Chapter 662: Very Good

"GREY! RUN!"

The angel lady’s voice tore out of Virtueless with more panic than Grey had ever heard from her, but he only rolled the black rod through his fingers before settling it back into his palm.

Kronos’ Dominion was still stretching her presence across time, distant answers continuing to pulse through whatever connection he had forced open, yet Grey’s expression slowly shifted into something dangerously close to amusement.

Then a notification appeared.

—

[Prometheus Evolution Quest]

[Phase IV — The Thief Rekindled]

[Requirement 4 Complete]

[Steal and successfully retain a fragment of power, Authority, or Divine Law from an existence of Ascendant Class or higher.]

—

Grey’s chuckle grew louder. "Well, that’s convenient."

"GREY!" the angel lady shouted again, though this time he could hear confusion mixing into the fear. "You have no idea what he’s calling here, you cannot fight—"

"I know what happened to you."

The words stopped her so completely that even the pulses running through Virtueless seemed to hesitate, and Grey turned the rod slightly as though he could somehow look at the woman trapped within it.

His Soul Link remained open beneath his physical awareness, allowing him to feel the strange second half of his Neural Frame more clearly than ever, and after everything that had happened with Elowen, the answer no longer seemed particularly complicated.

Grey had always thought of emotions as interference, something to crush down whenever they became inconvenient enough to stop him from doing what needed to be done. His breakthrough had shown him how stupid that was, not because emotion was some magical source of strength, but because it existed through the same deeper structure his Neural Frame was rooted into, becoming part of the way his soul maintained a coherent sense of itself.

If someone like Grey could fuck that balance up just by refusing to acknowledge what he felt, then Grey could only imagine what happened when someone powerful enough to be considered a God started breaking beneath emotions they couldn’t reconcile.

A soul that strong wouldn’t simply collapse like a normal person’s might, especially when its Neural Frame and Authority were powerful enough to maintain contradictions that should never have survived in the first place.

"You split yourself," Grey said. "Not like someone cut you into pieces from the outside, either, you started separating things you couldn’t reconcile until the different parts of you stopped agreeing on who the fuck you actually were."

The angel lady remained silent.

Grey grinned. "Honestly, I could see it happening pretty easily in one of these incestuous-ass families you Gods have. Imagine your husband dies because of your father, meanwhile your father’s fucking your sister or some shit, how are you supposed to reconcile that? I’d probably develop three personalities too."

"You vulgar little—!"

Grey’s grin widened as fury finally overwhelmed her shock. "What? You can’t even defend the incest part."

"That is not what happened!"

"So I got the important part right."

The angel lady’s anger disappeared almost as quickly as it came, fear rushing back into her voice when another pulse answered Kronos’ call from somewhere across the river of time. "Understanding what happened does not mean you can stop this, Grey, that thing in front of you is only a fragment of Kronos, and even then you’re barely keeping up with him."

Grey glanced toward Kronos, who hadn’t moved from where he stood, one hand extended while his Dominion continued to hold the temporal dilation around Virtueless.

The body he was using wasn’t even his own, just some mortal puppet that technically gave Kronos less to work with than a true mortal would have had, since there wasn’t a proper Neural Frame inside it for his own Recursive and Branching nature to express itself through.

If the real Kronos had been standing here, Grey wouldn’t have lasted long enough to understand the first thing about him.

Fortunately, that wasn’t the problem in front of him.

"Cute trick," Grey said, watching another distant pulse travel toward Virtueless. "But I already have a solution."

Kronos’ eyes narrowed.

"Actually, I should thank you," Grey continued, and the Recursive and Branching chains rattled around his arm. "I knew she had other pieces, but finding one through time would’ve been a pain in the ass, and you just went ahead and expanded every moment she’s touching for me."

Grey’s eyes glazed over.

The world didn’t disappear so much as become secondary, the road and Kronos fading beneath the enormous current Grey could now feel running through the Dominion.

Time stretched around the angel lady like a river that had suddenly been widened from a narrow stream into an ocean, every moment her existence touched becoming louder, clearer, and easier to follow.

Grey let Recursive do what it did best first, running through the same signature over and over until the pieces that belonged to the angel lady separated themselves from everything else. Branching followed afterward, dividing the temporal river into every path carrying that signature until Grey could distinguish one fragment from another.

There.

Grey recognized it immediately.

The same presence he had felt inside "Elowen."

Grey’s chains shot into the river of time, following Kronos’ own connection backward until the farm, the Melix palace and everything between became nothing more than passing points along the path. He saw Elowen beneath him for the briefest instant, still untouched, while a sliver of that familiar divine presence descended toward her soul.

The halo that formed the angel lady’s other half had needed to weaken itself to do this.

A fragment powerful enough to act openly would have been noticed by Genesis immediately, so it had broken itself down further, peeling away a piece small enough to slip into Elowen without triggering the protections surrounding her.

As far as Grey knew, there had only ever been two major pieces of the angel lady to begin with, the one inside Virtueless and the halo, meaning the thing descending toward Elowen had to have come from the halo itself.

Grey pulled.

A shriek filled the river of time as the chains wrapped around the descending fragment and ripped it away before it ever touched Elowen. The tiny piece snapped backward toward its source, and somewhere farther along that same temporal connection the weakened halo violently surged as the power it had sacrificed returned to it.

Reality bucked and whined.

Grey felt the paradox like a mountain dropping onto the river, the past insisting that Elowen had been possessed while the new path insisted the fragment had never reached her at all. Under normal circumstances Grey wouldn’t have had the slightest idea how to carry that kind of contradiction, nor did he have the strength to deal with the halo after restoring what it had sacrificed.

Luckily, neither problem belonged to him.

Grey looked at Kronos.

He hadn’t been the one who connected these timelines. Kronos had.

Every impossible temporal relationship Grey had just exploited was being maintained through Kronos’ Dominion, which meant the contradiction had only one place to go when the two versions of history slammed together. Grey released the chains and let the paradox race back along the path Kronos himself had opened.

Red fissures appeared across the mortal body’s hand.

Kronos looked down as another tore across his chest, then several more spread up his neck and over his face, glowing with the same eerie crimson Grey had seen in the breach outside the Genesis System.

The Dominion trembled as the Recursive structure tried to reaffirm a history that now contradicted itself, while Branching attempted to create enough alternatives to accommodate both outcomes, only for every new route to feed the paradox back through the same fragment maintaining them.

Grey rested Virtueless on his shoulder.

"What was it they called this again?" Grey asked, pretending to think for a moment. "Two birds, one stone?"

He nodded sagely. "It’s not wild or vulgar enough for my tastes, but it’ll do. Babye."

Kronos’ body was almost completely covered in crimson cracks now, yet instead of anger, the God began to grin again.

"Good..." he said softly. "Very, very good, Grey Temolt."

Chi.

Kronos shattered.