Chapter 580 Trifecta

The Goddess reacted slowly, almost dully, as the flaming wheels tore through the sky toward her.

They slammed into her golden body one after another, forcing her backward in heavy steps that shook the Palace beneath her, and Grey's grin widened as he watched the enormous projection finally give ground.

The damage wasn't dramatic, but the fact she had been moved at all told him that the attack was working.

More importantly, Grey finally understood one of the last pieces that made Elementals so absurdly powerful in the Genesis Games. They didn't simply launch their element outward like a mage throwing fireballs, because their Frames extended into every flame, every gust, every bolt, forcing their identities and control into the world around them.

When Grey thought about it that way, there was barely any difference between what Veyrath did naturally and what a Dominion Class existence did by imposing their will onto the surrounding laws.

That was probably why Elementals were considered such ridiculous favorites. Even without a Dominion Class weapon, if their elemental control became refined enough, they were effectively carrying a crude Dominion everywhere they went, and that gave them a genuine chance of clearing the first Arc through their own strength.

Grey glanced toward the Infernal Temper Band as Veyrath shook with enough rage that the bracelet practically vibrated against his wrist, then shamelessly lifted it toward his mouth and planted a loud kiss against the metal.

"Don't complain so much, bud. I'm gonna take you to the top—"

"Un... acceptable..."

Grey's words died in his throat.

The Goddess had barely spoken above a murmur, her voice slow and labored as though forming each syllable required deliberate effort, yet the pressure behind those two words exploded across the sky.

Winds slammed into Grey hard enough that he threw an arm over his face, while the remnants of his flaming wheels scattered and the air around the enormous woman distorted beneath her presence.

When the flames finally cleared, Grey's expression tightened. He couldn't see any meaningful damage on her despite the heavy steps she had been forced to take, and the golden body looming above the Palace looked almost untouched. Then she slowly raised one hand toward him, and Grey immediately felt every thread of energy surrounding his body begin to solidify.

His magnetic wings flickered.

The air disappeared from around him.

For a moment, it felt as though the entire region of space he occupied had been sealed shut, not merely suppressing his movement but refusing to allow the laws surrounding him to change at all.

A violent pulse of danger erupted through Grey's instincts, and he moved before he had enough information to understand why.

BOOM.

A pillar of blinding light descended through the space he had occupied an instant earlier, clipping the outer edge of one magnetic wing as Grey threw himself aside.

The contact lasted less than a heartbeat, yet the damaged portion immediately began collapsing, volatile energy spreading through the remaining structure like a cancer and corrupting every magnetic line it touched until the laws maintaining the entire wing became unstable.

Grey's pupils constricted.

'That's not Holy Energy.'

Holy Energy could reinforce, suppress, overwhelm, and impose Divinity, but it didn't behave like this. Whatever the Goddess had thrown at him was corrupting the rules that allowed the structure of his energy and his Neural Frame beneath it.

Grey coughed up a mouthful of blood as the contamination reached his back.

Pain tore through his nervous system, and he immediately ripped the infected energy away from his body with brute force, compressing it into a projectile before throwing it into the distance.

Somewhere beneath the chaos, he vaguely heard Elowen scream his name, but Grey barely registered it because the original attack hadn't even struck him directly and he already felt as though half his body had been burned through from the inside, and the other half was rapidly following.

Grey's eyes sharpened as the Bringer of Light Gloves pulsed around his hands.

The corrupted energy froze.

Every strand of it stopped simultaneously, the violent instability settling as though an invisible master had finally spoken, and Grey's expression changed just before gravity reclaimed him.

He crashed through the roof of a building below, smashed through another layer of stone, and disappeared beneath an avalanche of rubble while another mouthful of blood spilled from his lips.

'That fucking bitch...'

Grey had known there was something wrong with the Goddess for a long time, but he hadn't expected the answer to become this obvious.

That wasn't Holy Energy. It was Light.

More specifically, it was the same fundamental energy carried by the Bringer of Light Gloves, except twisted so thoroughly that even calling it the same thing felt wrong.

Grey had already noticed during the Culling that the Gloves could control Holy Energy far beyond what their supposed lineage should have allowed, and when he ripped control of the halo's blessings away, he had effectively perfected that lineage without even sitting down to properly study it.

At the time, Grey had assumed that meant he had simply become absurdly good at controlling Holy Energy.

Now he realized he had been looking at the result backward.

The Gloves weren't powerful because they controlled Holy Energy. They controlled something beneath it.

'Light...'

Grey looked down at the white gloves through the dust, then toward the Infernal Temper Band wrapped around his wrist. Veyrath could alter the light and energy produced by his flames through absurd elemental control, while Solveign manipulated solar winds, magnetism, and energetic phenomena on a completely different axis.

The Bringer of Light Gloves formed the third point.

Grey's eyes slowly widened.

He couldn't win this battle by being stronger because his body was too damaged, his Neural Frame was barely holding together, and the Goddess had been entrenched inside this city for far longer than he had existed. If Grey tried to exchange power with her directly, she would eventually crush him through sheer reserves.

So he wouldn't be stronger. He would be better.

Better at controlling energy, better at controlling Light, better at understanding the Holy Energy saturating every inch of Melix, and better at imposing himself over the territory this supposed Goddess had claimed long ago.

BOOM.

The rubble surrounding Grey exploded outward as red-gold energy surged from his body.

He had already found one thread through Solveign and Veyrath, and now the Bringer of Light Gloves gave him another. The three forces resonated together, magnetism, elemental energy, and Light locking into a single structure as Grey rose through the shattered building.

Each one overlapped with one another in some small way. All of them reflecting energy, all of them reflecting heat, all of them reflecting light...

A trifecta had formed, and Grey intended to use it to steal the sky.