Chapter 598: Yawn

Grey yawned.

It wasn’t even a fake one this time. Kronos, strongest God this, Prometheus failed that, ancient war, impossible path—none of it carried the weight the angel lady seemed to think it should.

A few weeks ago, Gods were stories written down by people who had been dead for thousands of years, and now she expected Grey to hear that one of those stories could kill him and suddenly start pissing himself.

Maybe it would hit him eventually.

Uh, probably not.

"Yeah, I’m not waiting until the end of Arc Three to fix my shit," Grey said, scratching the side of his neck. "So where do I go find him right now?"

The angel lady didn’t say a single word. She didn’t even have any to speak.

Grey waited patiently.

"Did your brain stop working again? Are you listening to yourself?" she finally snapped. "I tell you that defeating Kronos is a path no participant has ever successfully completed, that Prometheus himself failed, and your immediate response is to ask where you can find him?"

Grey shrugged. "My Frame is fucked now. Arc Three is later. Seems pretty straightforward to me."

The angel lady looked like she wanted to reach through whatever connection bound them together and strangle him herself. She took a breath instead, clearly trying to decide where she had failed in explaining the scale of the problem, then finally seemed to settle on an answer.

"You truly do not understand how weak you are."

Grey’s brow twitched. "That’s rude."

"It is fact."

She began with the Classes Grey already knew, the same progression his Frames and mechs had been following since the beginning. Proving Class was exactly what the name implied, the point where a path proved it had the foundation necessary to exist at all, while Established Class was where that foundation finally developed an identity of its own instead of remaining trapped inside the broad, generic characteristics of its Neural Frame Type.

Vector came next, the Class where an Established Frame stopped merely existing and began pointing toward something, turning itself into a direction for future growth.

Grey had already seen pieces of what that meant in the four Neural Frame Types: Resonant Frames gained deeper control over themselves, Recursive Frames became increasingly difficult to cripple, Linear Frames grew harder to interrupt, and Branching Frames gained even greater flexibility in how their abilities connected and evolved.

"Those three form the foundation," the angel lady said. "Proving asks whether your path can exist, Established decides what it is, and Vector decides where it is going. Everything after that is the process of making that path powerful enough to matter."

Grey nodded.

That part at least made sense, and it lined up with what he had already experienced with mechs as well. Higher Classes weren’t simply bigger numbers slapped onto the same thing, they became increasingly specialized until two items that might have looked similar at the Proving Class could turn into entirely different monsters later.

"Vanguard is the first true step beyond that foundation," she continued. "Your path gains enough weight that it can begin carrying you ahead of the ordinary limits of your Race. Command takes that further, your abilities no longer merely function through you, they begin responding to your will with an authority lesser Classes simply cannot reproduce. Then came Dominus."

Grey’s amusement faded a little at that one.

He had already tasted what Dominion meant, even if what he used against the Goddess was crude, incomplete, and held together with the metaphysical equivalent of duct tape. A true Dominus formed a Domain where their existence could impose its own rules upon everything caught inside, taking the direction established by the lower Classes and turning it into true authority.

"And you believe that is high?" the angel lady asked.

Grey looked at her.

"There’s more."

"Obviously."

She ignored him. "Beyond Dominusis the Ascendant Class, and that is where the relationship between the individual and the world changed again. A Dominus imposed their Domain on reality, forcing everything within their reach to obey the weight of their existence, while an Ascendant went a step beyond that and began forcing reality itself to change."

Grey’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"If a Dominus enters a frozen wasteland with a Domain of flame, their Domain may suppress the cold and establish an area where their flames reign," she explained. "An Ascendant does not simply suppress that environment. The world changes to accommodate their existence, ice melts, the earth dries, the atmosphere shifts, and the surrounding laws themselves begin moving toward the nature of their path."

That sounded considerably more annoying to deal with.

"At Paragon Class, you stop imposing."

Grey remained silent.

"You stop forcing change as well. The world itself carves out a place for you."

There was a strange weight to the angel lady’s voice now, something Grey rarely heard from her even when she spoke about Gods. "Your presence becomes the change, there is no struggle between yourself and reality anymore. You exist, therefore reality accounts for your existence, in the same way it accounts for gravity, light, matter, or time."

Grey stared at empty air for a few seconds.

"That’s a God?"

"That is the beginning of one."

Grey fell to silence.

The angel lady clearly saw the change in his expression and immediately pressed the advantage. "Paragon is the absolute weakest version of Kronos you could possibly encounter, and that assumes the Genesis Games suppress him as heavily as they are capable of doing. Do you understand what that means?"

Grey scratched his cheek.

She didn’t wait for an answer. "You have not even fought a true Dominus yet."

"The Goddess—"

"Was an ant."

Grey’s eyes narrowed.

"The thing you fought wore the remnants of Divine power and had enough strength to overwhelm everyone around you, yet compared to a true Dominus who has perfected their Dominion, she was an ant. The strongest opponent you have fought would be crushed by the people you are still several Classes away from reaching, and those same Dominuses would be ants before the weakest manifestation of Kronos."

That put the ladder into perspective a bit better.

Grey was still technically Proving Class where Prometheus itself was concerned to make matters worse.

The angel lady’s wings trembled as her frustration finally spilled over. "So tell me, Grey Temolt, what exactly do you imagine you will accomplish if you find Kronos right now? You could exhaust every mech you possess, burn your soul, destroy your Neural Frame again, use every trick you have ever created, and he may not even need to consciously attack you."

She stepped closer within his mind.

"Do you have a death wish?"

Grey remained quiet for several seconds, which seemed to calm her slightly. Maybe she finally thought she had gotten through to him, maybe she believed he had understood that there were some cliffs even he couldn’t jump off and expect Prometheus to fix on the way down.

Then Grey rubbed his chin, pursing his lips as though he was thinking very deeply about something. Then he got an itch and his ass and started scratching that cheek instead...

And the angel lady suddenly got a very bad feeling.