Chapter 584: Watch Closely

Grey rolled The Virtueless once through his palm as the Goddess slowly pulled herself free from the wreckage beneath him, then his gaze flickered toward some invisible point in the distance where he imagined the cameras were watching.

"Muse Incorporated, watch closely," he said, his bloody grin spreading wider as white-gold tendrils began accumulating throughout the skies again. "This is how you really end an arc."

The Goddess attacked first, her hand cutting across the air and sending a wall of Light ripping through half the Palace, but Grey’s body slipped between the fragments before The Virtueless crashed against her ribs.

She was far more awake now, her reactions sharp enough that every exchange looked like two flickering streaks colliding across the sky, yet there was something deeply inhuman about the calm in her amber eyes.

She didn’t seem to care that she was completely naked, didn’t react when Grey broke bones or drew blood, and even as the Palace collapsed around her, her expression remained so unmoved that it felt like the end of the world itself wouldn’t have earned a raised eyebrow.

Grey couldn’t decide if that was confidence, insanity, or something the corruption had carved into her a long time ago, but he didn’t particularly care anymore.

Every clash sent another stream of white-gold tendrils spreading outward until the fragmented mirror hanging over Melix gradually changed shape, lines accumulating so densely that it looked like an enormous mesh had been stretched across the entire Holy City. Only, anyone who tried following those patterns for more than a few seconds would quickly realize there was nothing uniform about them.

Some lines doubled back over themselves three or four times before suddenly branching into dozens of thinner paths, others crossed one another only to separate and reconnect somewhere completely unrelated, while entire clusters seemed to repeat the same pattern with tiny variations that made every supposed symmetry a lie.

Following one strand inevitably meant losing another ten, and staring at the whole for too long gave the nauseating impression that the structure was still changing even when it wasn’t.

It was less like a normal mesh and more like Grey had taken the impossible complexity of his own Neural Frame and stretched it across an entire city.

Grey suddenly roared and the mesh descended.

White-gold lines that had covered kilometers of sky rushed inward while the red-gold magnetic rings behind Grey expanded to meet them, and the entire structure folded around his body in four enormous wings.

Each carried a subtly different pattern, one straight and brutally purposeful, another repeating through nested loops, one endlessly branching into new possibilities, and the last pulsing outward with Grey’s Resonance as though the entire city had become an extension of his senses.

The four wings flapped.

Winds powerful enough to level mountains exploded toward the Goddess, stripping roofs from distant buildings and blasting debris outward in enormous spirals. She crossed one arm over her eyes and remained standing, her feet sliding backward through the air, before her other hand suddenly clenched.

Deep beneath the collapsed Palace, something answered.

A golden throne tore through tons of rubble and surged into the sky behind her, stone, metal, and Holy Energy cascading away from it as it settled behind the Goddess. The instant it appeared, her presence multiplied, the entire formation beneath Melix roaring awake as though the city itself had acknowledged its ruler.

Grey didn’t give a single solitary damn.

His wings remained tilted forward as they began wrapping around one another, four impossibly complicated structures twisting tighter around The Virtueless until the rod became the center of a massive lance. Grey glanced toward the battlefield below until he found Elowen, caught her gaze through all the chaos, then gave her a wink.

"Your husband is pretty badass," Grey called down. "After this, you’re not allowed to doubt me ever again."

Elowen’s lips parted, but whatever she might have shouted back disappeared beneath the growing roar overhead.

The four wings finished twisting.

White-gold radiance concentrated so violently around Grey that looking directly at him became almost impossible, the lance burning in the heavens like someone had dragged a second sun down above Melix.

Red-gold rings rotated through its core, Veyrath’s energy burned between them, and the Bringer of Light Gloves held everything together while Grey’s Center of Spirit imposed one singular intent onto the entire structure.

End it.

Grey stepped forward and thrust, and for one impossible moment, the world seemed to split into two silent halves.

There was Grey on one side, framed by a burning heaven of white-gold and red-gold, while the Goddess stood on the other with her throne and the entire weight of Melix behind her.

Between them was a single point where the lance touched her raised hands, and that point became so bright that shadows vanished from the city entirely.

Then sound returned.

BOOM.

The lance became a beam that swallowed the sky.

Duke Enphro stopped breathing as the clouds were ripped apart for kilometers, while Rosie forgot Petri was even standing in front of her. Brad stared upward with a manic grin, Xerchen’s cold expression cracked with disbelief, and Elowen stood frozen as the Palace disappeared behind a wall of Light.

Even Duke Valdi stopped struggling.

His sons were dead, his family had been humiliated, and he had spent every moment since seeing Grey again wanting nothing more than to personally rip the brat apart, yet now even his hatred couldn’t stop the chill crawling down his spine. For the first time, the possibility settled into his mind that Grey hadn’t been bluffing when he threatened to destroy everything Valdi had built.

The white-gold beam slowly blinked out like it was wrung dry by Grey’s own hands.

Silence fell.

Half the Palace was gone.

The golden throne had been erased from the seat upward, leaving only its lower portion floating amid the destruction, while the same was true of the Goddess herself.

Everything above her waist had vanished so cleanly that there wasn’t even blood spilling from the remains, the impossible heat having cauterized flesh, vessels, and bone into one perfectly smooth line.

Grey took a slow breath, sniffled, then dragged one finger beneath his nose as he admired his work with a satisfied grin.

"Ah, right, almost forgot something."

He turned toward Duke Valdi and raised one finger.

Valdi’s expression hardened immediately, his power surging as he prepared himself for Grey to finish their feud personally, but the attack never came from the direction he expected. One white-gold tendril instead shot toward a distant rooftop, wrapped around Erik’s unconscious body, then whipped him across the city with absolutely horrifying acceleration.

Valdi’s eyes widened, horror flashing through them as scenes and moments of his life play out one after another. Maybe he never thought it would all come to an end so pathetically.

Erik rammed into him.

SPLAT.

Both bodies exploded into a single cloud of flesh and blood that painted the surrounding battlefield red.

Grey blinked. "Whoops. That was more bloody than I thought it’d be. I also kinda forgot I wanted to ask him questions... oh well."

A notification appeared before his eyes.

—

Operation: The Heirless Final Knight

Quest Rank: Legendary

Quest Class: Vector

Mission Type: Revenge

Objective: Cleared

Reward: Noble Rank of Duke

—

Grey’s grin slowly widened.

Then another notification appeared.

—

VICTOR: Grey Temolt.

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