Chapter 579 Energy

Grey pointed The Virtueless forward and let out a slow breath, his lips barely moving as he spoke to himself.

"You can do this, Grey. Just one more hurdle, then you just might be able to sleep with cheeks in hand."

A scream rose from somewhere below, and Grey glanced down to find Elowen standing outside the catacombs, shouting up at him and trying to plead with him one more time.

He had no idea how the hell she had gotten out there that quickly while carrying Mauve, but the sight made his lips curl into a small smile. It really was nice having pretty girls worried about you, though obviously that only meant he had an even greater responsibility to look badass.

Grey's Neural Frame began to thrum with life again, and the tearing pain immediately prickled through his skull like someone was dragging needles directly across his brain.

He had already looked back toward the Goddess by then, refusing to give the pain any more attention than it deserved, before raising his voice just enough for Elowen to hear him. "If you're really that worried about me, Princess, I'm going to need a kiss after all this is over."

BOOM.

Grey's Frame erupted, magnetic pulses of red-gold energy spreading wide behind him until rings upon rings expanded across the sky. From below, they almost resembled the wings of a butterfly finally tearing free from its cocoon, except each line carried enough energy to distort the air around it.

Grey would have appreciated how fucking cool it probably looked if he didn't know just how little he currently had left to work with.

His Helm Frame was still cracked and probably too fragile to survive another rebirth, most of his mechs were broken, and the only treasures he had left on his body were the bracelet he had only just forged and The Virtueless resting in his palm. Well, those and his Shadow Forces.

There was no hidden trump card waiting in Cyber Space, no convenient new mech he had forgotten about, and no sudden stash of resources that was going to save him if this went badly. This was going to have to be enough.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Veyrath's power was ripped from the Infernal Temper Band without the Fire Elemental's permission, his furious resistance doing absolutely nothing as waves of heat and energy poured into the solar flares of Grey's Solveign Frame.

Grey hadn't lied when he said he possessed no Frame with a particularly strong affinity for fire, because the Solveign Class was built around magnetism, polarity, and solar winds rather than flames. If anything, its nature was far closer to something nuclear than something that could resemble fire. Similar didn't mean the same.

There was overlap, though, and Grey had finally noticed exactly where it was.

Veyrath's control had never been limited to simply commanding fire, because his mastery over flames was so refined that he could manipulate the energy and light those flames produced while keeping the physical manifestation almost unchanged.

Grey had watched him dim flames without weakening them, compress heat without allowing it to escape, and alter light output separately from the underlying fire, which meant Veyrath wasn't truly controlling several unrelated forces. He was controlling one thing so completely that everything connected to it had started falling beneath his influence as well.

That was the part Grey needed.

If Solveign controlled magnetic forces, solar winds, and the energetic effects surrounding them, while Veyrath could manipulate the energy output of his flames independently, then there was a point somewhere between the two where those principles overlapped. Grey only needed to find the right angle, lock the systems together, and let his mech do what he had built it to do.

Something clicked.

BOOM.

The red-gold rings behind Grey suddenly exploded outward, expanding several times over until they covered practically the entire Holy City. The pressure on his Neural Frame dropped so abruptly that Grey nearly laughed, because the tearing sensation that had been crawling through his brain only moments before faded to a distant ache.

Why the fuck should he still try to carry all of this himself when he had literally just built a treasure mech designed to control Veyrath's energy?

Grey's face became slightly ruddier as the Infernal Temper Band heated around his wrist, the living mech taking on the overwhelming majority of the control burden. The damage already running through Grey's Neural Frame remained, and his body still felt like it had been beaten with a sack full of bricks, but nearly ninety percent of the active pressure had shifted away from him and onto his new portable oven.

Considering the thing had Veyrath living inside it, Grey figured the bastard could suffer for him a little.

The Virtueless spun through Grey's palm as flames began wrapping around the bronze rod, rapidly accelerating until the weapon looked like a burning wheel between his fingers.

Red-gold magnetic arcs threaded through the fire, pulsing through it in rings as concentrated energy compressed along the edges, and Grey's grin widened as he felt the two systems finally harmonize.

"Let's dance, bitch."

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Wheels of fire erupted outward from Grey one after another, expanding so violently that each disk grew large enough to rival the torso of the enormous Goddess projection looming over the city.

The attacks weren't merely flames anymore, because dense fire had been layered around pulsing solar energy and compressed into razor-thin rotating edges, creating enormous disks that tore through the sky with terrifying precision.

Wherever they passed, the air split apart behind them and whined as though being super heated and super charged all at once.

The flames were so controlled that despite the concentrated heat, even the rare bits of foliage in the sprawling metropolis didn't so much as ripple. But at the same time, the sun beaming from on high felt just that little bit dimmer as its strength was yanked down into spiraling death wheels.