I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 756: The Thread In The Dark II

The chains truly were never the knife.

|The vibrant Source of the Vessel of THE Sealed One in THE Elvarna Mining Expanse has been sacrificed. Alongside it, every imprisoned lifeform still bound by the Chains or the Directives of THE Sealed One has been sacrificed as well. The two were tied together. He cut them together.|

Out of every prisoner in the Expanse, three still breathed. Taylor. Vienna. And him.

"Adrastia." Taylor’s voice in his mind had gone small in a way he had never once heard from her. "They’re all. Existence won’t stop showing me. It won’t stop."

"I know."

It was all he had.

He climbed out of the mountain because staying below with the corpses of beings he had half-saved felt like a verdict, and he came to stand near Taylor as THE Osmontian landed beside them, cold fury in the man’s eyes and something steadier underneath that the fury could not reach. Vienna stood on Taylor’s other side, ancient and unbent, and her cold gaze flicked once to Achilles’s bare ankles, then to the corpses of freed prisoners scattered across the nearest slope.

She said nothing at all.

The fading voice came one last time, thinning as it withdrew into wherever it had come from.

"Just how true is your Intent, Osmont? Just how true are you to your identity? Because if you had done nothing, all of these lifeforms would still be alive. Because you came, far too many Triassic and Mesozoic Scale beings, Infinite and Source and Gilded alike, are dead. Their blood is on your hands, my Vessel. Yours. There will be no grand battle for you. No adversity. Only the consequences of your choices." A last quiet breath in the dark.

"And know this. Anywhere else you go, wherever another of my Vessels waits, expect the same. All life there will fade the moment you arrive. You will walk from graveyard to graveyard, and I will not have lifted a finger against you. You will have done it, simply by being what you are."

HUUM!

...!

Then it was gone, and the man in emperor’s robes stood among tens of thousands of dead, and answered!

"I AM... HUMAN!"

His power spread across the whole Expanse in a slow tide, and everywhere it touched, the ground opened and closed! Graves! One for every lifeform THE Sealed One had thrown away, the earth folding gently over each corpse, mountains and pathways rippling with the labor of it! They had died as cargo. They would at least be buried.

Achilles watched the graves close, and the heavy thing in his chest sat exactly where it was and refused to move.

And then he felt the thread.

It moved through the chains! Not the dead shackles on the corpses, but the deep network itself, the root architecture he had joined when he assimilated his bonds, and along it a portion of the Vessel’s gathered power was sliding out of the dead Expanse, dense and old and thick with the flavor of THE Sealed One, quiet as a rat in a wall, traveling toward another region of THE Infinite Carcosa.

Toward another Vessel! Another feeding ground! The farmer moving his stock from a burned field!

His eyes went to the emperor-robed man burying the dead, to THE Creature, thr being shrouded in obaidian flames who had descended with Osmont anx looming above with its held-in fury, to the Originals hovering in the torn sky. None of them turned. None of them felt it!

They were not the chains. He was!

"Adrastia?" Taylor had caught something in his stillness. "What. What is it? Existence is telling me you’re about to do something and it won’t tell me what, which is never good!"

He almost told her. He almost told Osmont, ten steps away, who could probably chase that thread down and throttle it!

He didn’t.

He examined the impulse honestly, the way he examined everything, and found that it was not caution holding his tongue. It was hunger! That power was THE Sealed One’s own substance, and everything he had ever assimilated had given up its nature to him! Its memories! Its methods! Hand it to Osmont and it became Osmont’s knowledge. Take it himself, and he would know the enemy no one could even name from the inside out!

The careful half of him laid out the ledger one final time. The thing at the other end of that thread predicted possibilities and prepared for them. It had just murdered a mine full of hostages as a chess move! Reaching for its power might be a reach it had already predicted. The hook might have his name carved into it!

He thought of the graves. He thought of Vienna’s Trueness, unbending, worth more to her than her life. He thought of his own record, freshly written.

Deviating from that, even to be safe, would make him false!

"Adrastia." Taylor again, sharper. "Hey!"

"I’ll tell you after," he said quietly, which was its own kind of confession.

He reached his awareness into the network he had become, locked onto the fleeing thread of THE Sealed One’s power as it slid through the dark toward another region of THE Infinite Carcosa, and took the heaviest gamble of his entire existence!

"Assimilate!"

HUUM!

The thread went taut!

It did not snap, and it did not come freely the way the chains had come. It held, like a line with something heavy on the far end, and then, slowly, deliberately, in the manner of a thing that had never once needed to rush a sentence, the weight at the other end turned around.

And somewhere far away, in a dark that had never once been disturbed, something ancient noticed the grain of sand holding its line, and began, patiently, to pull back!

...!

Achilles began to assimilate a thread of something so profound that he was even worried it might overwhelm his identity, but he had to do it as his very existence seemed to be screaming for it.

He had to!