I Can Assimilate Everything Chapter 758: Unflinchingly True!

The graves stretched across THE Elvarna Mining Expanse in their tens of thousands, and above them stood the last three prisoners of a dead mine as the torn sky slowly knitted itself back together.

Achilles felt the fragment of THE Sealed One settled deep within THE Primordial Realm of Assimilation, silent now, integrated now, its ancient density folded into his foundations as his Akashic Seed pulsed with an elevation that made every previous feeding feel like scraps! He was grander than he had ever been. He was more powerful than he had ever been.

And for the first time in his entire existence, he could not say with certainty that he was entirely himself.

"You okay?"

Taylor said beside him, her sharp eyes narrowing as she watched him.

"Existence keeps telling me you’re fine, by the way. But existence also didn’t warn me about all things here, so I’ve downgraded its credibility."

"I’m confirming something."

"Confirm faster. You’re making me nervous, and I don’t do nervous."

...!

Vienna approached them across the folded earth, and the Original walked differently now than she had walked in chains, each step pressing quiet authority into the ground of a place that had tried to grind her into nothing! Her cold eyes swept across the graves once, holding something old and heavy, before they settled on Achilles.

"Adrastia, is it?" Her voice was dry as ever, but the coldness had changed its character entirely.

"Your single act that freed me, summoned my Lineage, broke this Expanse open, and unraveled a feeding ground that has been swallowing my people for longer than I want to speak aloud. So hear me clearly, Adrastia. You are more than worthy of becoming a Sword of Existence. You are worthy of more than that title."

HUUM!

Her intent hummed with her words, unfathomably True, and Achilles understood she was not offering a compliment, she was recording a fact into existence itself!

"THE Originals repay what is owed," she continued as obsidian light began gathering around her thin frame. "Come back to THE Source Lands under our banner. Not as an Attendant with a borrowed pass. As one of ours. There are things in the deep lands that even the Swords are not shown, and I judge you the kind of lifeform who should see them."

"And the reward you promised?" Achilles asked.

Vienna’s mouth almost curved.

"That IS the reward. The rest comes after." She looked at Taylor. "Both of you. My people will carry you wherever you wish, whenever you wish it. The door of THE Originals does not close."

Achilles nodded slowly to Vienna, accepting, as his gaze drifted one last time across the buried Expanse, across the mountains he had hollowed out in secret, across the altar standing cold and empty above a fled master!

"I’ll come," he said.

—

<THE Emperor King>

In a stunted Observable Existence that had once been the entire universe, an endless sea of blue stretched beneath a sky of drifting stellar light!

Achilles sat on the warm surface of the water with Rose leaning into his side, her fiery green hair spilling across his shoulder as gentle waves rolled out from beneath them toward a horizon that never ended, and for a long while neither of them spoke, because after everything, silence beside her was its own kind of wealth.

His other body was elsewhere. It stood in a graveyard Expanse accepting the banner of Originals. It held a Prime Cause and an unsprouted Seed swollen with the record of an ancient monster.

This one simply sat with his wife.

But even here, even now, a quiet process ran beneath his stillness as he moved through his own existence chamber by chamber, checking his memories, checking his wants, checking the shape of his own thoughts against every record of who he had been, because a patient voice had asked him a question inside his own chest and he had not stopped answering it since.

Would you still be you?

"Rose." His voice came out lower than he intended. "Was I a good man? A good father?"

She turned her head against his shoulder, and her flaming eyes searched his face the way she had searched it in a thousand quiet moments, finding whatever she always found there.

"Where is this coming from?"

"I need to hear it from outside of me."

Rose was quiet for a moment. Then she sat up, took his face in both of her hands, and made him look at her!

"Then look at what you accomplished." Her voice held fire and softness in the same breath. "You saved all of your family. Every single one. You resurrected the entire Adrastia Lineage when existence itself had written them off as dust. You stand right now protecting an entire Observable Existence, OUR Observable Existence, the stunted little reality nobody wanted."

Her thumbs pressed against his cheeks.

"And before any of that, before Causes and Scales and all of this madness, you were the young man who sat by my bed in that dreary hospital when I was dying, when I was nothing, and refused to leave." Her eyes shone wet and loving all at once.

"You will always be my Emperor King. You will always be my Little Fatty. From that hospital room to this sea, Achilles, I cannot love you enough. I have tried. There isn’t enough of me to hold all of it."

...!

Achilles listened in silence as the words settled into him, and something in his chest eased that had been clenched since a dark mine in a distant Carcosa, because whatever else he had swallowed, whatever else now lived folded inside his foundations, this was real, her hands were real, the hospital was real, the Lineage breathing safely within his Inner Dominion was real!

He had assimilated Absolutes and Gilded Ones and Causes and chains and a fragment of a thing older than counting.

And through all of it, he had never once stopped being the man who stayed in that room.

Hadn’t he?

He pulled Rose close and pressed his lips to her hair as the blue sea rolled beneath them, and quietly, ceaselessly, he continued checking his existence, one chamber at a time, confirming, confirming, confirming.

This was the truth of Assimilation, the truth he had built a budding Intent and a Cause and an entire existence upon. Everything he consumed became him. Nothing he took was lost.

But at the end of all of it, when a being has eaten chains and Causes and monsters and the patient fragment of an ancient horror, when everything has become him, the only question left is the one no prompt can answer.

Does HE still remain? Unflinchingly, unfathomably true?

Rose breathed softly against his chest, safe, warm, home.

And deep within Achilles’s eyes, far beneath the purple-gold, for just an instant, a crimson light flashed.