Chapter 658: Emotion (2)

Grey didn’t know that someone in the Proving Class shouldn’t have been able to sense this layer with anything close to such clarity, and right now he wouldn’t have cared if someone even if explained it to him.

Most only developed this sort of awareness after reaching Ascendant and learning to grasp the portion of their Neural Frame rooted outside the physical body, yet Grey could feel both halves so clearly that it was almost like standing inside two bodies at the same time.

What had once felt like four Frames now seemed like eight overlapping structures, and the rage moving through both halves of him made everything he’d felt before seem almost small.

That was when Grey sensed something that didn’t belong.

A foreign influence had been wrapped around the soul-side of his Neural Frame from the moment he arrived here, pressing so gently against it that Grey had mistaken its effects for his own weakness.

It wasn’t simply hijacking his nerves and forcing stronger pain signals through his physical Frame, it was reaching into the place where fear, grief, guilt, and physical sensation all became part of the same person, then magnifying the entire experience from somewhere Grey had never known how to defend.

That was when it clicked for Grey. Whenever he enraged the Genesis System and it killed him in the most painful ways imaginable, Grey had never truly understood how it could be capable of that until this very moment...

It had been accessing and manipulating layers of his Neural Frame he didn’t even know existed.

Even if Grey could train his nerves, adapt his body, increase his tolerance, and convince himself that agony didn’t matter, yet there had always been another half of his Neural Frame sitting completely exposed. Every time Grey buried his emotions instead of understanding them, he had made himself even less aware of the very place being manipulated.

The realization would have fascinated him under different circumstances, but Benn was still lying in the grass.

Grey pushed back against the foreign influence.

Instead of resisting like a weight, it shifted beneath his awareness, and Grey immediately realized that whatever was touching his soul wasn’t stationary at all. There was movement inside it, not through space but through sequence, one moment feeding into the next while the influence stretched backward through everything that had happened since his arrival.

Time.

Grey followed the sensation carefully and felt the path running through Sabrina’s kick, the patrol units, the burning car, then farther back toward the instant he had first fallen onto the road.

Whoever had placed this influence on him had tied it to his soul through time itself, leaving behind a continuous current that had been shaping his experience from the moment he entered this place.

Grey reached for that current with the half of his Neural Frame he had only just learned to feel, wrapped himself around it, and stopped treating it like something he merely had to endure.

He sensed which direction it was flowing, understood that its influence had been moving continuously away from a single beginning point, then forced that direction to turn around. If the power had left a path into his soul, Grey would follow the same path backward until he reached wherever it began.

The temporal current bucked against him hard enough that Grey felt as though something was trying to tear his soul apart, but compared to the thought of Benn dying, the sensation hardly mattered.

Grey held on, reversed the track completely, and suddenly the world around him began retracing every moment that had already happened.

Benn’s body lifted from the grass, Sabrina rose backward along the wall, James, Duke, and Lilac flew toward the positions they had occupied moments earlier, while shattered patrol units rebuilt themselves as fragments raced across the yard.

Grey didn’t stop when the farmhouse disappeared around him, nor when the fields stretched backward into the highway and every injury he’d suffered began unwinding from his body. He followed the lingering power farther through time, past Sabrina’s kick, past his first fight with the patrol units, past the burning wreck, until he finally felt the current reach the exact instant it had first touched his soul.

There was nowhere farther back to go, and Grey forced the power to stop there.

Hard concrete struck beneath his feet as a horn screamed directly in front of him, the same car already bearing down at close to a hundred miles an hour. Grey looked up, felt the strength that had been missing from his body since the moment he arrived, then drove a fist down before the car could reach him.

The hood crumpled around the impact as the rear of the vehicle kicked violently upward, flipping the entire car over Grey’s head before it crashed upside down and screeched along the pavement.

Sparks scattered across the road until the vehicle finally ground to a halt, and Grey straightened slowly while flexing one hand. His strength had returned completely.

A guttural chuckle echoed behind him as the bottom of the overturned car tore open, and the familiar young man crawled free looking like he should have been dead several times over.

Bones protruded where they shouldn’t, chunks of flesh hung loose from his body, and half his face had collapsed inward, but a single pass of his palm reversed every injury until his body became whole again. By the time he stepped onto the road, even his clothing had changed into a perfectly tailored black suit complete with polished shoes.

He adjusted his tie while looking Grey over with open fascination.

"Of all the little ants Prometheus has chosen, you are truly the most interesting, Grey Temolt. I cannot recall the last time a mortal sensed my presence so easily, especially not one still crawling around in the Proving Class. Fascinating, fascinating, to Soul Link your Neural Frame so early on... truly a talent almost as worthy as I."

Kronos opened his palm and a scythe blacker than night appeared within it, its curved edge seeming to swallow the light surrounding it. Grey looked from the weapon to Kronos’ pale face, then gave him a long once-over.

"You’re about as ugly as the last motherfucker I saw use a weapon like that. About as pale too. Did the little booboo hurt you more than you’re letting on?"

Kronos’ smile remained, though the warmth disappeared from it as his fingers tightened around the scythe. "And of all the little ants Prometheus has chosen, you are the one with the mouth closest to his."

"Pause," Grey said, raising a hand before Kronos could continue. "You gods are going to need to walk around with no homo signs at this rate."

Kronos started to speak again, but Grey was already pulling Virtueless from his back. "Listen, oh great Kronos. As you can see, I have the homies to go back to, and a grandpa that’s waiting on some grandkids, so instead of whatever bullshit you want this to become..."

Grey pointed Virtueless directly at Kronos’ head while chains lengthened and rattled from his left hand, Veyrath blazing to life around his right.

"... I think I’m just going to take your head and be done with it."