Chapter 743: The Fragility of Existence!
In Achilles’s stunted home Observable Existence.
Inside an endless sea of Thalassara.
Achilles lay with his head in Rose’s lap on a vibrant blue platform, the stellar waters glowing around them on every side, a citadel stretching outward beyond the edges of the platform in towers that caught the light of the sea. He had not lain still like this in what felt like a long time!
There had been a flood and a Gilded laboratory and a being from the Unobservable and a trial in an obsidian maze, and through all of it some version of him had been awake and calculating, and it was a small relief to let one body simply rest.
Rose worked her fingers through his white-gold hair, dividing it into sections, plaiting it slow.
"Tell me," she said.
So he told her what his other bodies were moving through, the words coming out unhurried.
"Gilded Ones finding their way into THE Source Lands was unexpected," he said. "But the method looks a lot like the wall I passed through to get there. Like they either stole it or built their own version to make their way in. I’m sifting through the memories of the ones I took, seeing what I can use to entrench myself deeper into the Source Lifeforms’ structure."
Her fingers kept moving. She did not interrupt.
"But the biggest thing is this."
He raised one hand, and the first Eridarch Ore his existence had produced on its own bloomed into being above his palm.
The aura of it hit the platform at once, and the surrounding stellar waters buzzed in answer, the currents around them shivering at the presence of Infinity and Primordial Source bound together in a single crystal. Rose’s eyes brightened. Her hand drifted from his hair toward the ore almost without her deciding it, the pull of the thing reaching even her.
She stopped short. For who she was right now, it was still too grand to touch.
Achilles smiled and sat up, the half-finished braids falling against his shoulder.
"This is one of the more important things at the moment," he said. "After I assimilate more of them and push up the rate my existence produces them, I’ll help you assimilate one. See if we can get you a result like mine."
He turned the ore over once, then let it fold back into THE Primordial Realm of Assimilation.
"Meanwhile, I’ll keep watching how things move between the Gilded Ones and the Source Lifeforms. A massacre is about to bloom in the Strand of Broken Scales. Maybe worse than a massacre."
Rose looked at him a moment longer, then reached out and turned his head gently back toward her.
"Sit still. I’m not done."
He let her finish the braids.
---
On the beaches of the Strand of Broken Scales.
Achilles, the body that wore the Attendant’s mark, stood among a gathering that made him understand the word massacre had been too small.
An army of Relictus had assembled along the obsidian sand. They were massive Source Lifeforms, beast-shaped, taking on forms that ran through draconian and dinosaurian and other beast variations, every one of them armored in obsidian scales that glinted where the drifting flower-light caught them.
Their power was a thing he could not measure properly, and there were a great many of them, standing in loose ranks along the shore with the patience of creatures who had done this before as the aura allowed one to estimate they were...at least at THE Fourth Scale!
Among them stood the humanoid Swords of Existence and the Attendants, folded into the same formation, the whole of it forming a wave that would soon move into the forest where the Gilded Ones had made their nest.
While they gathered, Achilles overheard a conversation he had not meant to overhear.
A female Sword with fiery hair was speaking to another Sword nearby. Her eyes were red, not with anger but with pain, the look of someone who had recently been given news she had not finished absorbing.
"I just confirmed it," she said. "William was collapsed. No details are being sent out. But if Gilded Ones were somehow behind this...!"
She did not finish.
...!
William.
Achilles held very still.
It could not possibly be Sir William Arthur. The being who had carved through a Gilded Legion with one draw of his blade, who had erased four Fourth Scale entities with taps of his hand, who had taken him and Taylor to Cornwall to make them Attendants. That William?
Collapsed? Because how?!
How would anything reach a being like that, and how would it happen in the short span since he had stood in front of Achilles straightening his tie?
He turned the impossibility over and found no place to set it down.
He was still holding it when a voice cut across the beach behind him.
"Adrastia!"
The piercing sound of Taylor of The Light echoed, and when he turned, there she was among the newest arrivals, adorned now in an obsidian robe with a sword at her side, her rapid eyes already finding him in the crowd.
Taylor came up beside him, her voice dropping low enough that it reached only him.
"What the fuck happened here?"
Her eyes kept moving even as she spoke, scanning the gathered Relictus and the Swords and the tree line beyond.
"Existence is telling me tons of things and none of them are small. First and foremost, Sir William is somehow dead. Like, what the hell? I can’t even...haaa."
She stopped, which was rare for her.
"I can’t even put it in order..."
...!
So it was confirmed. The words Achilles had overheard from the fiery-haired Sword had not been a mistake or a different William. The being who had taken them to Cornwall, who had cut through a Gilded Legion as though it were a courtesy, was gone.
His expression went heavy.
He thought about what that meant and did not like any version of the answer. What could collapse a being like that? Sir William had stood at a height Achilles could barely look up at, and something had reached him anyway and collapsed him!
If an existence like that could be killed, then Achilles had to be careful in this massacre and war to come. Unfathomably careful!
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