Achilles remained silent.

Mansa Nguna smacked her lips while looking at him up and down with lazy gold eyes that held the particular quality of someone encountering a specimen that defied the categories they had spent eons constructing.

Her expression moved through several calculations simultaneously, professional assessment mixing with the genuine curiosity of a scientist who found unexpected results.

"Bounded Lifeforms never cease to amaze me."

She shook her head slowly with something approaching fondness.

"Okay. Come here and let me see what this integration is all about."

Achilles went forward, following the impulses and commands she sent through the Engineering she believed had taken hold within him, his movements carrying the precise quality of someone responding to direction rather than acting on independent will.

He felt her commands arrive like gentle pressure against his consciousness and followed each one with the compliance of a being whose autonomy had been successfully restructured.

She put her hand forward like royalty extending a privilege rather than making a request.

He knelt down and took her hand.

The golden rivers of Observable Force floating throughout the laboratory responded to his left hand as he commanded them with the authority his Inner Dominion had been generating since before he entered this facility. He made the Observable Force flow through his palm in currents he directed with the practiced ease of someone who had been working with this medium long enough to feel its movements as natural extensions of his own intention.

He directed those currents onto Mansa Nguna’s skin.

And then he said the word silently, within himself, without moving his lips or allowing any external signal to communicate what was happening beneath the performance of compliance.

Assimilate.

HUUM!

The Assimilation this time was unique in ways that reflected how far his capability had traveled from its origins.

From Assimilating Evolutius Crystals into himself. From Assimilating a Plane of Existence. From moving beyond the requirement of physical contact to Assimilate things at range. To now being capable of Assimilating different aspects of things together, bringing them into relationship through himself as the medium of their connection.

That was how he considered this. Mansa Nguna was one thing, and the Observable Force was another, and he was simply bringing them together through him, using himself as the bridge through which two distinct entities would be integrated into deeper relationship with each other.

The critical ingredient that made this possible was what he had woven into the Observable Force before directing it onto her skin.

Invisible spores of his existence, threaded through the golden currents so completely that they were indistinguishable from the Observable Force itself to any perception that was not his own. He was literally placing himself inside Mansa Nguna’s existence in the form of specks of Observable Force, integrating this force into her as a vessel for his presence within her foundations.

At this moment, the results of that integration became visible.

"Oh shit."

Mansa Nguna’s body began shining gold.

An instant later, seas of Observable Force from the surrounding laboratory converged above her and began gushing down in rivers that surged toward her form with the urgency of currents that had found a new and more powerful attractor than anything previously present in this space.

Her control over Observable Force was multiplying in real time, her perception of its movements expanding beyond previous boundaries, her reserves deepening as the integration Achilles was facilitating rewrote her relationship with the foundational medium of structured reality.

Achilles focused on the emergence of these rivers with cold eyes that tracked everything.

The higher concentration of Observable Force flowing toward and through Mansa Nguna meant an exponentially larger volume for him to place his spores into, and he did so heavily now, seeding every current that passed through his directing hand with the invisible markers of his existence before those currents continued their journey into her foundations!

The Gilded One known as Mansa Nguna integrated more and more of the very quality of Observable Force as part of her existence with each passing moment, and each increment of that integration carried more of him alongside it.

Her laughter erupted with the particular quality of someone experiencing something that exceeded their framework for understanding their own power.

"I feel inseparable from Observable Existence itself, as if I myself am part of the Force that comprises it!"

The madness of genuine exhilaration colored her voice with something he had not heard from her before, the lazy scientist replaced momentarily by something more revealing.

"If I can attain complete resonance and integration, would I not overcome even a Silurian Paleozoic Scale Gilded One?"

Her gold eyes blazed with intensity that made the ambient light of the laboratory seem dim by comparison.

"Haha, more! More! Give me MORE!"

BOOM!

Achilles’s eyes flashed coldly as he continued directing rivers of Observable Force toward her with every external appearance of willing compliance, measuring the integration progress with perception that tracked percentages rather than impressions.

Shockingly, he had integrated himself into more than fifty percent of her existence.

And as that threshold crossed, the feedback began.

Boundless power gushed back through the connection he had established, flowing from her existence into his through the channels his spores had created within her foundations. His Inner Dominion began expanding rapidly as Infinity and Observable Force poured down into his body with the force of a Gilded One’s reserves suddenly becoming partially accessible to his consumption. The authority traveled through him toward his hand bones and the extremities of all his limbs, seeking the skeletal and organic structures that had not yet undergone transformation and beginning the process that would create Proterozoic Bones and Proterozoic Organs throughout his entire physical existence.

His finger bones had been a demonstration.

What was coming now would be the complete restructuring!

His eyes remained cold and measuring behind the performance of compliance as the rivers continued flowing and his spores continued spreading through the remaining fifty percent of her existence that he had not yet reached, the gambit approaching its resolution with each passing moment.

He would soon know whether he would have complete control of a Gilded One.

And whether the most terrifying risk he had ever taken would pay off!

A Gilded One exceeded THE Second Scale as if he was successful...he would be able to have a puppet...at THE Third Scale of Existence!

Oh!