Chapter 595: Burst

Grey twisted sideways as three spiraling beams of emerald wind crossed through the space where his chest had been, each one carrying enough compressed energy that the air screamed long after they passed.

The Wind Elementals refused to come anywhere near him now, instead disappearing into the hurricane before reappearing hundreds of meters away and ripping more power from the storm to launch another attack. ℴ

Grey could feel something changing every time they did it. The hurricane’s radius was slowly contracting as more of its stored momentum was stripped away and concentrated into their attacks.

They probably thought he couldn’t tell from inside the thing, and ordinarily they might have been right, but Grey’s Resonant Sense had already spread far enough to keep track of the outer pressure walls.

The decrease wasn’t fast, but it was consistent, and more importantly, it confirmed that the three Elementals weren’t producing unlimited energy so much as harvesting what nature had already built for them.

Grey ducked beneath another emerald beam and forced himself not to respond with the first combination of Frames that came naturally to him, because right now that was exactly how he would end up launching himself into another continent.

Until he fixed the imbalance, he would have to use one Neural Frame at a time.

That was annoying as hell, but considerably better than trying to coordinate all four and having his body decide forward meant somewhere three hundred meters behind him.

Grey shifted entirely into his Resonant Frame for the moment, allowing its expanded pathways to handle his perception and environmental control without trying to force Recursive or Branching calculations into the process.

Linear could come later when he needed raw direction and force, but mixing everything together was going to have to wait until he understood what the hell had happened to him.

The angel lady understood considerably more, and for once, she had been too stunned to even insult him.

Neural Frames did not heal like muscles.

Damage could be stabilized, but a Frame wasn’t supposed to tear itself apart under excessive strain and then rebuild itself stronger afterward. Grey’s had done exactly that, and worse, the Linear and Resonant portions hadn’t merely recovered, they had expanded so drastically that she estimated they were somewhere between ten and twenty times more capable than before.

She watched silently as Grey dodged another attack and wondered what sort of monster Prometheus had created.

The situation around him was still becoming more dangerous, however, because while Grey had correctly noticed that the hurricane was shrinking, he hadn’t yet seen the entire problem.

As its radius decreased, the Wind Elementals had less storm to manage, which meant the amount of control they could exert over every remaining current increased sharply.

There would be a window before the hurricane finally exhausted itself where the three of them could potentially command winds tens of times more efficiently than they could now, and surviving until the storm simply died wasn’t an option.

Yet Grey wasn’t retreating. He was waiting.

Another pair of emerald beams tore past him, one close enough to rip a strip of skin from his shoulder, while Grey continued mapping the storm with unnerving patience.

He followed the low-pressure currents flowing inward, the hotter air being pulled upward, the cooler descending currents farther out, and the enormous rotating exchange that kept feeding momentum back into itself.

This wasn’t exactly an Earth hurricane, especially without an ocean beneath it or moisture driving everything, but the underlying principle was familiar enough that Grey finally found what he wanted.

"Got you."

His Resonant Sense erupted outward.

The pulse spread through the hurricane until Grey could feel nearly its entire rotating structure at once, and a moment later Veyrath’s bracelet became painfully hot around his wrist.

Grey didn’t simply dump fire into the middle of the storm, because even he knew that blindly feeding heat into a vortex could make the damned thing stronger, so instead he targeted the places where the hurricane’s lower inflow was feeding energy toward the rotating core.

Heat exploded through those regions in a broad, uneven ring.

The result was immediate.

Air that should have continued spiraling inward suddenly became violently buoyant and surged upward far too early, ripping sections of the hurricane’s inflow away from the circulation before they could reach the center.

Grey continued pushing heat into carefully chosen sections rather than evenly around the storm, creating enormous columns of rising air that disrupted the pressure balance and forced the hurricane to begin feeding against itself.

The Wind Elementals reacted instantly, emerald currents surging outward as they tried to correct the distortion, but that was exactly what Grey had been waiting for.

Wind and fire loved each other when given the right conditions, and the moment their currents rushed to restore the hurricane’s rotation, Veyrath seized on the fresh oxygen and momentum. Scarlet flames spread through the emerald winds in vast ribbons, twisting together until enormous spirals of red and green filled the sky.

The hurricane roared like something alive.

Fire raced along the rotating currents faster than Grey could have produced it alone, while the rapidly expanding hot air shoved pressure outward and upward at the same time.

Emerald wind compressed the flames, flames expanded the wind, and for several seconds the two forces fed each other so violently that the entire storm became a rotating furnace of red and green.

Grey grinned through the heat.

"Now."

He changed the pattern.

Instead of continuing to feed the fire, Grey cut Veyrath’s output at the same instant he used his Resonant Frame to shove against the already destabilized pressure boundaries.

The giant columns of superheated air kept rising from their own momentum, tearing enormous gaps through the circulation, while the outer winds rushed inward to fill spaces that no longer aligned with the hurricane’s rotation.

The storm tore itself apart.

BOOM.

Red and emerald exploded across the sky as rotating walls of wind collapsed into dozens of competing currents, each one stripping momentum from the others instead of reinforcing them.

The three Elementals tried desperately to seize control, but maintaining their bodies inside the violent decompression required them to strip enormous portions of their own Neural Frames from the surrounding winds.

Below, Elowen, Brad, Amunet, Mauve, and Xerchen stared upward as the hurricane vanished before their eyes.

Grey floated where its center had been, white hair drifting around his face while three suddenly diminished Wind Elementals hovered in front of him.

"Science, bitch."

His grin returned.

"So, what portable device would you guys like to be?" Grey asked, rolling The Virtueless across his palm. "I really need a Water Elemental so I can have a bidet everywhere I go, because those things are heavenly and toilet paper is a drag. But every bidet needs a blower, you know."

He looked between the three of them.

"How about an ass fan?"