Chapter 582: Steal

The Goddess moved, and for a fraction of a second Grey’s eyes couldn’t properly follow what happened. Her actions seemed layered over one another, almost as though several versions of the same movement had been stacked together because his perception simply wasn’t fast enough to resolve them individually, but his reactions were a different matter.

He couldn’t clearly see her arm sweep outward, yet he felt the white-gold threads spread through the sky snap in sequence, felt something push through his Resonant Sense, felt it cut across the sea of solar winds around him, and finally felt it ignite against the canopy of heat and flame hanging above the battlefield.

Grey vanished before his eyes could catch up with what his instincts already knew. A line of Light speared straight through the afterimage he left behind and continued across the horizon so quickly that a mountain several kilometers away suddenly gained a crescent-shaped wound through its side, the missing section collapsing only after the attack had already disappeared.

Grey’s grin widened into something wild and almost feral as he surged forward. Even staring at that level of destruction, he didn’t feel the slightest bit afraid.

Instead, he poured out everything he had learned until this point.

Center of Spirit had already grown beyond simply stabilizing the identity inside his own Neural Frame, and Grey had pushed it through Resonant Sense once before, but now he went even farther into Veyrath’s playbook.

The Infernal Temper Band became the conduit, carrying Center of Spirit into the energy flooding out from Grey until his solar winds, flames, magnetic lines, and Light all carried the same centered intent.

He wasn’t just sensing the battlefield anymore, pieces of himself were spread throughout it, and every fluctuation around him became information.

The Goddess’s shoulder shifted, and Grey dodged before her attack had properly formed. Air compressed near his ribs and he twisted before the pressure became a blade, Light gathered behind his neck and he ducked before it condensed, then he stepped through the only opening her movements had left and slammed The Virtueless directly against the side of her head.

BOOM.

More white-gold shards broke away from her enormous humanoid form, raining through the sky while something real slowly emerged underneath.

Amber hair spilled free first, followed by the smooth line of a cheek and the curve of a shoulder, while a thin stream of blood ran down from one nostril. Grey was also about ninety percent sure that the woman underneath all that glowing bullshit was completely naked, but in what might have been the greatest display of discipline in his entire life, he didn’t comment on it.

He only tightened his grip around The Virtueless and roared, "COME ON!"

Power continued pouring from him in what felt like an endless torrent, but strangely, the harder Grey pushed his mechs, the less his Neural Frame seemed to suffer. The Infernal Temper Band carried the overwhelming burden of regulating Veyrath’s energy, while the Bringer of Light Gloves managed the white-gold force threading through everything else, leaving Grey free to dedicate more and more of his attention toward Center of Spirit.

The difference became obvious almost immediately, because every attack he made grew cleaner, every dodge happened earlier, and every counter seemed to eliminate several possible responses before the Goddess even chose one.

Grey started to understand what was wrong with her. She hadn’t finished whatever transformation she had begun.

The enormous projection wasn’t just a convenient body of Light, it was a cocoon, one she had been using to accumulate more and more power that clearly hadn’t belonged to her originally.

That stolen strength had swollen her presence to ridiculous levels, but it had also muddied her Neural Frame, twisted her focus, and left her trying to control an enormous amount of energy through a form that wasn’t properly synchronized with it.

Worse still, Grey was standing directly in front of her with three different methods of interfering with the very energies she had chosen to rely on.

The Goddess’s massive frame suddenly contracted.

White-gold shards exploded away in every direction as the giant humanoid shell collapsed inward, and within seconds the behemoth looming over the Palace had shrunk into the form of an ordinary woman. Her amber hair fell freely around a slim, flawless body without the slightest blemish, and yes, Grey confirmed immediately, she was definitely completely naked.

She also became faster. Much faster.

Her movements sharpened, her footwork became cleaner, and her control over the space around her tightened considerably, but Grey realized almost immediately that the transformation hadn’t actually helped her.

The giant projection had been clumsy, but it had hidden enormous amounts of information behind layers of power, while this smaller body made every shift in balance, every gathering of Light, and every pulse of energy easier for Center of Spirit to read.

Grey started crushing her.

Red-gold and white-gold plumes erupted around his body like enormous butterfly wings, while halos of magnetic force rotated behind him and thin lines of Light stretched across the sky in every direction.

From below, the heavens looked as though some god had reached down and shattered space into countless pieces of a broken mirror, each fragment reflecting another streak of Grey’s power.

The people fighting below gradually stopped pretending they weren’t watching.

Duke Valdi froze in the middle of another attempt to break past Xerchen, his expression twisting as Grey drove the Goddess through one of the Palace towers hard enough to erase half of it. Duke Enphro stared upward without speaking, while even the Holy Knights began losing rhythm as shockwaves rolled through the city one after another.

Rosie had stopped arguing with Petri entirely.

Brad only grinned.

Elowen couldn’t breathe.

BOOM.

Grey smashed The Virtueless across the Goddess’s ribs and sent her through another Palace tower, then followed before the debris could even finish falling. Stone, gold, and reinforced formation lines exploded around them as Grey battered her through one structure after another, and for the first time, it genuinely looked as though the entire Palace might collapse before the battle ended.

Grey appeared above her one final time, The Virtueless raised while every strand of Light and red-gold energy around him converged toward the weapon. The Goddess looked up from beneath broken stone, blood running down her face, and Grey could already feel the opening that would let him tear her apart.

Then the temperature plummeted.

A biting wind swept through the ruins and frosted the tips of Grey’s hair, sharp enough that even he noticed it despite everything else happening around him. Before he could fully turn, a familiar albino figure appeared between him and the Goddess, an ice spear already forming in both hands.

The weapon drove downward toward her heart.

Grey blinked.

His expression twisted in disbelief.

"Are you fucking kill-stealing me?"