Chapter 492: Assassinate! II
After the plan was set, Achilles acted on it.
Less than an hour after the council between him, the current Adrastia Emperor Kings, and Rose, he was ready to set off...or really, a Constellation Dream Body of his, though this one carried more of his true power than usual.
They stood within the Sea of Thalassara, its luminescent waters painting them in shades of impossible blue. Achilles and Rose faced outward while Adras and Thalsian stood behind them, their expressions mixing valor with the particular concern that came from watching family venture into danger.
"You are sure the two of you are enough?" Thalsian asked again, his deep voice carrying the weight of someone who had lost too much to be casual about risk.
Achilles smiled and turned back, his purple-gold eyes meeting his grandfather’s ancient gaze.
"More than enough," he said with confidence that transcended arrogance. "And our other bodies will still be here. We’ll keep you all updated with the results."
Rose smiled as well, her water form rippling with anticipation that looked almost like excitement.
"Don’t worry, Father, Grandfather!" she called out, using the titles with the easy familiarity of someone who had been fully accepted into the family.
With a nod of acknowledgment to their concerns, Achilles wrapped his arm around Rose’s waist.
Then, with the casual violation of physics that had become his signature, he took a single step.
HUUM!
The Regulation of Quantum responded not like a tool being used but like a part of him extending...because it was. Space folded, probability collapsed, and distance became opinion rather than fact.
WAP!
They disappeared from the Sea of Thalassara.
In the next moment, they appeared countless light-years away at the edge of the Star Seas, where space itself grew thin and uncertain, where the known universe met something that refused to be known.
They floated there grandly, two impossible beings at the boundary of possibility itself.
"..."
Both reached out to touch the thin veil separating space from void, their fingers meeting resistance that was more conceptual than physical.
Achilles gazed at the barrier with eyes that had seen too much for his years.
"For many, they don’t get to leave their village, much less their world," he said, his voice carrying the weight of contemplation.
"They live entire lives within boundaries they never chose, never question, never challenge. But we... we get to leave our world, our stellar system, our very Star Sea."
He paused, looking at the barrier that most beings didn’t even know existed.
"And now we prepare to step beyond even that, into spaces that exist outside the stories most beings tell themselves about what reality contains."
Rose grasped his hand, her water fingers intertwining with his solid ones in defiance of physics.
"A certain grandma recently told me," she said, her voice carrying its own weight, "that every time you take a step to leave, it always opens a pathway for something much grander. The village leads to the city, the city to the world, the world to the stars, and the stars..."
She looked at the void beyond the barrier.
"The stars lead to understanding that there was always more than we imagined. So let us see what grandness waits for us out there, even if the reason for our leaving is to assassinate, Little Fatty!"
...!
As she spoke those final words, her emerald eyes shone with a sense of brutality that reminded anyone watching that the Primordial Genome Empress was not merely a woman but a force of nature that had chosen to wear the shape of one!
Achilles nodded. He took another step.
They disappeared again, but this time the transition was different...harsher, more violent, like being born in reverse.
In the next moment, they appeared in a region of endless darkness punctuated by chaotic storms of existence. Not storms of matter or energy, but storms of possibility itself, where reality hadn’t quite decided what it wanted to be and changed its mind with violent frequency.
The environment pressed against them with oppressive force that had nothing to do with pressure and everything to do with hostility.
This was a place where normally only Tier 8 Null Scale existences could survive, unless one possessed a specific vessel forged by those in the Level Zero Scale of Existence...beings who had transcended the normal rules entirely.
Yet Achilles and Rose adapted with their terrifying uniqueness. His assimilated Regulations wrapped around them like armor made of physics itself, while her nature as living water that had transcended biology allowed her to exist in states that normal matter couldn’t maintain.
They looked around, taking in the alien hostility of their surroundings.
Behind them, visible through the chaotic void, a vast shimmering landscape appeared...an endlessly massive globe of stellar bodies that looked like a snow globe filled with lights instead of snow.
A sea of stars.
Their Star Sea, viewed from outside for the first time, revealing itself to be finite despite feeling infinite from within. It was humbling and empowering simultaneously...seeing the vastness of their home reduced to a sphere, however massive, that could be observed in its entirety.
Achilles looked away from it toward the Void around them.
The Void...not empty space but aggressive absence, not darkness but the active negation of light!
It was an oppressive and difficult environment where countless dangers lurked in forms that normal consciousness couldn’t process without breaking.
Having arrived in such a place where existence itself was more suggestion than certainty, Achilles calmly bellowed out a single word that carried the weight of violation:
"ASSIMILATE!"
...!
BOOM!
The word echoed through non-space with authority that made even the chaotic storms pause in their fury!
This wasn’t just a command to absorb power....it was a declaration that even the Void itself, even the space between spaces, was just another aspect of existence that could be consumed, understood, and transcended!
The Void, which had never been claimed by anything because it existed specifically as the absence of things to claim it, suddenly found itself being drawn toward something that refused to acknowledge its fundamental unclamability.
Achilles stood at the boundary between known and unknown, between story and silence, and chose to make even nothingness into something he could use.
The assassination mission had begun, but Achilles began with something grand!