Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 5776: Assimilation! II

<Achilles Adrastia>

Existence was a unique thing.

It held everything, and it held it strangely, and no two pieces of it were quite alike. But there was a thing more unique than existence itself, and Achilles had built his whole life on it. The capability to assimilate it. To take a piece of existence into yourself, whatever it was, whoever it had belonged to, and make it a part of what you were.

He had assimilated a great many things across his life. Powers, weavings, authorities, the cores of enemies and the gifts of friends, whole systems of existence swallowed and woven into his own. Most of it had settled. Some of it had fought. None of it had ever been as problematic as the monstrous weavings he had assimilated weeks ago, and none of it had ever kept him awake the way those did now.

The trees nearby did not care about any of that.

They grew out of meteorites, here, in this sealed pocket of existence that held no life but his and hers. Tens of thousands of them, stellar trees rooted in drifting stone, their trunks pale and their leaves a vivid pink, streching away through the dark in every direction like an orchard planted across a night sky.

And through all of them whipped the snow. A heavy storm of it, white and endless, driving between the pink-leaved boughs and across the meteorites and through the empty space where no wind should have been, because The Long Night did not need wind to fall.

Achilles leaned against the nearest tree and watched it come down.

He looked young. He always had, a young king’s face, handsome and composed. But his eyes had long since stopped matching it. They were old eyes, aged past the youth that held them, and lately they had gotten older still.

He wore a multicolored coat pulled close against the cold, layers of shifting hue woven from a dozen assimilated authorities, and he was not alone. Rose leaned against his shoulder with her arms wrapped around it, her green hair blowing in the storm, her own coat as many-colored as his, and the two of them watched the pink leaves and the falling snow together in a place where nothing else lived.

"What exactly will you do, Little Fatty?"

Rose asked quietly, without looking away from the storm.

"We have not come across any problem we could not overcome. Not one, in all this time. But this one..." She tightened her arms around his shoulder. "This one feels neverending."

...!

Neverending!

That was the word for it, if there was a word. That was what it was to assimilate a portion of THE Sealed One.

Every time Achilles thought he was peeling back the layers of possibility, getting closer to autonomy, closer to a self that was fully and finally his own, he found only more layers underneath. The weavings of THE Sealed One were not a thing you assimilated. They were a thing you fell into, and the further you fell the more you understood how vast and how disastrous the fall was. Even now, weeks in, he had not found a bottom.

"He has so many weavings stretched across existence and time," Achilles said, "that even now, he considers me nothing more than a part of him that is not fully aligned yet."

The snow drove between the pink boughs.

"He has not moved against me. Because I cannot lose you, and the others. And he can sense that. He can sense the commitment I made, that the moment he reaches for everything I have, I collapse all of it. Every weaving of my Assimilation, gone, the whole of what I am, so that he takes nothing. He knows I will do it. So...he waits like a venomous fucking thing..."

Achilles let out a slow breath that turned to frost. "But I can feel him reaching a new precipice. Somewhere out there, he is about to gain enough that he can overwhelm me even with the threat. And when that time comes, I will have no choice but to take the gamble. I will assimilate all of him that I can reach, all at once, and the whole of it will come down to whether I succeed, or whether he takes everything I have instead. It is..."

He did not finish. He sighed, and raised his hands toward the falling snow and the pink leaves, as though he might catch some answer in them.

And at exactly that moment...

HUUM!

His existence pulsed.

It was the deep hard pulse of an assimilator’s whole being registering a presence, and his expression went heavy at once, and he pushed off the tree and rose to his full height, because ahead of them, across the orchard of pink and stone, existence was tearing.

It tore like a page!

The dark between the trees split along a clean seam, and out of the tear flooded light. Golden blue. It poured into the sealed Elsedimension in a tide, and out of the light, stepping through the torn page of existence as easily as a man steps through a door, came a lifeform!

Achilles had seen a great many lifeforms. He had assimilated a great many. He had never seen one whose mere arrival did what this one’s did!

The moment it stood in the orchard, the orchard changed. The nearest pink trees shivered, and their leaves began to turn, the vivid pink draining out of them and a deep blue gold flooding in, spreading from tree to tree in a wave that ran outward from the lifeform’s feet.

And the snow stopped. Not slowed. Stopped! Ten thousand flakes hung motionless in the air around the torn page of light, arrested mid-fall, as though the Long Night itself had paused to look!

Achilles felt his existence churn. A profound oppression settled over the orchard, a pressure that was not aimed at him and did not need to be. His instinct, which measured everything as a thing to be taken, looked at this lifeform and found nothing it could take. That had never happened before. Not once!

Then he looked closer, and closer, and past the boundless Infinity and Immensity that seemed to fill the lifeform’s eyes, he recognized the face.

Was this not...THE Osmontian? Noah Osmont?!

He knew that face. He had crossed paths with this anomaly a few times and each time, Achilles had reached out with the sense that measured all things and found that he could not find the bottom of this one!

So why had he appeared here? Now?

Achilles kept his expression heavy and his voice calm.

"Hello," he said. "To what do we owe the pleasure of your appearance here today?"

The lifeform looked at him.

The pressure did not lift. If anything it settled deeper and when the lifeform spoke, its voice boomed out across the orchard.

"Adrastia," it said. "THE Ninth Adrastia Emperor King, is it?"

The hanging snow did not move!

"I have come for your Existence."

...!

Achilles’s expression went heavy and defiant in the same instant, and beside him Rose flared.

Verdant flames spilled out of her, green and bright against the blue gold of the changed trees, and her body began to drink the authority around it, assimilating the surrounding weavings!

She did not step back and she did not flinch from the pressure that had stopped the snow. She looked at the monster across the orchard with the same defiance in her face that was in his, undaunted by his authority, and her flames climbed higher!