Existence was full of wonders, but you never knew whether the wonder you were experiencing was actually your downfall.

Power did not protect against the particular blindness that wonder produced, because wonder operated on the same frequency as desire, and desire had a way of narrowing perception to the object of its focus while everything peripheral became irrelevant noise.

There was a story told in certain circles about a Royal Gilded One from the Maharanis Royal House of a distant Observable Existence.

This being had cultivated for spans of time that made most Civilizations look like brief candle flames, accumulating power and wisdom and the careful habits of someone who had survived long enough to understand that survival itself required discipline. He was powerful by any meaningful measurement, beloved by his House, respected by his peers.

Then he came across an injured Relictus on his travels across THE Gaps of Undefinition.

Relictus were monstrous creatures that represented the greatest enemies of Gilded Ones across all Observable Existences where their kind flourished. They were not merely powerful in the conventional sense that Existences measured power, not simply beings who had accumulated tremendous authority through cultivation or Engineering or the favor of higher entities.

They were something older and more fundamental, creatures whose existence seemed to operate by different principles entirely, and caused mortality rates among Gilded populations to exceed every other threat combined across recorded history.

No being had successfully captured a single Relictus in the past eons.

And yet here was one, injured, weakened, apparently vulnerable for reasons the Royal Gilded One did not immediately investigate because the sight of the wonder before him had narrowed his perception to a single blazing point of opportunity.

He did not notify his House.

He did not call out to other Gilded Ones who might have shared in the victory or at minimum provided support against something that had never been successfully captured by any single being regardless of their power.

He isolated the space instead, sealing the surrounding region so that nobody else could arrive before he faced that monstrous creature alone, protecting his claim to a wonder that his desire had already transformed into a guaranteed triumph in the architecture of his thinking.

What followed was not a battle. It was a consumption. The creature shredded the Royal Gilded One apart, dismantling his existence layer by layer and using the harvested authority to revitalize itself from whatever genuine damage it had actually sustained before his arrival.

Had he only called out to his people.

Had he been careful of the wonder that appeared before him, treating it with the suspicion that eons of survival should have instilled rather than the hunger that desire produced.

He would not have faced a calamity.

---

At this moment, the figure of Mansa Nguna was laughing wildly.

She threw her arms outward with abandon that she had not displayed at any previous point in their interaction, rivers of Observable Force permeating and swirling around her form with density that made the laboratory air golden. Her hands began dispersing at their edges, fingers dissolving into pure Observable Force as if the boundary between her physical existence and the foundational medium of structured reality was becoming a matter of choice rather than necessity.

She could be rivers of golden Observable Force herself.

Her voice when she spoke had changed character entirely, the lazy warmth of the scientist replaced by something more monotone and ambient, even her laughter carrying the same flattened quality as if the personality behind it was becoming secondary to something larger and less individual.

Observable Force had no emotion. It was not as terrifying as the superior madness of Infinity in its capacity to unmake identity, but it was still something grand in its own right, and Mansa Nguna was integrating with it deeply enough that its emotionless nature had begun bleeding into her own.

Before this could become too set in stone, Achilles stopped sending Observable Force into her.

She blinked as the torrent ceased, turning toward him with gold eyes that had taken on a slightly more distant quality than they had possessed before this process began. Her frown arrived with the expectation of someone whose commands had never been questioned by anything her Engineering had touched.

"Continue."

He looked at her coldly.

He rose up straight, meeting her gaze with purple-gold eyes that held nothing of the dimmed compliance he had been performing throughout their interaction, the full weight of his consciousness present and calculating and entirely his own as he looked at a Gilded One and said the word that her Engineering was supposed to make impossible for him to direct toward her.

"No."

...!

No?

The word landed in Mansa Nguna’s awareness with the particular quality of something that did not compute, a result that her framework had no prepared category to process. She almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, a Bounded Lifeform whose Engineering she had personally performed refusing her direct command, because that was simply not something that happened within the architecture of how her world functioned.

Before she could speak, Achilles raised his hand.

"Shut up for a moment. I cannot hold this back any longer."

BOOM!

Mansa Nguna felt her body freeze instantly!

Her mouth could no longer open. The command to speak that her consciousness sent found no response from the physical structure that should have executed it, her own existence declining to follow her direction with the same calm certainty that Achilles had just declined to follow hers. She was frozen in place by something that had infused itself so completely through her foundations that it now held administrative authority over aspects of her existence she had never imagined could be accessed from outside.

Shock and incredulity moved through her awareness in waves that had nowhere to go because the expressions that should have communicated them were unavailable.

She observed what happened next with the helpless attention of someone watching a procedure being performed on themselves.

All of their surroundings shattered.

The laboratory, those sleek walls and floating platforms and preserved corpses and gleaming instruments accumulated across eons of dedicated research, cracked and broke apart as if the space itself could no longer maintain coherence against the forces being released within it. Boundless rivers of Observable Force and Infinity surged from all directions simultaneously, from the walls and floor and ceiling and from the air between and from Mansa Nguna’s own body where Achilles had spent their entire interaction seeding his existence into her foundations one invisible spore at a time.

All of it went crashing toward Achilles.

He had fully and truly Assimilated boundless parts of himself into a Gilded One, and the feedback of power that resulted made every previous moment of advancement in his existence feel like the first tentative steps of something that was only now learning what walking actually meant.

His existence began scaling upward and transforming into something gloriously new as the combined authority of Observable Force reserves belonging to a Gilded One and the Infinity she had wielded across eons of cultivation poured through the channels his spores had created.

His bones and organs glistened and turned crystalline throughout his entire body as boundless power flowed through them, Proterozoic transformation spreading from his already-transformed finger bones outward through every skeletal structure and every organ with speed that reflected the volume of authority now available to drive the process.

And yet.

Even as this was occurring, even as he felt his physical existence being rewritten into something that could genuinely contain Second Scale authority, it felt like it still was not enough. The hunger that defined his Civilization did not recognize completion, only the next consumption that had not yet been undertaken.

He turned and looked at the frozen figure of a Gilded One that ridiculously followed his command because he had infused boundless parts of himself into her structure.

His eyes shone with a light that held something beyond cold calculation, something approaching the particular madness of a being who had just discovered that the ceiling they had always assumed existed above them was considerably higher than they had believed.

He pointed at her.

At a Gilded One.

And...

"Assimilate."

...!

Oh.

Oh!