Chapter 596: Fix

The three Wind Elementals were furious, Grey could feel that much even if their swirling faces still refused to show it, but fury didn’t change the fact that the hurricane was gone. Without that massive reservoir of natural force behind them, every attack suddenly felt smaller, slower, and far more honest, which was unfortunate for them because Grey had already fought an Elemental who was much stronger.

He grinned as the first emerald beam screamed toward him, shifted sideways just enough to let it pass, then sent a white-gold tendril curling around its path to follow the distortion back toward the Elemental who had fired it.

The Wind Elemental split apart before Grey could reach it, its body dissolving into a dozen spinning copies that scattered across the sky while the other two did the same. For a moment, nearly forty emerald figures surrounded Grey, each one radiating enough of the original presence to make ordinary senses useless, but Grey had already seen this trick with Veyrath and didn’t bother chasing appearances.

His Resonant Sense spread outward instead, tracking how each clone disturbed the air and how much actual Frame each body carried, until the dozens of false presences separated neatly from the three that mattered.

"You guys really need new material," Grey muttered, then vanished.

The first true Elemental barely managed to turn before The Virtueless smashed through its chest, the rod carrying enough concentrated Linear force that its emerald armor folded inward before the entire upper half of its body exploded into shredded currents.

It tried to disperse and reform farther away, but Grey’s white-gold tendrils had already sunk into the fragments, forcing the pieces apart faster than its Frame could pull them together. Within seconds, the Elemental collapsed into a shrinking vortex and then disappeared entirely.

That was when the other two panicked.

One immediately fled toward the horizon, its lower body becoming a narrow stream of wind as it poured everything into speed, while the other turned toward Melix and accelerated toward the barrier with enough force to create a sonic boom. Grey’s gaze flickered between them, and for half a second the choice looked irritatingly familiar: chase the one escaping and let the other smash itself against the city, or stop the attacker and accept that one enemy would get away.

"Fucking cut scenes."

But then Grey grinned.

"Why the hell would I choose?"

He slapped his palms together.

His Resonant Frame surged outward.

White-gold tendrils erupted across the sky in every direction, but this time Grey didn’t use them like individual limbs, because trying to micromanage thousands of threads would only drag Recursive and Branching back into the imbalance.

Instead, he let Resonant do what it now seemed frighteningly good at, expanding his presence through the surrounding air until his Frame spread outward like an infection.

The fleeing Elemental jerked violently.

So did the one charging toward Melix.

Grey’s Resonant Frame invaded the winds surrounding both of them, sinking into the same elemental medium they depended on to move, and suddenly every current they tried to seize had Grey inside it too.

They compressed instinctively, shrinking their bodies and withdrawing more of their Neural Frames inward just to prevent his influence from ripping through them completely.

For the first time, Grey understood how terrifying his Resonant Frame had become.

Grey pointed toward the one trying to escape and hurled The Virtueless. The rod disappeared with a thunderclap.

Air detonated along its entire path as raw Linear force drove it forward, tearing a perfectly straight tunnel through the atmosphere before smashing into the Elemental’s compressed body. Emerald armor shattered, the wind beneath it burst apart, and The Virtueless continued onward without visibly slowing while the Elemental was reduced to scraps of Frame scattered across several kilometers.

Grey didn’t even watch it finish dying.

His attention was already on the last one as he flicked a finger to pull The Virtueless back.

White-gold tendrils pierced into its condensed body from every direction, sinking past the emerald armor and spreading through the currents holding its form together. The Elemental thrashed hard enough to create violent pressure waves around itself, but every attempt to disperse only gave Grey more openings to invade, and his threads continued multiplying through its body until there was nowhere left to retreat.

Grey closed his fist.

The Elemental tore apart from the inside out.

Emerald wind burst in every direction, only to be caught by Grey’s Resonant Frame and shredded again before any meaningful fragment could escape. Within moments, nothing remained except drifting turbulence that quickly lost even that structure.

Grey yawned.

He considered trying to turn one of them into a mech for roughly half a second, then immediately dismissed the idea because these three were way too weak compared to Veyrath. If he eventually ran into a genuinely powerful Wind Elemental, maybe he’d revisit the ass-fan idea, but right now wasting a Proving Class vessel on something this mediocre felt insulting.

His actual priorities were much clearer now.

The Helm Frame needed to be fixed, and beyond that, he needed more support-type mechs.

The fight against the Goddess had made that painfully obvious. Without Veyrath filling in the gaps while Grey’s Neural Frame was half destroyed, he wouldn’t have stood a chance, and that meant simply building more weapons that hit harder wasn’t enough anymore.

Luckily, more Elementals were coming.

Sooner or later, someone actually powerful would show up.

Grey could probably build things for Brad, Amunet, Mauve, Xerchen, and the others too, but he wanted better material than this before he started handing out gifts. If they were going to keep following him into increasingly stupid situations, then he expected their equipment to at least be worth the trouble.

Grey took a slow breath, exhaled, and stepped back through the territorial formation with a grin.

"Well, people, looks like we’re gonna have some real trouble on our hands."

He lifted his wrist.

"Hey, sparky boy, what’s the second Arc about?"

Veyrath hadn’t even started answering before the angel lady’s voice cut in.

"That question no longer has a useful answer."

Grey’s brow rose.

She explained that the first Arc could be optimized because its Chapters followed stable frameworks, known milestones, and predictable paths that experienced Races could prepare for in advance. The second Arc was different, because once the Territories began properly colliding, the Genesis Games was no longer a convenient list of checkpoints, especially not with participants clashing directly and power becoming the only reliable measure of progress.

"So chaos," Grey said.

"Essentially."

Grey shook his head, but the amusement on his face slowly faded as something more important returned to the front of his mind.

"My Neural Frame’s imbalanced."

The angel lady went silent.

Grey continued before she could pretend otherwise. "Linear and Resonant got dragged way ahead because of The Virtueless, so if I want to fix this properly, I probably need something similar for Recursive and Branching."

He tapped the rod against one shoulder.

"Which means I need another treasure made by a God who wanted a Dual Frame, except this time the combination has to be Recursive and Branching."

Grey looked upward slightly.

"So where the hell do I find something like that?"

Inside whatever strange space she occupied, the angel lady froze.

Her heart skipped several beats.

For the first time since Grey had known her, she didn’t seem to know what to say.