this body’s location. These guys are truly fucked now! Fuck THE Sealed One even more!"

...!

Her words were ridiculously ecstatic for someone calling the help of another and believing in them so much.

But...

The moment after she said it, the skies cracked again as someone new entered.

But this weight was different.

The Originals had descended like a storm. This came down like a verdict. Every being in the Expanse felt it at once, and the fighting itself stuttered, Fifth Scale Source Lifeforms and Wardens alike turning their faces upward mid-blow, the newly freed prisoners freezing where they stood, because the aura unfolding above them was not one more soldier joining a battle. It was grander than that in a way that had no comfortable name. Majesty came off it. Royalty. Profundities layered on profundities, things even Achilles, who had eaten the memories of Gilded Ones and walked THE Source Lands, could not put words to.

The being wore an emperor’s robe.

Endless blue light poured from him, gathering into plasmic flames that moved like lava given the freedom of the sky, and his gaze as he looked down over the whole burning Expanse was imperious beyond anything the mine had ever held. Wardens, Originals, prisoners, mountains, the altar and its fire, all of it sat beneath that gaze like items on a table he was deciding whether to keep.

He bellowed, and the sky bellowed with him.

"I AM!"

BOOOM!