I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 757: Are you...you?!

The tremendous power flowed across every corner of him, and for one glorious instant Achilles thought he had it!

The sliver of authority poured into his existence in dense rivers, the flavor of THE Sealed One saturating his channels as his Prime Cause opened wide to receive it, and then, for the first time in his entire existence, the thing he was assimilating... refused to stop being itself!

It held its identity!

Inside him! Fully inside him, flowing through his foundations, and still entirely, coldly itself!

"Little thing," a voice boomed through his existence from within his own channels, patient and vast and amused, "what are you doing?"

...!

|Warning: the Intent and identity of what you have Assimilated is far too strong compared to your current existence.|

|Integration has stalled. The fragment retains full cohesion within your foundations.|

|You are holding an authority that has not agreed to become you.|

His heart slammed once, and he locked his face into stillness as the struggle erupted through every layer of what he was! The fragment did not thrash. It did not fight the way the Absolute Mutated Terror had fought, the way Mansa Nguna had fought. It simply sat inside him with the total density of a mountain dropped into a pond, and began, calmly, to spread!

"What a unique existence you are," THE Sealed One mused from inside his own body. "Actually capable of ignoring the gap in our power to try to assimilate me into your existence? I have collected many rare things, but this is a new experience. Some things, you will find, are far too strong to be incorporated and integrated into another."

The voice warmed, and the warmth was horrendous!

"I will simply make you another one of my Vessels."

BOOM!

The fragment pushed, and Achilles felt his own channels begin answering a will that was not his, felt the edges of THE Primordial Realm of Assimilation flicker with a crimson light he had never invited, and he threw everything he had against it! His Prime Cause! His Inner Dominion! The records of every Gilded One and ore and consumed Cause he had ever taken, all of it hurled into the single task of digesting one insignificant fragment of one ancient monster!

Around him, the world kept moving as though nothing at all were happening.

Osmont descended. THE Creature descended beside him, obsidian flames billowing and coiling around a titanic frame, and the two began to speak, their words washing past Achilles as distant weather while he stood there looking entirely, perfectly normal! His breathing was even. His posture was loose. Vienna stood an arm’s length away and sensed nothing, Taylor’s eyes swept across him and moved on, because THE Sealed One’s fragment was doing everything possible to give off no indication, hiding inside him as neatly as he was hiding it, both of them concealing the same war for entirely different reasons!

But THE Creature’s gaze did not move on.

It stayed on him. Through the whole conversation, through Osmont’s words, those cold obsidian eyes rested on Achilles’s figure the way a verdict rests on the accused, and a question stood in them that had not yet decided to become an accusation.

It could sense something. Not what. Something!

And even if it could help, even if that titanic power could reach into him and tear the fragment out, Achilles found that he did not want it to! This was his adversity! His gamble, his hook, his line, and he had not clawed his way up from a stunted Observable Existence by handing his battles to taller beings! He called upon his Prime Cause of Assimilation! He called upon his Inner Dominion! He called upon everything he had ever been and everything he had ever eaten, and he ground the fragment’s spread to a halt one channel at a time.

"Oh?" THE Sealed One’s voice held genuine interest now. "You are actuslly trying? Hah!"

The pressure eased.

That frightened him more than the pushing had!

"Let me offer you a thought, little thing, since we are sharing a body for the moment." The voice settled in, conversational, endlessly patient. "Suppose you win. Suppose your quaint little Cause grinds this fragment down and integrates every drop of me. My Intent is old beyond your ability to count, and dense beyond your ability to imagine. When it dissolves into you, it does not vanish. It becomes part of what you are. So answer me honestly."

A pause, deliberate as a knife being set on a table.

"Would you still be you after the assimilation?"

...!

"You know what? Go ahead, actually." And now the voice smiled, he could feel it smiling inside his own chest. "Assimilate freely. Take all of me in. Let us see if the thing that opens its eyes afterward is still you, or whether I simply walked into my newest Vessel through a door you held open yourself."

...!

BOOM!

Achilles stood motionless on the graveyard of THE Elvarna Mining Expanse, his face calm, his existence at war, and came upon the heaviest crossroads of his life!

He chose to go all out!

If the price of being what he was, was risking what he was, then he would pay it! Achilles tore away every hesitation and opened his existence completely, and his Prime Cause of Assimilation burned brighter than it had ever burned as he devoured the fragment of THE Sealed One with everything he had!

"Assimilate! ASSIMILATE!"

BOOM!

Euphoria!

It crashed through him in waves as the ancient Intent finally began to break, its density collapsing into him channel by channel, and deep within THE Primordial Realm of Assimilation his Akashic Seed buzzed with violent, ecstatic life! The unsprouted seed drank down the oldest and truest record it had ever tasted and swelled with tremendous elevation, hungering, thickening, climbing toward tiers he had no names for while his Prime Cause blazed around it like a sun!

|The fragment of THE Sealed One is being integrated.|

|THE Akashic Seed is elevating tremendously.|

|Integration complete.|

The cold voice in his chest thinned, and thinned, and went silent.

Achilles breathed out, heavily, and the breath shook on its way out of him.

"...Adrastia?" Taylor’s head turned, her eyes narrowing at something in that exhale. "You okay?"

He did not answer her, because he did not know how much time had passed! Seconds? Hours? He raised his head, and Osmont was gone, the emperor’s robes and the blue flames vanished from the graveyard sky entirely!

But THE Creature had not left.

The titanic being wreathed in obsidian flames stood exactly where it had been, and its cold gaze rested on him with the weight of a thing that had been waiting, and its deep voice rolled out across the buried Expanse with a question that should have made no sense at all.

"Are you... you?"

...!

An odd question. A question no sane being would know how to answer.

Achilles understood it exactly.

He gathered everything he was, every record, every consumed thing that had agreed to become him, every choice that had ever been his own, and he voiced it out with total conviction!

"I AM!"

HUUM!

His existence buzzed with the declaration, and THE Creature held his gaze a moment longer, and then nodded once, slowly, and even that titanic being disappeared from the torn sky!

Achilles stood alone among tens of thousands of graves, breathing heavily, victorious and elevated and grander than he had ever been.

And still, in the quietest corner of his mind, he asked it anyway.

Was he truly himself?

He had answered with conviction. Now he had to be sure!