Chapter 583: Put Your Back Into It

Grey probably should have been pissed, but instead, he found the entire situation fucking hilarious.

His mind had been focused almost entirely on Center of Spirit for the last several minutes, pushing the Ability until his thoughts seemed to operate at impossible speeds, and yet Erik had somehow appeared without Grey sensing the bastard at all.

That almost certainly meant he was relying on some treasure Grey hadn’t seen or understood before, and there was exactly one corporation with both the motivation and resources to hand something like that to him.

Once Grey focused on it, the rest of the plan was almost insultingly easy to unravel.

Muse Incorporated clearly hadn’t trusted the Goddess to kill him on her own, so they had boosted Erik’s icy abilities with something specifically designed to interfere with Grey, allowing the cold to cling to his Resonant Sense and crawl through that connection toward his Neural Frame.

Their calculations were actually pretty damn good, because even if Grey eventually broke free, a few fractions of a second of delay against someone at this level should have been enough to decide the fight.

There were just two tiny problems with their genius plan.

The first was that Grey was completely immune to cold.

The second was much worse, because the Goddess standing before them was tens of times stronger than the existence Muse should have been expecting, strengthened not only by the blood of her own children but also by the enormous reserve of Holy Energy Grey had personally concentrated into Melix during the Culling.

Muse could have prepared for the first source of power, but the second should have been impossible to properly account for. Whatever plan Erik carried into the Genesis Games had almost certainly been prepared long before Grey hijacked the Culling, and directly sending updated instructions into the Games wasn’t exactly easy when the Genesis System banned people for far less.

Muskrat had been slapped out of Grey’s chat more than once for trying to dance around those restrictions, though Grey wasn’t stupid enough to assume Muse suddenly developed morals and decided to follow the rules because they were asked nicely.

None of that was the reason Grey stood there watching Erik’s spear descend without moving.

Center of Spirit spread through the frozen energy wrapped around the weapon, and Grey understood exactly how much force was behind it.

He sputtered. Then he started laughing.

Grey could have reached Erik before the spear landed, but there was simply no reason to bother, so he stood there holding The Virtueless while laughter shook his shoulders hard enough to make his already battered ribs ache.

Erik’s ice spear slammed into the Goddess’s chest, the explosion of frost swallowing half her body, and for one glorious second the albino bastard probably thought he had actually pulled it off.

BOOM.

Erik disappeared in the opposite direction faster than he had arrived, hurled away by a burst of white-gold power so violent that he became a pale streak across the sky.

"Hey, hey, hey, hold on, where are you going?" Grey managed between bursts of laughter.

He reached backward and several white-gold tendrils snapped through the air, catching Erik around one ankle before he could vanish into the distance. The sudden stop was brutal enough that Grey could practically imagine the man’s organs continuing forward inside his body, and when Grey reeled him back like a particularly disappointing fish, Erik’s usually composed expression had become noticeably less composed.

"Try again," Grey said, wiping a tear from the corner of one eye. "You’ve really gotta put your back into it, you know? Girls are sturdier than you think, your little hip thrusts are gonna do fuck all."

Erik’s expression darkened.

Grey ignored him. "Sometimes you’ve gotta pin their ankles back to their ears and start planking into her shit, and if you don’t have the cardio, core, or glute strength to keep up, fucking just isn’t for you, my boy. Then you’ll get roasted in the group chat, and you don’t want that, do you?"

Grey whipped the tendril forward and Erik went flying back toward the Goddess.

The Empress had already started recovering, fragments of Light crawling back across the damage Erik’s spear had created while her amber eyes sharpened with growing irritation. Erik twisted in midair and drove another ice spear forward, clearly deciding that if Grey was going to use him as ammunition, he might as well make the attempt count.

The Goddess slapped him away again.

Grey caught him with another tendril.

"Better, but you’re still not committing."

He threw Erik back.

BOOM.

This time Erik managed to carve a bloody line across the Goddess’s shoulder before another burst of Light smashed him through half a Palace tower, but Grey’s tendrils hooked around his waist before he could disappear into the rubble.

Down below, even people in the middle of life-and-death battles had begun looking upward with increasingly strange expressions.

Brad’s lips twitched so violently he eventually stopped pretending he wasn’t laughing, while Petri stared toward the sky with the exhausted expression of a man reconsidering every decision that had brought him here. Even Duke Enphro looked uncertain whether this was still a battle for the fate of Melix or some elaborate form of bullying, while Elowen simply covered her face with one hand and tried very hard not to imagine what Grey’s earlier advice said about his personal experiences.

Erik came flying back out of the rubble under Grey’s control, frost pouring from his body as he tried for a third time.

"Come on, apex predator, give her the business."

The Goddess punched him out of the sky.

Grey dragged him back.

"Again."

By the fifth attempt, Erik was bleeding from his mouth, one eye had swollen nearly shut, and his ice was noticeably weaker. By the seventh, his body had stopped cooperating entirely, and Grey finally reeled him in close enough to notice that the bastard was unconscious.

Grey stared at him for a moment, disappointed.

"Well, that’s boring."

He tossed Erik onto the remains of a nearby roof, making sure the asshole wasn’t immediately going to fall to his death, then turned back toward the Goddess. The humor gradually drained from his expression as The Virtueless rolled once through his palm, red-gold and white-gold energy gathering around him again.

"I’ll deal with you later."

Grey’s gaze locked onto the recovering Empress, and the wild grin returned as the sky around him began to fracture beneath his power.

"For now, I’ve got a battle to finish."