Chapter 667: First Order

Duke looked Amunet over with absolutely no shame, his smile widening as he leaned against the side of the temple. "You know, I really don’t understand what you see in him. Grey’s way too fickle, but me? I’m a one-woman kind of guy. I’d treat you right."

Grey turned toward Amunet, fully expecting Duke to learn a very painful lesson about flirting with women who could rip his spine out through his mouth.

Instead, Amunet slowly looked away from Duke and settled her eyes on Grey, which was odd enough on its own, only for Sabrina to do the exact same thing a moment later.

James snorted, Lilac’s shoulders started shaking, and even Benn had a grin spreading across his face while Grey looked between them all in disbelief.

"You’ve gotta be kidding me. Can’t you people see we have an existential crisis to deal with?"

Amunet didn’t respond, and Sabrina somehow managed to make her stare even flatter.

Duke glanced between the three of them before his expression changed, the bastard apparently realizing that he’d accidentally walked into something far more entertaining than whatever chance he thought he had with Amunet.

Grey could practically feel everyone waiting for him to dig himself deeper, so naturally he did.

"You know what? Fuck all of you. I’m literally king of the world now. If I want to have both of you, what are you gonna do about it?"

Sabrina and Amunet’s eyes widened at the same time, but Grey had already stepped forward.

One hand cracked across Sabrina’s ass, the other landed just as cleanly on Amunet’s, and he passed straight between them before either woman had enough time to decide to murder him.

"Alright folks, we’ve got work to do. First order of business, we return to my other wife’s empire. Second order, I kick ass."

Nobody answered.

Grey kept walking, because stopping would probably get him killed, but there was a grin stretching across his face now that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier.

He rubbed his fingers together, remembering the springiness of both cheeks, and somewhere between that and the sound of Duke choking back laughter behind him, the shadow that had settled over Grey’s thoughts after the Genesis System rejected the integration began to loosen.

It wasn’t that the problem had gotten any smaller. The Genesis Council was still moving, Earth was still caught between hundreds of outside claims, and the Genesis System had just informed him that the normal way of fixing that mess wouldn’t work.

But normal had never really done Grey much good anyway, and once he stopped overthinkign everything, another potential idea started to bloom. He wasn’t much of a thinker anyway, he was far more of a doer.

’Normal World Integration Cannot Proceed....’

Normal.

Grey’s steps slowed.

The Genesis System hadn’t told him it was impossible. It had told him that whatever process it usually used had looked at Earth and organize integration had apparently shit itself.

’Fucking useless.’

A grin started working its way across Grey’s face again despite his thoughts.

It had already taken the damned thing long enough to start integrating Earth in the first place, and then, when it finally got around to it, humanity had been scattered all over creation like someone threw a deck of cards into a hurricane. Now the Genesis System was confused because the pieces weren’t neatly sitting where it expected them to be.

Clearly, what it really needed a guiding hand.

Grey stopped beside the teleportation array he and Amunet had originally used to reach the temple, his gaze lowering toward the old circuitry carved through the stone. He had spent enough time buried in formations lately that the thought came almost naturally.

The problem wasn’t necessarily that Earth’s people were separated. The problem was that the Genesis System was reading all of those separated territories as different political and spatial entities instead of pieces of the same whole.

A formation could change that.

Not some little teleportation pad or barrier formation either. Grey would need something fucking enormous, something capable of reaching across every Earth territory and tying them together strongly enough that the Genesis System had no choice but to recognize the connection.

The question was how.

Grey’s grin widened even more, becoming wild and unbridled.

’For once the Fog of Chaos might be useful.’

The Fog already existed between territories, worlds, and spaces that had no business touching one another. Grey had spent enough time watching it bend distance and swallow boundaries to know that whatever rules normal space followed, the Fog took one look at them and used them to wipe its ass. If he could make use of that, then he didn’t necessarily need to reach three hundred territories through ordinary space at all.

He just needed to give the Genesis System a better answer than the one it had right now.

Amunet finally noticed the change in his expression. "What?"

Grey looked over at her. "Don’t worry about it, your king is going to save the day like he always does."

Amunet blinked and for some inexplicable reason, she actually relaxed and just barely managed to stop herself form smiling. She caught glimpses of everyone else only to realize that they were feeling the same exact way, whatever weight there had been on their shoulders vanishing.

Amunet turned back to Grey and stared at him for a small while and decided to ask. "What did you figure out?"

"Nothing yet." Grey stepped onto the teleportation array, still working through the idea as the circuitry began to glow beneath his feet. "But if normal integration can’t proceed, then let’s just do it abnormally."

That only earned him another stare, but Grey was already reaching for the connection the array had used before. He didn’t bother trying to explain the rest because there wasn’t anything to explain yet, only the beginning of an idea, and Amunet had never seen half the shit he’d learned about formations anyway. By the time he came back, he intended to have something considerably more useful than a theory.

"Where are you going?" Sabrina finally asked.

Grey glanced back. "My other wife’s empire. Keep up."

The teleportation array flared.

Amunet’s expression changed as she realized he really was leaving right after what he’d done, while Sabrina’s hand finally moved to cover the spot he’d slapped. Grey caught the motion, smiled brightly, and disappeared before either of them could decide to do something about it.

Silence returned to the temple.

Sabrina stood frozen with one hand against her ass.

Amunet slowly looked down, then seemed to realize her own hand had been in the same place the entire time.

Neither woman said a word.

They only stared at the empty teleportation array where Grey had disappeared.