Mansa D’Kuku arrived where Mansa Nguna had been.

The remains of THE Gilded Laboratory Outpost #32 offered him nothing but shattered surfaces and the absence of everything that had defined this space across eons of his daughter’s dedicated work.

Her specimens were gone. Her instruments were gone. The sleek golden floor and the floating platforms and the preserved corpses she had studied with such relentless curiosity across lifetimes of accumulation were gone alongside everything else, dissolved into the same torrents that had carried her away from existence.

He wept.

The sound that emerged from a Gilded One weeping was not the sound of conventional grief. It was something that pressed against the fabric of reality with the same authority as his presence, Observable Force responding to his emotional state the way weather responds to atmospheric pressure, the surrounding existence registering his loss as a structural event rather than merely a personal one.

Existence cracked.

Rivers of Observable Force wept alongside him, golden currents surging from the surrounding landscape and flowing through the broken space with the directionless quality of something that had lost its organizing principle.

Rivers of Infinity followed, blue torrents pouring through the cracks that his grief had opened in the architecture of the space, the fundamental forces of structured reality mourning in whatever way fundamental forces could mourn when the being who commanded them had been shattered by loss.

Then his expression became heavy and firm.

He looked toward the direction Achilles had disappeared with eyes that had crossed from grief into something colder and more purposeful, the transition rapid in the way that transitions from devastating pain to absolute resolve tend to be in beings who have cultivated long enough to know that action is the only form of grief that produces results.

He raised his hands.

And he began to recite.

"That which has been held, that which has been known, that which has breathed within the fabric of Observable Force and left its mark upon the currents of Infinity that flow through all structured reality."

His voice carried the cadence of something ancient and precise, words that had been arranged not for beauty but for function, each syllable placed with the exactitude of a technique refined across eons of cultivation.

"I call upon the Relentless Seeking. I call upon the truth that nothing that has existed within Observable Force can fully depart from it, that Infinity remembers what it has touched, that the currents which flowed through a living existence carry the signature of that existence forward through time and space with fidelity that cannot be falsified."

Observable Force gathered around his hands in concentrations that made the surrounding space luminescent.

"By the Pulse of THE Unending Pursuit, find what I seek. Find what touched my daughter. Find what consumed her existence. Infinity, seek it. Observable Force, trace it. Reality itself, deliver it to my hands."

BOOM!

The Pulse activated with force that made the shattered remnants of the laboratory dissolve entirely. Blazing rivers of Infinity and Observable Force erupted outward from Mansa D’Kuku’s position in every direction simultaneously, moving with the relentless quality of something that did not experience obstacles as meaningful distinctions from open space. They sought the signature of Mansa Nguna within whatever existence had consumed her, tracking the specific configuration of her foundations through the integrated remains she had left within her destroyer.

The rivers blazed forward.

And Mansa D’Kuku gave chase behind them.

---

Achilles was crossing through gaps of Observable Existence with everything he had, using all the memories he had obtained from Mansa Nguna to find pathways that conventional pursuit could not immediately follow, threading through spaces between structured reality with the desperate efficiency of someone who understood exactly how little time he had.

The urgency was genuine and total.

If he moved through the Silver Philotimo Observable Existence, he would be caught in less than a few seconds by a Gilded One whose grief had converted entirely into the specific fuel of a father hunting whatever had taken his daughter. The Silver Philotimo was Mansa D’Kuku’s territory in every meaningful sense, a reality where his authority would extend through Observable Force currents that he commanded with the ease of native familiarity.

If he went back to his own Observable Existence, that would reveal everything. His identity as THE Vilicus, Mansa Zulu’s sanctioned representative, would be exposed as the existence that had consumed a Superbius Gilded One. Nobody would believe a Bounded Lifeform could do anything against a Gilded One, which meant the conclusion they would reach was considerably worse than inconvenient.

The only option seemed to be letting this body die here.

But even this would cost him tremendously, because this was the main body he had used to Assimilate Mansa Nguna, carrying the fullest integration of everything she had been. His other bodies in his Observable Existence were still undergoing their own transformations, the power and changes working their way through his distributed existence to ensure consistency across all of them, but the process had not yet completed.

It was a genuine pickle.

He was still working through his options when existence stopped giving him time to work through anything.

BOOM!

Rivers of Infinity and Observable Force surged out behind him like snakes given purpose, the Pulse of THE Unending Pursuit locking onto his signature through the integrated remains of Mansa Nguna he carried within his foundations. A terrifying aura surged behind the rivers with the quality of grief that had completed its conversion to fury, Mansa D’Kuku closing distance at rates that made the gaps between them irrelevant as a concept.

Achilles sighed.

He was about to collapse this body entirely when everything froze.

BZZT!

Frozen, completely and instantly, as if the dimension of time had simply ceased to process forward motion for every particle of existence within range of whatever had just activated. Achilles himself froze alongside everything else, suspended in the middle of the decision he had been about to execute with the particular frustration of someone who had been interrupted at the worst possible moment.

BZZT!

A woman appeared in the frozen space with the ease of someone for whom the stopped moment was not a limitation but a medium.

She had crimson hair that moved despite the frozen state of everything around her, catching light that should not have been flowing while time stood still. Her eyes were crimson-gold and shining with a piercing brightness that communicated intelligence and assessment simultaneously, and her smile carried the particular quality of someone who found the situation they had arrived into interesting rather than urgent.

She emanated no waves of power whatsoever.

Which was precisely what made Achilles feel the heaviest sense of danger he had experienced since Mansa Zulu’s emergence from infinite obsidian brilliance, because beings whose power did not radiate outward were beings whose power had nothing to prove through radiation.

She locked onto him with those crimson-gold eyes and sighed with the exhale of someone who had been doing something taxing for longer than they found comfortable.

She stretched as if tired.

"Man, I hate time shenanigans the most, but what has to be done has to be done."

...!

"Hey there! Achilles, right? Achilles Adrastia?"

She tilted her head with the slight angle of someone confirming something they already knew.

"You have made some fairly powerful moves in the future to warrant us seeking you across time. But here we are, your savior!"

Her smile widened with brightness that the frozen moment somehow could not dim.

"Though nothing is without cost. I actually want something from you. Something only someone with your particular set of skills can accomplish."

...!