I Can Assimilate Everything

Chapter 692: THE Gilded Games! II

New environments were fruitful. A single step into a place one had never walked before carried with it the possibility of learning, of growth, of swallowing something that had not been available in the old country.

Different skies meant different lessons. Different foundations meant different weaves. A being who traveled, who truly traveled, came home denser than when they left, if they came home at all.

Because new environments were also deadly.

They were deadly precisely because they were new. The rules of the old country did not apply in the same way. The instincts forged over eons at home were, in a foreign Observable, only approximately correct, and approximately correct was the kind of wrongness that got a being killed.

The fruit grew on the same tree as the knife.

Achilles understood this, through the simple fact of having been both fruit and knife in the past.

He stepped off the Auric Concourse of the Hundred Glories behind Khaemwaset-of-the-Nine-Suns and his smiling delegation, and new realm opened above him.

"Welcome," Khaemwaset said, "to Babylon."

They entered A Primordial Realm.

Not a Primordial Realm like Tian, vast and struggling and half-formed, the sole functioning one in his stunted Observable. This one was small. It sat like a perfectly cut gem in the middle of its own private sky, and every inch of it had been shaped with the deliberate hand of an Existence that had plenty of Primordial Realms to spare, and so had allowed this one the luxury of being intimate.

Rivers ran through it.

Two rivers. They moved in slow lazy spirals around each other, braiding through the realm without ever quite mixing, and their waters were not water.

One ran gold, bright as Observable sunlight given a current to flow through, and Achilles’s perception read it as pure Observable Force moving. The other ran obsidian, deep as the space beyond the broken sky of Tian, should be...Unobservable?

Observable and Unobservable. Side by side!

Oh!

Khaemwaset drifted ahead, gesturing as he went, and Achilles followed with Rose at his side and THE Watcher drifting silent behind.

At the center of the Realm, at the confluence of the two rivers, it rose.

A coliseum.

It was massive.

Tiered rings of dark stone stacked themselves upward into the Realm’s sky, ring upon ring, each lined with seating that stretched so far along its curve that the far side of the arena blurred into heat-haze even from this approach. The floor of it, the pit of it, was a sunken bowl wide enough to hold a war.

Above it floated statues.

Huge ones. Easily the size of small continents. Humanoid, most of them, though a few bent toward shapes Achilles did not have a frame of reference for. They hung in the air around the coliseum in a slow protective orbit, each one rendered in gold that shone from within, each face set in the dispassionate serenity of a being who had been carved.The statues looked through.

The Gilded. Or effigies of them. Either way, the weight of them pressed on the Realm’s air like a held breath.

And flowing toward the coliseum, from every direction the sky of Babylon allowed, were lifeforms.

Hundreds of thousands of them.

Achilles’s Architect’s Perception read them as they moved. Surface Depth entities, the bulk of the river, drifting in their many-colored waves. Intermediate Depth cultivators in tighter clusters, holding their own small formations. Fundamental Depth masters moving in more deliberate lanes, trailing retinues. And scattered throughout, glints that his perception snagged on, Absolute Depth presences carrying their weight.

And then, rarer, here and there, the ones that made him slow.

Second Scale.

An Undivided One drifting past with its form unsettling the air behind it. A Formless Terror moving in a pocket of reality that politely refused to be looked at directly. An Antediluvian One trailing its ancient pages. A Primordial Architect, full-formed, striding with the Infinity in its chest. A Singular Cognizance threading through the crowd as a point of attention that was walking its own thoughts toward the stands.

They were all going the same way.

To the coliseum!

"Behold," Khaemwaset said, because of course he said behold, "the Coliseum of a Thousand Ascendant Glories. It is the foremost of its kind in the Silver Philotimo, which is to say, the foremost of its kind in any Observable Existence the Collective has condescended to measure against. Within it are held THE Gilded Games."

He turned to Achilles.

"The Games are ancient. They are older than the Silver Philotimo’s current civilizational era. They are older than several of us standing here, and some of us are older than a great many things. In their original form they were the means by which strength, power, and potential were determined in the earliest ages of our Civilizations, before hierarchy settled into its current shape. The Gilded Ones, in their wisdom, saw fit to preserve this way. They influenced it. They refined it. They embedded into its rules their own preferences, their own tests, their own measures of what is worth keeping and what is worth collapsing."

He gestured upward, toward the gold statues in their slow orbit.

" Every Game is, in its smallest sense, a sacrifice offered to them in the language they most enjoy, which is the language of contest."

Achilles nodded and let the man talk.

"The Games themselves are many. There are the Trials of the Measured Step, in which combatants are ranked by the precision of their movement under layered Civilizational pressure. There are the Contests of Sustained Foundation, in which one’s foundation is pressed until it yields or does not. There is the Rite of the Nine Gates, which is a crucible of nine sequential domains, each tuned to a different aspect of Civilizational expression. There is the Harvest Melee, a mass combat in which numbers. There are contests of construction, contests of song, contests of stillness, contests of endurance, contests whose names would be tedious to list in full here."

He smiled.

"And there are fights."

He said it softly.

"There is the Open Pit, the Bonded Lanes, the Chained Arena, and a dozen smaller variants. Fights, as you requested. Proper fights, in proper forms, before proper eyes."

His gold-flame gaze settled on Achilles.

"I must tell you one thing, before you accept anything. THE Gilded Games make all participants equal."

...!

"It is the first and oldest rule, the one the Gilded themselves wrote into the Games when they took an interest in them. You will hold no special status in any competition. Your mark, for example." A small gesture toward Achilles’s forehead. "Will mean nothing here. The mark of the Vilicus, whether mine or yours, carries no protection within these walls. Your Scale is equalized. Your Civilization is measured against your opponent’s on terms the Games themselves impose. You will enter as a contestant, and you will leave as whatever the Games decide you have become."

He paused.

"Especially in the fights. All fights here are considered fair game for collapse. There is no rule against killing. There is no rule against unmaking. There is no rule against whatever the victor chooses to do with what remains. The Gilded have never found reason to write such rules. They find the absence of them instructive."

He spread his hands, palms up, in that same opening-gesture of arrangement.

"So. Do you still wish to enter? And if so, which of the Games would you like to be considered for?"

...!

Achilles looked past him.

He looked at the coliseum, and at the statues, and at the hundreds of thousands of beings moving toward the stands like a slow cosmic tide, and he did not see a single one of them the way Khaemwaset saw them.

He did not see citizens.

He saw potential.

He saw opportunities!

He saw an Observable Existence that was not stunted, packed to the horizon with beings whose foundations had been allowed to grow the way his own had never been allowed to grow, and every single one of them was made of material his existence had been built to swallow.

Oh!

He could step into THE Second Scale. The doorway was open inside him. One willed motion and he would cross the threshold and stand on ground the rest of the delegation stood on, and the smiles they had been giving him would start to shift.

His intuition told him not to.

Not yet.

So he would stay where he was, for now, and he would see what he could swallow from an Observable Existence that had never once been small.

He turned back to Khaemwaset-of-the-Nine-Suns with a calm face.

"I still want to enter. Let’s go in and delve into those...games with life or death fights."

BOOM!