Achilles was very much convinced that the woman in front of him wanted to hang him dry.

The picture she had painted was clear enough when examined without the excitement of novelty coloring the interpretation. She was more powerful than him by margins he could not currently measure and had still been unable to kill THE Osmontian even in the future, alongside countless others who had presumably dedicated themselves to the same purpose. Whatever she and her assembled force represented in terms of collective capability, it had proven insufficient against this creature that stripped Infinity from Gilded Ones and devoured Sororis Prima like they were nothing.

As grand as his Civilization of Assimilation was, there needed to not be an immense gulf between him and the other party for it to function as anything other than an elaborate method of dying.

Between him and that monster, it seemed like that gulf was massive.

So he wanted nothing to do with it.

But for now, he would play along, because playing along cost him nothing while refusing prematurely might cost him everything in a domain where Vireth had demonstrated the casual ability to freeze Silurian Paleozoic Scale beings without apparent effort. He wanted to see exactly what was being offered before he began calculating exit strategies.

"What exactly can you do for me to allow my power to get where it needs to be so that my life is not immediately on the line against a creature that even you cannot kill?"

His voice held genuine curiosity beneath the pragmatism, because the answer to that question mattered to his planning regardless of what he eventually decided to do with the information.

Vireth waved her hand.

A dazzling obsidian-gold object appeared in the space between them with the particular quality of something that had existed for far longer than the space it currently occupied, its presence pressing against the surrounding isolated domain with ancientness and stature that went beyond conventional measurements of age or authority.

Achilles’s entire existence shook with excitement the moment his perception made contact with it.

He was astonished in ways that his transformed foundations had not prepared him for, because he had never come across anything in his existence, through all his Assimilations and transformations and encounters with entities ranging from Absolutes to Gilded Ones, that could evoke this particular quality of reaction from his existence without him choosing to initiate it.

It exceeded absolutely everything had fell previously!

The shaking came from something deeper than his conscious assessment, from foundations that recognized something and responded to that recognition before his awareness had finished processing what it was looking at.

Vireth looked at his reaction with the satisfaction of someone whose gamble had produced exactly the result they needed.

"Many more things are abundant in the future, but this is so rare that I take a tremendous risk by coming here with it."

Her crimson-gold eyes held the seriousness of someone acknowledging a cost rather than performing modesty.

"Its existence is a causality that could potentially spawn a Relictus. And if you may not know, a Relictus is a monstrous entity that always appears whenever any Gilded One comes close to grasping THE Primordial Source. They are the guardians of that threshold, the mechanism by which existence prevents what it has decided should not yet be reached from being reached prematurely."

She gestured toward the obsidian-gold object floating between them.

"This here has a connection to THE Primordial Source. But all it is, is a relic that will grant you the usage of the power of a language connected to that Source. THE Primordial Tongue. A total of three times."

Her crimson hair shifted as she leaned slightly forward.

"This is a Bronze Relic Fragment of Persevere, allowing you to utter this letter of THE Primordial Tongue a total of three times. Having this is like having a total of four lives alongside your own. You need to consume and Assimilate THE Osmontian, and he will likely be capable of killing you multiple times over in the process, so you simply need to Persevere and use that capability continuously across the attempts."

She held his gaze with eyes that held the honesty of someone who had decided transparency served their purposes better than deception, even the likely there will be more things that she was not telling him. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

"You are only one of the blades prepared for him. I am another blade, and with you doing what you do and others doing what they do, while I cannot fully promise the integrity of your existence, there is a tremendously high chance based on what we have calculated that we will be able to kill THE Osmontian."

She did not soften what came next.

"I am honest with you regarding the risk because everything in existence carries risk. You will not get anywhere without risks and adversity. This is simply adversity at a scale commensurate with what you are capable of handling, which is why you are here rather than someone else."

She threw the object toward him without ceremony.

Achilles spread his palms out and received it gently, the obsidian-gold weight settling into his hands with warmth that made his entire existence want to collapse the distance between his Civilization and whatever this relic contained.

Every aspect of his foundations was screaming at him to Assimilate this item immediately, the hunger of his Civilization responding to the proximity of something connected to THE Primordial Source with an enthusiasm that bypassed rational assessment entirely.

He controlled himself.

"Okay."

"Adversity makes existence go around. So let me see just how much adversity all of this will be."

Even as he put on such a bravado in front of her, his internal landscape was running a considerably different calculation with considerably different conclusions, mapping every possible route away from this domain and this obligation and this supposed suicide mission that Vireth was assembling from pieces scattered across time.

He would listen.

He would learn.

He would take the Bronze Relic Fragment of Persevere and everything else she was willing to offer.

And then he would find the most elegant possible way to never be seen again by anyone involved in hunting something that had made Sororis Prima into a meal!