I Can Assimilate Everything

The air stilled. The waves that had once lapped and hissed against the island's edge fell into silence, as if the sea itself had forgotten how to move. No bird called. No wind stirred. The shadows that slithered beneath the surface of the island trembled as if waiting to hear the next breath that Achilles would take.

But he didn't speak.

He didn't move.

He simply stood with his fingers resting on the edge of the shovel, calm eyes meeting the wavering form of the one who had called himself the Primordial Light of Darkness.

There was no more thunder.

No eruption of fury.

Only a quiet, cracking sound.

A sound so small, yet so filled with devastation, that even Rose instinctively reached out to place a hand on Achilles' back. The Monkey King stood frozen beside her, his golden staff humming low like a dirge, uncertain whether to defend or simply bear witness.

The being before them, that terrifying sovereign wrapped in shadow, wavered again.

It clutched no wounds.

And yet it trembled.

Then…

"Ah…"

A ragged gasp escaped it. One that was not made by lips or lungs but by something far more ancient, far more wrong.

A tremor ran through its body. Then another. Until the majesty it once carried crumbled like dust before the storm.

The regal, humanoid figure began to melt.

Its form did not vanish into mist or burn away. No, it fell apart in the most grotesque fashion imaginable. From the tear ducts of its obsidian eyes, slow streams of crimson began to weep, curling down its face like the blood of stars. Then those streams became rivers.

Rivers that flowed and pooled, staining the air itself.

Its limbs lost coherence. Its outline blurred and shimmered, and then…

It unraveled.

Where once stood the proud figure of the Primordial Light of Darkness, there now writhed a mass of horrors too complex to be defined.

Thousands- tens of thousands of slithering, wriggling tentacles, each one no thicker than a finger but pulsating with crimson-black light, wrapped around one another.

And at their center….

A single, massive eye.

It had no lid. No sclera. Its surface was a sphere of raw, wet muscle lined with rings of pulsating flesh and nerve. The thousands of tentacles seemed to form its iris and sclera all at once, rotating with an unnatural wet squelch every time it moved. Just looking at it made the stomach turn. It wasn't meant to be perceived by anything human!

BZZT!

Rose turned her head, eyes narrowing in instinctive revulsion. The Monkey King took a step back, face pale, his tail bristling and golden staff trembling in his grip.

But Achilles didn't look away.

He tilted his head, his voice calm. "The physiology of your kind is fascinating. Unique, even."

He took a single step forward, his golden robes trailing over dark sand.

"Across your lifetimes, you forge three hearts," he continued. "One major. Two minor. But the major… that's what defines you. And you, Andras, left your major heart in this plane of existence long ago."

A sound like static and blood tried to rise from the eye, but it faltered.

"When I say your name," Achilles said, his voice lowering, "I do not refer to the man you consumed. The defender whose body you wear like a mask. I refer to you. The real you. The thing that came from outside. That entered this place when the skies split."

BOOM!

Andras, no, the thing that had stolen his name, twitched violently.

Its eye spasmed. The tentacles forming its shape shivered and recoiled, like a creature that had suddenly realized it was dying.

And behind it, the fifty shadows began to cry out.

Their forms flickered. Some lost cohesion entirely, their silhouettes bending into unnatural shapes. They clutched their chests, clawed at the air, writhing as if their very cores were unraveling.

They screamed.

The sound tore through the quiet, a piercing cacophony of grief and confusion. They were losing something- no, they had already lost it. Their connection. Their source. Their sovereign!

"What… what is this?" the eye rasped.

Its voice was warped now, stripped of all grandeur.

"What happened? How, how could you have possibly done this?!"

It thrashed as if trying to pull itself back together, but there was no anchor.

It writhed.

It shrieked.

"I was careful!" it howled, the eye dilating and contracting erratically. "I accounted for everything! I erased the records, severed the lines, buried it all! How did you know?!"

It was not anger.

It was not even pride.

It was panic.

"What…are you? You cannot possibly be a mere human of this plane. You cannot…" the voice finally asked, quieter now.

The tentacles trembled. The massive eye seemed to shrink as it asked again, with a whisper now filled with something bordering on reverence and horror.

"What are you really?!"

Because nothing made sense.

A man born of this Plane should not have been able to trace his name.

A native of this world should not have seen the threads of his hearts.

A being shackled by the limits of mortality should not have reached through fate and certainty to deliver this crushing deathblow.

Achilles said nothing for a moment.

He simply stood there, calm as the sea had once been.

And then, he smiled.

A subtle thing. Not smug. Not cruel.

A smile like the turn of a page in a book he had read many times.

The question hung in the air, unanswered. Because some truths didn't need to be said aloud.

And at that very moment, within the roots of the twin mountains beneath them, his other self moved. The Primordial Avatar stood before the locks and shackles that once bound the major heart of this outsider.

They had already been undone.

And the heart… was his.

A surge swept through him, one that laced through his bones and blood like starlight twisted with crimson. A brand-new Assimilation bloomed, deep and complex. The threads of it wrapped around him gently.

The battle was already done.

There would be no final clash. No world-shaking brawl. No last roar from a dying titan.

Only mercy.

For a shell.

Achilles stepped forward again, his boots pressing into the dark sand.

"The human whose body you took," he said, voice soft now, "he fought you here. On this very island. Between these two mountains. And though he lost, his resistance still lingers."

He looked at the grave behind him. The simple hollow in the sand.

"I'll assimilate everything," he said. "But I'll leave the husk of that protector behind."

…!

There was no gain in taking it.

No power in absorbing what was already empty.

Let it rest.

Let it return to the soil it tried to defend.

The eye flickered again. Weakened. Its tentacles slowly lost cohesion, the shape of it starting to sag.

"You…" it whispered.

"You won't kill me?"

Achilles looked at it with a gaze that carried the weight of inevitability as this creature seemed confused now. He wouldn't kill it? Hah!

"I already have."

…!

The sky above them opened faintly, as if the Plane itself had exhaled. And the stars, those ancient, watching lights, shimmered in mourning.

The outsider who had come from beyond would not die at Achilles' hands.

It had already died in his shadow.

And the grave was waiting!