Chapter 744: The Assault on Gilded Ones! I
As he processed the fact that Sir William was dead, beside him, Taylor grumbled her way through her own version of the same disbelief, and somewhere in the middle of it she asked him how his trial had gone.
He told her, plainly, the maze and the bulls and the obsidian sea and the crow that had decided not to fight him. She listened with half her attention while the other half kept circling the thing neither of them could put down.
Then she stopped mid-sentence.
"Huh???"
She blinked, the rapid scanning of her eyes faltering into pure confusion.
"What?" Achilles asked.
"There are so many things happening I can barely keep track. We will figure out what happened to Sir William later. Right now...Existence is giving me information that shouldn’t be true at all."
She said it slowly, like she was reading something and rereading it to make sure.
"Since I got to this place, I’ve been picking up geography, positions of Source Beasts, even where the Gilded Ones are clustered. My power means existence itself talks to me, everything talks to me, and right now it’s telling me that in the further reaches of the forest of the Strand of Broken Scales, Osmont is there."
She frowned harder.
"With Gilded Ones. But, bah. I’ll just ask him."
...!
Achilles blinked at her.
THE Osmontian. The being four Fourth Scale Gilded Ones had crossed time itself to try to kill before he became whatever he was destined to become. The being who stripped Infinity from Gilded Ones!
That one was moving among Gilded Ones in THE Source Lands, walking alongside the very kind of thing he was supposedly hunting.
What kind of game was the monster playing?
Taylor went quiet and closed her eyes, reaching out through whatever channel let her speak to a being like that as casually as she spoke to anyone. Achilles did not bother asking how she was contacting him. He had stopped being surprised by her after all this!
He looked around instead. The Relictus and the Source Lifeforms had begun to move, and Sir George gave the command.
"Let’s go."
The army started into the ancient forest, the obsidian-scaled beasts flowing between trunks wider than settlements, the Swords and Attendants moving in the spaces between them. Achilles and Taylor went with them.
Taylor’s face changed several times as she walked, running through some conversation he could not hear, landing on incredulity before she shook her head.
"This fucking guy."
She turned to him and sent her words where only he could catch them.
"He’s playing all sides. He knew Gilded Ones were in THE Source Lands before we did. He’s stripping Infinity from them and killing them in an Observable Existence, and at the same time he’s moving alongside them. He must be crazy. He’s already connected to Source Lifeforms too. Next thing you know he’ll be connected to Infinite Lifeforms as well...!"
She exhaled.
"Be careful who you snipe or try to kill among the Gilded Ones, Adrastia. If you happen to target Osmont by mistake, that’s your end. That guy is a monster. I’ve seen more of him than you have as he took me to his domain. Just be careful. I’ll warn you if I spot him."
...!
The expedition had started with complications already, and Achilles kept his focus on what lay ahead rather than the tangle Taylor had just dropped on him.
He was thinking about the coming massacre and how to approach it. The math was simple enough. The more Gilded Ones he assimilated, the grander his existence became, and the faster his body produced Eridarch Ore. And if there were going to be collapsed Gilded corpses scattered across a battlefield, corpses already broken and offering far less resistance than a living Gilded One...
"Hmm."
His eyes moved with the possibilities.
Up ahead, Sir George spoke again, and there was a chilling light in his voice.
"Hah. These rats have been here so long they’ve established settlements. Grown their Sources past Seidr all the way to Galdr and Einherjar Source."
He almost sounded impressed, in the way a man is impressed by how much he is about to enjoy correcting something. "Up ahead, all of you. The infestation has one of its nests there."
...!
They moved fast past a clearing. The Source Lifeforms spoke with the Source Beasts native to the forest, and those beasts rose and gave up what they knew, and the position of the clustered Gilded Ones passed through the army within moments.
They could all sense it now.
Far ahead, the overflowing Egos of Superbius and Ira and others, pressing against the forest like a heat coming off a fire that had been left to burn far too long!
They came out of the trees and the settlement stood before them.
Walls ringed it, built from the tall ancient trees themselves, trunks wider than fortresses lashed together into a barrier that rose high enough to swallow the drifting flower-light overhead.
The walls were not bare wood. They had been reinforced with the light of many Pulses of THE Scales, layer over layer of stolen authority worked into the timber until the whole barrier hummed with the labor of beings who had clearly been here long enough to dig in and intend to stay!
The power of Prime Causes vibrated across the whole region. Achilles felt it in his chest before he registered it anywhere else, the foundational weight of authorities that traced back to THE First Cause itself, woven through the defenses in concentrations that told him these Gilded Ones had not been idle in their trespass.
Sir George looked at it and harrumphed!
He raised his blade.
"Destruere."
HUUM!
A letter of THE Primordial Tongue.
He spoke it the way another being might exhale, no strain in it, no buildup, and existence answered him in the next instant. Clouds gathered overhead where there had been only the slow gold of the canopy-flowers!
Obsidian tendrils of lightning began to leak from the sky, thin at first and then not thin at all, their light carrying a deadness to it that made Achilles’s foundations register the strikes as endings rather than mere force.
The lightning crashed down toward the defenses of the settlement.
The reinforced walls, the layered Pulses, the trees lashed together by beings who had thought themselves safe behind them.
All of it met the letter at once!
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