I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 755: The Thread In The Dark I

The declaration rolled across THE Elvarna Mining Expanse, and Achilles felt it twice.

Once in the air, the way everyone felt it, a pressure that leaned the whole sky toward the figure in emperor’s robes. And once through the chains, because he was the chains now, and the binding network of the entire Expanse rang like a struck bell against his existence.

I AM.

The ore buzzed in his hands. The slivers of True intent in every vein of the mountain answered the voice above, recognizing something unbound, and for a moment Achilles simply stood in the deep tunnel with his palm against a half-eaten wall of ore and let his awareness climb up through the rock to look.

The being hung at the center of the burning sky wreathed in blue flames that moved like slow lava. Emperor’s robes. An Intent rolling off him in tides so seamless that it made one want to kneel. Almost!

So that was THE Osmontian.

Taylor’s voice hit his mind almost before he finished the thought.

"That’s him! There’s Osmont! Hah, I told you he’d come. I told you!"

He nodded silently even as things became chaotic.

He had no intention of drawing any attention so far. The chaos above was the best cover he would ever be given, and he used it the way he used everything. His awareness swept the Expanse, and shackles dissolved off ankles by the dozen, the hundred. Sir George. The fiery-haired Sword. Prisoners on far peaks who fell to their knees not from despair but from disbelief. He worked fast, and a colder part of him kept the ledger he did not want to keep. The chains came off quick. The Directives did not as he would need to be deeply in contact with them.

Unweaving a Directive from a living existence took long, careful work, the kind he had only done on himself, and there was no time. So he made the efficient choice without ever saying it out loud, even inside his own head.

Above, the battle that had not yet started began to end instead.

Another terrifying aura descended, this time...it was a being who was literally burning with Existence appearing near THE Osmontian.

Obsidian flames raged around this titanic being as Achilless felt his existence buzzing when he looked towards this being.

But before he could look too closlely...Achilles felt the Warden’s Olympian Intent erupt, crimson pressure stacking into a body of law, one Mesozoic being deciding that the feeling in his bones was not enough to kneel for. Achilles paused his work to watch.

Then, from THE Osmontian...the wings came out.

Two vast wings, blue-black, and every eye upon them opened at once. Hundreds of eyes, lemniscate pupils turning slowly, and along the membranes countless tiny mouths whispering just beneath hearing. Achilles’s Architect’s Perception reached toward them out of pure habit and came back with nothing he could hold. His mind, such as it was, advised him to stop looking.

He did not stop looking as THE Osmontian seemingly took down a Fifth Scale being...so easily!

A Warden!

The Warden screamed. And then the Warden began to claw pieces off his own face, his own arms, his own records, digging at himself like a man after a splinter in his skull. The filaments came down. The tiny mouths opened wider than their size allowed. A Mesozoic Scale existence went into them wet and screaming, and then there was empty air.

WAA!

The whole Expanse went silent. Even Vienna, standing tall and terrible in her rags near where Taylor had climbed to, had gone still.

"Move a single muscle," said the being in emperor’s robes, "and you are next."

Achilles kept assimilating chains. Technically, he decided, his muscles were not the part of him moving.

"Sealed One." The voice above turned toward the altar, toward the deep place under it. "Will you crawl out of that tepid cave of yours, or shall your Followers, these dogs who look up to you, die one by one before your eyes until you do?"

HUUM!

At such a time.

The ground beneath the altar began to rise.

Achilles felt that through the chains too, before anyone saw it. The network trembled from its root, and then the voice came up out of the depths, low and booming and laughing, and the laughter had a madness in it that sank and sank and never struck a floor. When the Intent wrapped inside it rolled out across the Expanse, every existence below THE Mesozoic Scale collapsed to their knees.

Achilles almost went down with them.

His body almost hit the tunnel floor without asking his permission. He had assimilated the chains, the Directives, a Miniature Cause, a Gilded One. He had a Prime Cause and an Intent outside the Scales, and his knees still nearly buckled!

"Strength," THE Sealed One said, "is the prediction of possibilities. I want you to sit with that word, Osmont. Prediction. I knew, when I began going for you, that one or two of my Vessels might one day receive a visitor. I knew it the way a farmer knows the seasons. And knowing it, I prepared for it."

The words settled into the silence, patient as stone. Osmont...was actually already an enemy of THE Sealed One?

"Even so. Even with you standing in my sky, I still do not wish to contribute one drop of adversity to you if I do not have to. Because it always comes down to choices. Yours, and mine." A low sound, almost a sigh.

"Now. I do understand how difficult it is, granting a being no adversity at all. It goes against every instinct. So consider this my present to you, my Vessel. I sacrifice for the greater good. I do this to give you no satisfaction. Only the knowledge that what follows is a consequence of your actions, and no one else’s."

HUUM!

Almost kneeling in the dark, Achilles’s mind ran ahead of the voice, and got it wrong.

He thought: the Vessel will fight. He thought: it has been feeding for years, it is fat with offerings, it will rise and make this a war of terrifying scale, and in that war I will eat like I have never eaten.

The Vessel rose into view, withered, its edges already crumbling to ash. It...had never been meant to fight at all.

It turned toward the sky and smiled.

"No adversity," it said. "Just pain."

And it withered, and turned to ash, and a moment later, Achilled felt...something unfathomably heavy.

He felt...every prisoner in THE Elvarna Mining Expanse collapse.

...!

Achilles felt the cord get cut from the inside.

He was the network. He held the same distinction as the shackles, and so he felt the command race out from the dying Vessel through every weaving at once, felt the Directives fire in every chest across every mountain, tens of thousands of splinters turning in tens of thousands of hearts in the same instant. The lifeforms carrying them simply stopped.

Sir George stopped. The fiery-haired Sword who had grieved for a dead William stopped. Beings whose chains Achilles had dissolved a little while ago dropped where they stood, free ankles and all, because he had taken their shackles and was unable to take the Directives within them.

They all...perished one after another.

The chains were never the knife!