Chapter 650: Warning

The light faded around Grey and Amunet, leaving them standing beneath a ceiling of sandstone buried so deeply underground that Grey couldn’t sense anything resembling the surface. Massive columns stretched ahead of them, covered in hieroglyphs and carved figures that looked unmistakably Egyptian, while distant braziers burned with pale flames despite there being no obvious source of fuel.

Grey glanced toward Amunet and expected some sort of explanation, only to find her staring around with nearly as much confusion as he felt.

"This isn’t what you expected?"

"No." Amunet slowly shook her head, stepping away from the teleportation point while studying the nearest wall. "There was supposed to be a ruin here, something related to him, but this isn’t what I was told to expect."

Grey looked around again.

That was comforting.

Amunet had described this place as somewhere they could confront a fragment of Kronos and use what remained afterward to create a method of bringing the people of Earth into the Genesis Games. Grey had expected something ancient, dangerous, and probably full of bullshit designed by Gods who apparently had nothing better to do than leave ridiculous trials lying around, but an entire buried Egyptian structure hadn’t been part of the explanation.

Amunet started forward, only for Grey’s hand to catch her shoulder before she made it more than a few steps.

"Wait."

She looked back, but Grey was no longer watching her. His eyes had narrowed toward the wide staircase rising through the center of the structure, thin arcs of white-gold electricity flickering through his irises while Resonant Sense slowly spread outward.

There weren’t any enemies, but...

Grey had gotten used to sensing danger through movement, Neural Frames, energy, or at least something with the good manners to be alive. What he felt ahead wasn’t any of those things, the fluctuations moving through the air were warped enough that Resonant Sense couldn’t settle on a consistent distance between any two points.

Grey picked up a loose piece of stone and tossed it forward.

It landed three steps above them.

Then it vanished.

A second later, Grey heard it strike something somewhere far behind them, followed almost immediately by another impact that sounded like it came from hundreds of feet above.

Amunet’s expression tightened. "Time."

"Time and space," Grey corrected, watching the fluctuations more closely. "They’re tangled together."

If they walked forward normally, there was no guarantee they would remain beside one another, and Grey wasn’t particularly interested in finding out where Amunet would end up if one of the distortions caught her alone. She was clearly hiding more secrets than he knew about, but there was no chance she had secretly become strong enough to fight a fragment of Kronos by herself.

He had watched her die before. Several times, actually.

Grey had just happened to die afterward and reverse the whole mess, which made it easy to forget that those deaths had still happened from Amunet’s perspective the first time around. Unless she somehow knew about Prometheus, something she wouldn’t have known he had back then from what Grey understood, there was no reason she would ever willingly let herself die on the assumption that he could eventually fix it.

Grey reached around her waist and lifted her off the ground.

Amunet stiffened immediately. "What are you—"

She stopped when she saw his face.

There wasn’t any grin waiting for her, and Grey wasn’t looking down at where his arm had ended up either. His attention remained locked on the staircase while small arcs of electricity continuously flashed through his eyes.

"Stay still."

Amunet hesitated, then wrapped an arm loosely around his shoulders.

Grey took the first step.

Nothing happened.

He waited, watched the shifting pressure ahead, then moved diagonally two steps to the right before taking another. Resonant Sense continued feeding him information that shouldn’t have made sense, distances stretching and contracting in fractions of a second while echoes arrived before the sounds that produced them.

Grey adjusted.

Then adjusted again.

Ten steps took almost five minutes. A hundred took close to an hour.

The staircase didn’t seem nearly long enough to justify it, yet every time Grey thought they were approaching the top, the distance changed again and pushed it farther away. Sometimes he stood still for several minutes before moving half a foot, while other times he suddenly crossed twenty steps in one motion as the warped space briefly aligned.

Amunet remained unusually quiet through all of it.

At some point she stopped holding onto him loosely and settled properly against his chest, though Grey barely noticed. His focus had narrowed until the staircase was nothing more than a network of changing distances and temporal rhythms, his Resonant Frame constantly probing ahead while he used every successful movement to understand the next one.

Three hours passed.

Grey finally stepped onto level ground.

The pressure disappeared so suddenly that his body almost overcorrected, and he had to take another step to stabilize himself before lowering Amunet back onto her feet. She adjusted her clothing, then looked forward.

Grey had expected a chamber.

Maybe a throne room, maybe some ridiculous God-sized arena, maybe a tomb with Kronos sitting inside waiting to turn him into paste.

There was nothing like that. The entire top of the pyramid opened into an endless sea of chaos.

Grey couldn’t tell where the room ended or whether there even was a room anymore. Fog, darkness, fractured light, and colors he couldn’t properly process rolled together in an ocean that seemed to stretch farther than Resonant Sense could reach.

Through the center of it all ran a single crack of crimson.

It split the chaos from one horizon to another, thin in some places and impossibly wide in others, pulsing as though something on the opposite side was trying to force its way through.

Then the Genesis System reacted.

A violent alarm echoed through the space, louder and harsher than any notification Grey had ever heard before.

—

[WARNING]

[A BREACH IN THE GENESIS SYSTEM HAS BEEN DETECTED.]

[ALL CANDIDATES ARE ADVISED TO RETREAT FROM THE AFFECTED REGION IMMEDIATELY.]

[CONTINUED EXPOSURE MAY RESULT IN UNRECOGNIZED DEATH.]

[SUCCESSES ACHIEVED WITHIN THE AFFECTED REGION MAY FAIL TO RECEIVE PROPER REWARD ASSIGNMENT.]

[RETREAT IS STRONGLY ADVISED.]

—

Grey stared at the warning.

Then he looked toward the crimson crack running through the chaos.

Amunet slowly turned toward him. "Grey."

"Yeah."

"I don’t think it’s supposed to be like this."

Grey’s eyes narrowed as Prometheus began to burn inside his soul.

"No shit."