I Can Assimilate Everything

Across the vast Star Seas, where the distance between thoughts could span light-years, a vessel moved with purpose.

The ship looked like a metallic infinity symbol given three-dimensional form.

This was not a design choice but a necessity…when traveling through regions where space itself could rebel against intrusion, it helped to have a ship that was technically traveling through itself, always arriving where it had already been.

Inside its command center, where walls displayed the musings of distant stars, Major General Lydia stood with the stillness of someone who had learned that movement without purpose was energy wasted!

Her gaze swept across flickering screens that showed approach vectors, defensive formations, and the thousand small details of different Butchering Grounds.

She was adorned in purple-blue stellar armament that seemed to drink in light rather than reflect it…crafted from dead stellar bodies, each piece containing the compressed death-screams of suns that had burned for billions of years before being convinced to become armor.

A few dozen Stellar Nexus Embodiment and other more powerful entities occupied various seats across the command center.

They were the escort, the guards. Their destination pulled at them all with invisible gravity towards the heart of the Infinite Radiance Sovereignty, where the Chancellors resided in their towers of light and law.

The atmosphere was one of controlled tension!

At that time.

Without warning, without any sensor detecting approach, without reality bothering to announce the violation of its rules…

HUUM!

A unique authority manifested in the command center.

The entities surrounding General Lydia began to fall into daze, consciousness sliding away from them like oil from water!

One by one, then in groups, they slumped in their seats.

Not dead, not injured, simply... absent. Their bodies remained but their awareness had been gently, irresistibly, moved elsewhere.

The screens continued flickering. The ship continued its course. But the witnesses had been politely removed from what was about to occur.

General Lydia's gaze sharpened from imperial to lethal in the space between heartbeats.

Beside her, manifesting like smoke given malevolent purpose, her butler emerged from shadows that hadn't existed until they needed to.

He was adorned in a radiant black suit that seemed to be cut from the absence of light itself, the Regulation of Darkness coursing around him in.

His presence was a statement: threat had been detected, and response was prepared!

But even as her guardian materialized, Lydia was already turning, her senses…honed by years of conflict and survival, detecting presence behind her that shouldn't, couldn't, wouldn't normally exist.

The air began to shimmer with platinum radiance that didn't illuminate but revealed, as if reality was remembering it had forgotten to show something that had always been there!

A form coalesced from the light.

Achilles's Constellation Dream Body manifested with the terrible beauty of a concept given form!

His shape was nominally humanoid, but only in the way that a shadow was nominally the shape of what cast it.

His form seemed to be constructed from condensed narrative, platinum stellar brilliance that wrote and rewrote itself continuously.

Every movement left trails of text in the air.

His face was recognizable as Achilles, but transformed into something that suggested rather than defined!

The ethereal nature of his presence made the command center's reality hiccup.

Surfaces near him couldn't quite decide if they were solid or metaphorical.

The air around him carried the weight of stories…millions of them, all happening simultaneously, all connected to him in ways that normal consciousness couldn't process.

Lydia felt a sense of oppression she couldn't explain!

Her voice emerged cold, controlled, but carrying undertones of alarm.

"What is this?" She said, "I thought we had an understanding?"

Achilles smiled, the expression visible despite his face being more suggestion than substance, and the smile carried layers…amusement, assessment, something that might have been compassion.

Just by gazing at her, his current terrifying power could see glimpses of her Fable with the clarity of reading a well-loved book.

The narrative threads of her existence spread before his perception: someone who cared a great deal about the welfare of the weak, someone who built homes for orphans whose fathers and mothers had perished in the Butchering Grounds and endless wars.

Her story was etched with sacrifice, with choosing difficulty because it was right, with power used to shield rather than conquer.

Her Fable was a unique one, she was a decent existence in a universe that rarely rewarded decency.

The way Achilles viewed her had changed greatly from when they last met.

Then, she had been a powerful piece on the board, a potential ally or obstacle.

Now, she was a character in a story he could read, edit, perhaps even rewrite.

It was a unique sensation, this detachment from existence…as if he stood outside the narrative while still being part of it, a reader who had discovered they could reach into the page.

"Yes, we have an agreement," he said, his voice carrying waves that suggested every possible way the words could be spoken.

"I just came to steer things a little differently than we previously discussed."

He paused, his ethereal form solidifying slightly, becoming more present without quite becoming physical.

"First, I wanted to gauge power. Could you..." The smile widened slightly, carrying challenge wrapped in curiosity. "Attack me with your strongest attack?"

…!

General Lydia and her shadowy butler froze at these words, the request so unexpected that even their trained responses stuttered.

He came to... gauge power?

Lydia's frown carved itself across her features like canyons forming on a planet's surface.

She shook her head slowly, her voice carrying the weight of someone explaining why playing with antimatter was inadvisable.

"I am mainly a Master of the Regulation of Space, among others." The admission came with neither pride nor humility, simply fact. "I could collapse this entire vessel and surrounding light-year if something went wrong."

Achilles's smile remained unperturbed, carrying the confidence of someone who had already much!

"I'm sure that a Master of Regulation can focus her power to only collapse her individual target." His tone was conversational, as if discussing weather rather than concentrated destruction. "Come on."

The gaze of General Lydia turned from stern to something harder than collapsed stars.

She raised one hand, a gesture that made her shadow guard step back despite himself.

The butler understood…when a Master of Space decided to demonstrate their power, being too close was inadvisable regardless of alliance.

Then she moved.

The step forward wasn't movement through space…it was space rearranging itself so that forward had always been where Achilles was.

She appeared before his ethereal form with the suddenness of inevitable conclusion, her fist already in motion.

Reality seemed to shift into slow motion, though whether this was Achilles's perception or actual temporal distortion remained unclear.

The mechanics of the Regulation of Space revealed themselves in terrible clarity!