novelraw Chapter 695: First Blood! I
Chapter 695: First Blood! I
Achilles moved through the Artificial Primordial of the Last Verdant Hour with slow deliberate steps, and with every step, his existence settled a little deeper into itself.
The trees went on forever above him, disappearing into a canopy so high he had to adjust his perception twice just to read where it ended.
Gold veins pulsed through the bark in rhythms he was beginning to match without thinking, and the leaves were not leaves but discs of light suspended in the upper reaches, catching a brilliance that did not come from any single sun.
Below his feet, a floor of moss and root-system stretched outward for distances his Architect’s Perception couldn’t finish reading, and a river of blue Infinity murmured wide and slow off to his left, deep sapphire shot through with paler threads of something older than color.
He was consolidating, and every motion he made in this Domain fed back into him.
Every press of the oppressive air against his skin asked his foundations to thicken, and every time his foundations answered, they answered a little faster than they had the time before. The Archean Adaptation he’d gained from the Waters of the Flood was doing exactly what it had been designed to do, turning adversity into evolution and pressure into density, and the version of him walking through this forest was a version that had barely existed an hour ago and would barely exist an hour from now if the Domain kept pressing on him the way the Domain was leaning on him.
He felt it most in one specific direction, and that direction was the Cause.
Mansa Zulu’s Miniature Cause, the Great Archean Flood, the thing whose Waters he had assimilated, was no longer quiet inside him. It was whispering, telling him that if he simply wished, he could reach down into his own foundation and draw up a smaller version of that same Cause, his own, initiated by him and summoned by him, a fraction of what Mansa Zulu had ushered across all of Observable Existence but unmistakably the same shape.
He had assimilated the Miniature Cause, which meant, logically, he could initiate it freely.
Oh!
His foot paused mid-step as he let the question sit in his chest, warm and enormous, filing itself next to the other questions his existence had been quietly filing since the flood settled, and he decided he would know when he knew, because this Game would almost certainly teach him.
He kept moving, and he had made it perhaps another two miles along the mossy forest floor when something massive parted the air behind him.
HUUM!
Achilles felt it a full second before it arrived, pressure cracking through the Domain from behind him with the regal confidence of a being who had done this many times before and was not particularly worried about doing it again!
Whatever the Game’s restrictions on perception were, they didn’t hold against this presence cleanly, and the trees themselves leaned slightly under the simple fact of a Rhyacian-tier Proterozoic being walking toward him!
A Second Scale enemy!
WU!
The attack came before any greeting did, a wave of Civilization crashing through the forest behind him, blue-black and serrated, Chaos threaded through Paradox in a braid that burned. It struck the space where Achilles had been, sheared clean through the trunk of a thousand-mile-tall tree, and kept going, though the tree did not fall so much as forget, in the section that had been struck, how to be solid, a slow shimmer of contradiction rippling through the trunk as the Domain itself insisted the tree continue to stand.
Achilles spun as the wave caught him across the chest, and he did not move an inch from where he stood, the attack breaking against him with a sound like a bell being struck underwater. The force pressed through his form and out the other side without shifting him so much as a handspan backward, his archaic tattoos flaring bright and his Primordial Heart thudding once in clean absorption, his foundation thickening in real time to accommodate the blow!
Because he had...Archean Adaptation!
BOOM!
He looked up to find a being standing between the trees on the far side of the small glade, tall and humanoid and wrapped in robes of something that looked like smoke that had agreed to hold a shape.
The figure’s skin was a deep layered purple-black that seemed to be several shades at once, and his eyes were two points of paradox-light, circles inside circles inside circles, each ring rotating in a direction the ring inside it was not, and he radiated the glow of THE Second Scale at the first stage of it, Rhyacian-tier, fresh enough to the Proterozoic Scale that the texture of his ember was still settling!
His Civilization...was Paradoxical Chaos, and it read loud across the glade, the Chaos side familiar to Achilles as a cousin to his own partial Claim, while the Paradox side was trickier, because things hit by it did not simply take damage but took contradiction itself.
The Rhyacian’s paradox-eyes narrowed as he regarded Achilles with the expression of a man reading a line of a book that had been printed with a typo.
"The hell? You didn’t die..." he said.
"I’ve hit beings across every Depth of the First Scale and they fall as they’re supposed to fall, even Absolutes when I feel like it, but you haven’t fallen, which is strange so...allow me to fix it."
He raised a hand, and three more waves came in rapid succession, each one sharper than the last and threaded with more paradox than the one before.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
They scoured the glade and shattered another tree so thoroughly that the Domain had to stop and reprint it, hammering Achilles with a combined force that should have, by any honest accounting of First Scale foundations, ended him, and yet he held through every strike as his chest burned and his foundation groaned and his Primordial Heart beat harder!
Every wave of Paradoxical Chaos that washed over him was read and catalogued and fed directly into his Archean Adaptation, and his existence ate the lesson on the spot, his foundation now somewhere above where it had been when the Game started, not a little above but a lot above!
The oppressive Domain pressure grinding him from the start, combined with the Rhyacian’s attacks layered on top of it, combined with the sheer relentless demand from every direction to keep up or die, had induced something in him that he only now recognized for exactly what it was, and what it was, was a Cause!
His own, Miniature and smaller than Mansa Zulu’s by a thousand orders of magnitude but the same shape and the same architecture, the thing that had washed across Observable Existence now rising up inside Achilles’s own body in a quiet private wave, evolving him freely under the very pressure the Rhyacian was so generously providing.
Oh!
Thank you.
Above the Domain, across the sky that was not a sky, the announcer’s voice boomed again, bright and delighted and very much back at her job.
"Oh my, oh my, oh my! A moment for our new viewers who have just tuned in, because numbers are climbing, and for those who’ve just joined, welcome, welcome, I am your commentator, call me what you like, everyone does!"
A little laugh rippled through the Domain as she went on, the brightness in her voice carrying that same cold cruel edge underneath.
"What we have unfolding right now, on my screen and on yours, is something delicious, my friends, because we have one of our Rhyacian Second Scale favorites engaging a First Scale participant in Sector Nine, and the First Scale participant is somehow still standing after four clean hits of Paradoxical Chaos, which, I will confess to you all, makes me want to have my numbers checked, because I do not believe them! Is this guy’s Civilizational Anchor real? Coz how the fuck is an Absolute Depth shrimp standing against him?!"
WAA!