Achilles watched Vireth rise from her ledge of Observable Force with the smile returning to her features as the hatred receded back beneath the surface where she apparently preferred to keep it, contained and functional rather than displayed and wasteful.

"Alright, we have to get ready and go where THE Osmontian currently is, which means making a trip outside this Observable Existence to another entirely."

Her crimson hair shifted as she moved with the purposeful ease of someone transitioning from conversation to execution.

"For this I will need to close off your existence as I move through wormholes of Undefinition to reach where we need to be. At the pace I will be traveling through those spaces, your exposed existence will be shredded apart from Undefinition before we cover a fraction of the necessary distance. You would need to be very stably on THE Silurian Paleozoic Scale to survive as you arent...quite there yet."

She looked at him with crimson-gold eyes that held the practical directness of someone who did not soften operational realities.

"You ready?"

This woman was moving fast.

Achilles could only nod, because the alternative was raising objections that would reveal he had not yet committed to anything despite every surface impression suggesting otherwise, and that revelation served none of his current purposes.

He watched her wave her hands.

Obsidian plates bloomed from her existence with the particular quality of something that had been waiting in reserve rather than constructed in the moment, emerging with the organized efficiency of prepared materials rather than improvised creation. They moved toward him with deliberate speed and began encasing him from the ground upward, each plate settling into position against the others with precision that left no gap between them.

He sensed the authority emanating from the plates as they closed around him, a heavy power he could not quite categorize through any framework his transformed existence had developed across everything he had consumed and integrated. It was filled with something that was not Observable Force despite carrying a similar foundational quality, something that existed in relationship to what he understood the way shadow exists in relationship to light.

Unobservable Force.

The final plate sealed above his head.

Everything cut off.

Not gradually, not with the fading quality of distance increasing between his awareness and the external world, but immediately and completely the way a door closing separates interior from exterior in the span of a single motion. He could not feel the isolated domain outside the encasement. He could not feel the Silver Philotimo Observable Existence beyond that. He could not feel his other bodies in his own Observable Existence through the connections that normally persisted across any distance he had previously encountered.

Even time seemed stopped in this space, the subjective quality of duration becoming ambiguous in ways that made him uncertain whether moments or eons were passing outside the obsidian plates surrounding him.

|Encasement Active: Unobservable Force Containment Plates.|

|Classification: Construct of Vireth.|

|Internal space is isolated from all external perception, temporal flow, and Civilizational resonance.|

|Unobservable Force cannot be quantified by current assessment frameworks.|

|Warning: Duration of encasement indeterminate from internal perspective.|

...!

He could not sense or feel anything beyond the space the plates defined.

Which meant Vireth could not easily sense what occurred within it either, well, maybe anyways, and that particular observation arrived with implications.

He pulled out the Bronze Relic Fragment of Persevere.

The obsidian-gold object turned slowly in his hands as he examined it from angles his transformed perception could access, every rotation bringing new aspects of its nature into contact with his awareness and producing the same shaking excitement his existence had demonstrated the moment she first revealed it. The hunger was worse at proximity without external observation to discipline against, his Civilization pressing against the boundary between examination and consumption with urgency that had not diminished in the slightest since receiving it.

He did not see why he had to delay things for himself.

But contained inside the power of Vireth’s encasement, she could potentially sense everything occurring within it through mechanisms he did not yet fully understand, and any external change his Assimilation produced would communicate what he had done before he had any opportunity to manage the consequences of her knowing.

If anything occurred externally, he would funnel it entirely into his Inner Dominion.

His mind made up with the efficiency that characterized decisions made under genuine time pressure, he seemingly put the object away. It appeared instead inside his Realm of Assimilation, transported through the internal pathways his Inner Dominion provided rather than any external spatial movement.

He uttered the word silently to himself, generating no sound that the plates around him could carry.

Assimilate.

BOOM!

His existence shook with resistance that exceeded everything he had encountered before it, exceeding even the consumption of Mansa Nguna whose Gilded foundations had fought his Assimilation with authority he had genuinely struggled to overcome. The Bronze Relic Fragment of Persevere pushed back against his Civilization with something that communicated its resistance not through power in the conventional sense but through a quality of connection to something so foundational that his Assimilation had to work against the very nature of what the object was connected to rather than simply against the object itself.

Eventually, with effort that made his internal existence strain against its own limits, the object began melting into him.

BOOM!

He controlled his body externally with everything his discipline could provide, maintaining the stillness of encased waiting that Vireth would expect to perceive if she checked. Internally he was almost breaking, his foundations restructuring around something that had no precedent in the architecture of what he had previously consumed, making accommodations for integration that his existence had to invent rather than adapt.

|Assimilation Complete: Bronze Relic Fragment of Persevere.|

|You have integrated your existence with a miniscule portion of THE Primordial Tongue.|

|You have integrated your existence with a miniscule portion of THE Primordial Source.|

|Your existence has been touched by the Source as if it has always been integrated with it, the connection retroactively woven through your foundations in ways that transcend temporal sequence.|

|Due to the miniscule integration of the Source and the nature of the product Assimilated, you have gained access to THE Primordial Tongue.|

|Capability Gained: You may utter the most foundational letter of THE Primordial Tongue available at this integration level, Persevere, as many times as you Source can stand it.|

|Warning: Each utterance draws directly from your integration with THE Primordial Source. Use with full awareness of the cost each instance carries.|

...!

BOOM!