Chapter 663: Almost Rekindled

Kronos shattered into a storm of ruby-red fragments, each piece translucent enough for Grey to see the thin crimson cracks running through its center before they broke apart again. The fragments floated for only a moment before collapsing into motes of red light, and as the last trace of the God disappeared from the road, a familiar notification settled in front of Grey’s eyes.

—

[VICTOR: Grey Temolt]

—

Grey barely had time to grin before the notification flickered violently, disappeared, then returned with a line of static running through the center.

—

[ERROR]

[Unregistered System Interaction Detected]

[Searching...]

[Unaffiliated World Interference Located]

[World Identified: Earth]

[Tracing Point of Interference...]

[Primary Point Located]

[Grey Temolt]

—

Grey’s smile slowly faded as another screen replaced it.

—

[World Earth currently exists outside direct Genesis System jurisdiction.]

[Authority conditions have been satisfied.]

[Would you like to initiate World Integration?]

[YES/DELAY]

—

Grey stared at the choices without moving.

This was what Amunet had brought him here for, the entire reason she had been willing to risk entering a ruin connected to Kronos in the first place, and after everything that happened Grey had somehow stumbled into exactly the result they needed.

The problem was that he had expected to understand a little more by the time he reached this point, or at least have some idea what "integrating Earth" actually meant beyond putting billions of people underneath the Genesis System’s protection.

Protection sounded nice until Grey remembered who was doing the protecting.

He looked down at Virtueless. "Angel lady, what exactly happens if I press yes?"

There was no answer, and Grey’s expression immediately tightened as he reached through the connection between himself and the rod. For a moment he thought Kronos’ attack had done something after all, but he could still feel her presence buried inside Virtueless, quiet and unusually faint without feeling damaged or unstable.

She was asleep.

’Fuck.’

Grey looked back toward the prompt, hesitated for another few seconds, then chose DELAY. The Genesis System had spent quite enough time throwing him into situations without explaining shit first, so for once it could sit there and wait until Grey had someone available to tell him exactly what he was agreeing to.

The notification disappeared, but the space where Kronos had shattered suddenly twisted in on itself.

There was no treasure chest, no neatly labelled reward, and no Genesis notification explaining what Grey was looking at. A ball of crackling red energy simply appeared in the air, hovering inside a patch of nothingness that seemed to have been cut away from the world, crimson arcs crawling across its surface with enough intensity that Grey could feel his Recursive and Branching Frames reacting before he even touched it.

"Well, that’s not ominous at all."

Grey reached out and grabbed it.

Crimson fractals exploded across his palm, racing beneath his skin before branching through his arm and across his chest like a network of glowing circuitry. Grey’s Neural Frame opened beneath the pressure, Recursive and Branching surging so violently that the imbalance he’d been dealing with ever since Linear and Resonant advanced began correcting itself almost in real time.

Kronos was on an entirely different level from Atlas, and this wasn’t remotely the same situation as when Grey had forced power out of The Virtueless. The Genesis System was actively rewarding him this time, taking the remnant of something that had once belonged to a God and trying to use it to push Grey as far along the same path as his body could tolerate.

It had to be remembered that defeating a fragment of Kronos was supposed to be one of the possible routes toward a perfect clear of the Third Arc. Grey wasn’t even there yet.

Fortunately, he also wasn’t the same person who had blindly allowed every improvement to wash through his Neural Frame when the Genesis System decided to give him something. His Resonant Sense turned inward, Soul Link settling over it almost naturally now, and Grey began separating what actually fit him from what the reward was trying to force into place.

Recursive thickened first, familiar routes repeating until they became more stable, faster, and increasingly difficult to interrupt. Branching followed with an almost ridiculous explosion of internal complexity, but Grey stopped most of the new growth before it could properly establish itself and instead fed the energy into structures that already existed.

He didn’t need more paths.

Grey already had so many routes through his Neural Frame that he wasn’t convinced he’d ever use all of them, and adding another billion options wasn’t going to magically make him better. These rewards didn’t truly create something new anyway, they seemed to push a Neural Frame farther down developments it would have eventually reached on its own, amplifying and refining what should have taken Classes of growth to achieve naturally.

That probably explained Center of Spirit.

Grey was still only Vector Class through his ordinary Frames, yet he’d pushed an Ability all the way to Level 36, something that should have been completely impossible under normal progression. His Neural Frame had been developed ahead of where his Class said it should be for so long that the old restrictions were starting to mean less and less.

Grey squeezed his fist and cut the flow.

A violent cloud of crimson energy burst out from his back and shoulders, everything Grey had rejected scattering into the atmosphere before it could settle into his Neural Frame. He expected it to disappear, only for the fifth chain connected to Prometheus to snap outward so quickly that Grey barely saw the movement.

The chain plunged straight through the cloud.

Red energy rushed down its length, every link glowing brighter as Prometheus swallowed what Grey had thrown away, and Grey raised an eyebrow as the last trace disappeared into the fifth ring.

"Alright. Knock yourself out."

He honestly didn’t care very much, since evening out Recursive and Branching had been the only part of the reward he really wanted. Grey had reached the point where adding more strength to his Neural Frame almost felt redundant, especially when Prometheus was still sitting at the bottom of his actual Class progression and holding everything else back.

It was probably about time he focused on finding a true Dominion Class existence to beat the shit out of so he would get Prometheus to Phase IV.

The instant the thought formed, something roared through Grey’s body.

His back arched as all five chains snapped straight at once, the fifth ring blazing so brightly that the red-gold light swallowed his entire hand. The energy Prometheus had absorbed wasn’t remaining inside the chain at all, it was being dragged through the Vessel and compressed again and again, every cycle refining it before pouring it directly into the Spirit.

Grey’s breath caught when Prometheus finally moved.

—

[Frame: Prometheus]

[Proving Class > Established Class]

—

The advancement hit nothing like any Frame breakthrough Grey had experienced before.

His other Frames had changed him, improved him, opened new paths through his Neural Frame, but Prometheus sat at the center of everything in a way none of them did. When it advanced, the entire Vessel reacted with it, the five rings tightening around his fingers as every chain became more substantial and the red-gold circuits running through them suddenly felt less like foreign machinery and more like extensions of Grey’s own body.

Grey barely had enough time to process that before Prometheus pulled again.

The remaining crimson energy rushed through the fifth chain, then spread into the other four, carrying traces of Recursive, Branching, Linear and Resonant back toward the Spirit at their center. It wasn’t taking any one of those paths for itself, but somehow the act of housing all four made Prometheus feel increasingly complete, as though each chain was giving it another angle from which to understand the Vessel carrying it.

The pressure doubled.

Grey stumbled, his palm slamming against the road while red-gold fractals raced outward from his fingers and crawled through the cracks in the asphalt. His Soul Link expanded involuntarily, and for several seconds Grey felt every part of himself at once, his physical Neural Frame, its metaphysical reflection, the four artificial chains layered over both and Prometheus burning at the center of it all.

Then the fifth ring pulsed.

—

[Frame: Prometheus]

[Established Class > Vector Class]

—

Grey froze.

The change swept through him without another explosion of power, yet somehow that only made it feel more ridiculous. Prometheus settled into the same Class as every other one of his Frames, and the instant it did, all five of them seemed to lock together with a precision Grey hadn’t realized they were missing.

Paths that had felt close enough suddenly aligned perfectly, signals that used to lose fractions of themselves crossing between Frames stopped losing anything at all, and the five chains hung around Grey in complete silence while his Resonant Sense reflected the difference back at him.

Grey slowly rose to his feet.

"... Holy shit."

For the first time since Prometheus had chosen him, it was no longer dragging behind the rest of Grey’s Frames.

It had caught up.