I Can Assimilate Everything

The wind no longer touched the island.

There was no more air, not truly- not with how it curled and thickened like ancient breath caught between dying worlds. The sea beyond the black shores lay still, as if stunned by what had begun here. Time did not move. It only watched.

The body of the Primordial Light of Darkness shuddered again.

The tentacles that formed its eye, those writhing crimson threads that once pulsed with the song of unmaking, were weakening.

Achilles felt it in the space between each heartbeat. The slow unraveling. The way the sinew of that being began to betray its own shape.

He stood still, the grave behind him, the shovel waiting in the soil.

And then he moved.

His hand gripped the haft of the shovel, his fingers brushing the violet Runescripture still humming softly across its frame. He lifted it slowly- no haste, no tremor. And when he stepped forward, the motion was as smooth and inevitable as the turning of tides.

Sun reached out without thinking.

"Wait, Achilles, are you sure…?"

"I'm sure," Achilles murmured.

And he walked past the Monkey King.

The weakened body of the Primordial Light of Darkness hovered inches above the ground now. Its single, grotesque eye rotated slowly in its tentacled cage. Each rotation more sluggish. Each pulse of red-black light dimmer than the last.

Achilles stood before it, less than a breath away.

The tentacles twitched as if sensing the proximity of a predator. But the being did not recoil. It could not. Its body was failing. And Achilles had already stolen too much from it to allow rebellion.

He reached forward.

The shovel in his hand dipped under a tangled mass of curling tendrils, and with one gentle motion, he began wrapping them around the tool. Slowly. Deliberately. As if preparing a sacred bundle.

The body twitched.

The eye quivered, the wet muscle in its center pulsing with a hollow kind of dread.

He wrapped more. And more.

Until a sufficient length was bound.

Then, wordless, Achilles turned.

He began dragging it.

The sound was quiet, like meat over stone. The bundled tendrils tugged against the ground, leaving faint trails behind them, whispering across the corrupted black sand.

Step by step, Achilles returned to the grave.

And behind him, the being breathed.

A sound like rot through silk.

"You cannot," it rasped, "You cannot do this…"

Its voice was fragmented, an echo caught between dimensional shears. It trembled with disbelief more than pain.

"There are enemies you kill," it continued, its eye twitching violently, "and there are enemies you cannot kill. I am among the latter. I still have a minor heart. My other body… is coming."

…!

Achilles didn't look back.

His voice came evenly, softly, as though speaking to a child tugging at a lie.

"Yes. That's one of the reasons I'll be devouring almost all of you and burying your husk behind."

He stopped at the grave.

Turned slowly.

"To instill fear. Not in this body, not only. But in the one that's still coming. So that when it arrives- Empyrean Star Nexus Transcendent, proud, perhaps even stronger than this shell, it will know what I've done. That I took your major heart. That I buried what remained."

He smiled.

"That even if it walks above the confines of this Plane… I will devour it, too."

…!

The wind did not stir.

Achilles let go of the shovel, the bundled tentacles slumping beside the open grave like discarded roots.

"But you can't really speak to it, can you?" he said. "Not cleanly. The barrier that holds this Plane together is still strong. Stronger than your kind hoped. The Aeonic Chains may be unshackled, yes. But the surveillance… the signals and communication across the Outside? Still frayed. Still broken."

He knew this from the memories of this crimson eye!

From when it first found this plane with the others, when they saw a barrier bloom and tbe plane vanished before their eyes!

He looked up, his golden-purple gaze sweeping across the horizon.

"Your people… they still don't know where we are, do they? Only a faint direction. They will only know for sure once the Planar Barrier completely fades…"

…!

Silence answered.

A silence soaked in a growing dread.

He turned to face the being again. And in its eye, its massive, grotesque eye…there pulsed a ripple.

Fear.

Actual, bleeding, primal fear.

Achilles stepped forward. Sank to one knee before it.

He reached out, gently- his fingers brushing against one of the many trembling tendrils that made up its disintegrating shell.

"I am going to devour you now," he said. "Very slowly."

The being shook.

Achilles continued, voice like velvet over steel.

"I want you to feel it. To know, even as I take your structure into my own, that this pain isn't punishment. It's reminder."

He tilted his head.

"You should've never come to this world."

His hand began to glow.

And softly, terrifyingly, he whispered:

"Assimilate."

…!

The tentacles twitched.

Then they spasmed.

One after another, the tendrils recoiled as if electrified. But it was too late. The core had already been breached. The remnants of the major heart were already consumed. And now, Achilles was absorbing the rest.

The skin. The nerves. The inner shell.

Everything.

The body began to shrivel. The mass collapsed slowly, folding in on itself as if ashamed. And through it all, Achilles stared directly into the eye. Never blinking. Never faltering.

"Tell me," he said, voice smooth as wine.

"Have I instilled fear in you yet, Primordial Light of Darkness?"

The eye spasmed again, frantic now.

"No…" Achilles whispered. "No, I suppose I shouldn't call you that anymore."

He rose, dragging the trembling mass with one hand, his other raised in invocation.

"I will name you now by the ancestral name of your species," he said, voice rich with power.

"Vel'Zur'aan."

The name struck the air like a bell.

"Lifeform of the Crimson Shroud Vortex. A parasitic nomadic species that dwells within the…Threnallis Abyss Fields- the void belts surrounding collapsed stars along the Forgotten Star Seams."

He pulled the body closer to the edge of the grave.

"You hunt silence. Weakness. Fragile minds and fragmented realms. Your kind thrives in devastation. You descend on immature star systems… waiting until their dominant life reaches the cusp of Ascension, then you shatter their sky and descend to feed."

He lifted the being with both hands now- its mass a twitching tangle of crimson sinew and breaking reality.

"You feed on consciousness. On hope. You are not wonders. You are carrion."

And he dropped it into the grave.

Softly.

Like burying a body that had already been mourned.

He looked down into the hollow, where the shriveled eye now lay in ruin, surrounded by its own ruinous limbs.

"Your other body will feel this fear. You will feel this pain. "

HUUM!

He raised his hand.

And the grave began to seal.

Not with dirt, not with shovel.

But with Runescriptures!

Thousands of glowing sigils carved themselves into the air, burning with violet, gold, and deepest black. They spiraled, forming an entombing seal that bound the empty skin of the monster that had once been Andras, once been Vel'Zur'aan.

The sigils whispered as they locked into place.

Memory. Mercy. Warning.

Achilles let out a slow breath.

The grave sealed.

And the wind, finally, began to move again.

Above, the stars blinked as if they, too, bore witness.

Aevareign would not forget this day.

The day a king fed fear to an outsider.

And buried it with his own hands!