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Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse (Web Novel) - Chapter 5777: Assimilation! III
Chapter 5777: Assimilation! III
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<Achilles Adrastia>
Achilles had spent a long life learning when not to move, and this was one of those times.
Of course, standing still was easier said than done. Rose’s flames were climbing beside him, and the pressure of the thing in the torn light had settled over the orchard and every instinct he owned was telling him that a man who did not act was a man who got acted upon!
But he held his ground.
"You and I have had no negative dealings," he said. "One of the last times I was near you, you came down with THE Creature to attack another Vessel of THE Sealed One. Not me."
He kept his voice level. "So before I do everything I can for my survival, can you at least tell me why?"
Why, indeed.
Why now, and why here, in a sealed pocket of existence that no one should have been able to find? Why him, of all the scattered pieces of THE Sealed One drifting through existence like seeds? Had he done something, some careless thing weeks ago, that had marked him as the first to be gathered? Or had he simply been the easiest to reach? Achilles did not know!
In fact, the lifeform did not answer him at all. Not the question he had asked, at any rate. It drifted closer across the changed orchard, the blue gold spreading through the trees ahead of it, and when it finally spoke it seemed to be picking up a different conversation entirely, one that had begun without him.
"Was that the time you assimilated the weavings of THE Sealed One?" Osmont said, almost idly. "Perhaps I should have been more thorough back then, and none of this would have happened. Oh well."
"When I say I am here for your Existence, I mean it. I am here to ensure your Assimilation Factor is never grasped by THE Sealed One. Consider me... your savior."
WAA!
Achilles had barely finished hearing the word when the anomaly’s hand rose and came down toward them.
He did not think about it! The light of dozens of assimilated Prime Causes and First Causes poured out of him at once, and assimilated Primordial Source surged up dark beneath it, and assimilated Infinity rose over all of it, and around himself and Rose he threw up a bubble of every color he had ever swallowed, seething and bright, a wall made of a lifetime of taking.
And yet nothing struck it!
The bubble held and seethed and waited, and no blow came against it. Instead, the orchard simply went away. The blue gold trees and the hanging snow washed out like paint under water, and in their place there were seas, golden and dreaming and slow, rolling out to every horizon under heavy golden clouds. Compared to the hand that had come down, it was almost gentle. Compared to anything Achilles had ever seen an enemy do, it was far more frightening.
Savior, the anomaly had said. Was that actually what this was? Had a being that stopped snow with its arrival truly come all this way to help a man it barely knew? Achilles wanted to believe it, but..
What he could not dismiss, though, was the authority.
It wrapped around everything now, this golden dreaming light, and it was unlike any weaving he had ever taken into himself or ever failed to. His existence seethed at the nearness of it!
The oldest instinct he owned, the one that had built him from a hungry man into a king, whispered the way it always whispered, that he should take it, assimilate it, now, before it was gone!
And in the very same breath he understood that he could not.
But even that was not the truly unsettling part.
The truly unsettling part was that, just by standing near this authority, he had begun to think about his goals. His dreams. He had not asked to. He had not wanted to, not here, not in the middle of a standoff with something that could end him.
And yet the thoughts came anyway. What kind of authority did that to a person? What kind of power made a being remember what it wanted, simply by being close?
Since he could not measure the thing itself, he did what he had always done. He measured the one who trusted it.
"Taylor of the Light always carried the highest belief and confidence in you," Achilles said. "I will use her character as the basis of trust, since I have nothing else to use."
He lowered the bubble by a fraction, and only a fraction. "So. If you truly came to help, what is it you think you will be able to do? I am irreversibly bonded to THE Sealed One. I assimilated a portion of his weavings of existence, and my Assimilation is absolute. It does not take a thing partway. I am that part of THE Sealed One now, and at the same time I am not him, and there is no line between those two facts that I have ever managed to find."
He held the anomaly’s gaze. "It is not a matter of separating two existences. It is a matter of cutting apart a single one. If you can help with that, then by all means, go ahead. I am only unsure that it can be done."
In truth, he had turned the problem over ten thousand ways. Every angle of Assimilation he knew, every trick a lifetime of taking had taught him, and not one of them ended with him still standing.
So perhaps it was not so strange that he would take the help of a monstrous lifeform as readily as any other, if the help was real. He had a family to think about, after all. He had Rose.
And he had made himself a promise, in the long nights since the weavings settled into him, that on every morning still to come, however cold and however cruel, she would wake beside his face. His own face. Not the face of an ancient monster wearing whatever was left of him.
So he raised a hand and pushed her gently back.
"Stay behind me."
"Fatty..." She caught his sleeve befofe she let go, though her flames did not lower, and Achilles stepped forward out of the bubble to stand before the titanic figure alone.
Up close, he could feel what it emanated, and he found that he knew it. Provenance Essence. He knew the shape of that authority from the memories of THE Sealed One that lived inside him now.
Achilles had not thought Osmont had come this far. So maybe, he told himself. Maybe there was a chance.
The anomaly looked him over, up and down. Then he nodded, once.
"Are you human?" Osmont said. "Do you dream?"
Achilles blinked.
Of all the things he had braced himself to hear, that had not been among them. Was it a test? A riddle?
"I was very much born human," he said slowly. "And of course I have dreams. Everyone has dreams."
The anomaly’s reply came grand and quiet.
"Then I will simply be making a dream come true," he said. "Open your existence to me. Let me see."
His dream.
Behind him, Rose’s expression had gone heavy. He thought about his Dream, since he had been asked to, and found that he did not have to look far.
His Dream was Rose. His Dream was his children. His Dream, if he was honest, had always been existence itself. He had wanted, from the very beginning, to assimilate every aspect of existence there was, to take all of it into himself until nothing anywhere could shake him, until he stood on a foundation made of everything. He had wanted to assimilate everything!
And was that not still true? Had the weavings of THE Sealed One changed what he wanted, or only what he feared? When he looked at it plainly, the wanting was exactly where he had left it. He could assimilate everything.
That was his Dream, and of course he wanted to reach it. And if this anomaly, this being that stopped snow and turned trees to gold and made him remember what he wanted simply by standing near him, could actually put him back on the road toward it, then perhaps the price of finding out was one he could afford.
Achilles was decisive, as he had always been.
He sat down where he stood, on the golden dreaming sea, in a meditative position, and as he settled his body changed. The young king’s flesh gave way to what lay beneath it, a crystalline figure shifting through every color at once, every authority he had ever swallowed visible now in the facets of him. A man made, quite literally, of everything he had taken.
He opened his eyes and looked up at the titan before him.
Neither of them said a word. The one standing reached out, and a frosty crystalline hand came down and rested, lightly, on the crown of his head.
|You have opened the weavings of your existence to THE HUMAN DREAMER.|
|A terrifying Provenance has begun to permeate across your existence.|
|Your existential genome is being studied.|
|Your Dream is being studied.|
A heavy Immensity spread through the whole of him, and Achilles steeled himself against it, and held!
Then the cold authority began to move. It moved through his existence and it found, in a matter of moments, the seam he had spent ten thousand attempts failing to find.
Achilles felt his existence stop. Had it truly been there all along, that close, that simple, and he had never once been able to see it? Or was it only there now, because a hand grander than his own had come looking?
He did not have time to decide. The authority had found what it was looking for, and it began, without any ceremony at all, to cleave!
It cleaved!
