Chapter 669: Insane

For a few seconds, nothing came from Virtueless, and Grey started to wonder if the woman had fallen back into whatever distant memory had pulled that ancient voice out of her.

Then the presence inside the rod shifted, the weight in her tone returning.

"You should show more respect for your elders, mortal child, and perhaps even a little for the Gods while you’re at it."

Grey stared at the rod.

"Damn, does this mean I can’t make big titty jokes anymore?"

The woman choked so hard that whatever ancient dignity she’d been gathering disappeared almost instantly. Grey could practically feel her trying to recover it, but by the time she spoke again, her normal irritation had already taken over.

"Forget it, forget it, you and Prometheus are too insufferable. Just wait until my husband returns, he’ll set you straight."

A red-gold flame flickered above Grey’s head, spreading outward until it took the shape of a burning crown, and Prometheus pulsed several times in quick succession.

The angel lady immediately snapped toward him as though he’d spoken aloud, only for the flames to flicker harder while Grey stood between them and watched the argument begin.

"You know exactly what I meant."

The crown flared.

"No, that isn’t what happened, and you weren’t even there."

Prometheus burned brighter, sending another series of sharp pulses through the air, and the angel lady’s irritation rose right along with them.

Grey could understand what Prometheus was saying if he focused hard enough on the intent carried through those flames, but following an argument between two ancient beings wasn’t high on his list of priorities when he had three days left to somehow rearrange half the political geography surrounding Earth.

"Prometheus!"

Grey laughed and clapped his hands before the two of them could keep going.

"Alright, people, I need focus. Now, can you do it, big tit sis?"

The angel lady snorted. "Of course I can, and don’t call me that."

"Well, you just gave me like half a dozen names you go by, so how am I supposed to pick one?"

There was a short pause, and Grey could almost hear the seriousness returning before she answered.

"Call me Your Holiness or Goddess Superior."

Grey rolled his eyes. "Only if you call me daddy."

Prometheus’ crown spluttered so violently that Grey didn’t need to focus to know he was laughing, and the angel lady immediately turned her annoyance toward him instead.

The two started arguing again, except from Grey’s perspective it sounded like she was yelling at herself while a crown of fire twitched over his head.

"Do not encourage him!"

Prometheus flickered.

"I said do not—"

"Alright, alright, we’re running out of time." Grey waved both hands. "I have a ridiculous amount of calculation to do, so I can’t waste a second."

Grey opened his mouth to say more, but then something inside his Cyber Space changed. One second there was nothing new there, and the next an enormous blueprint had already unfolded across his mind, carrying so much information that his thoughts stalled while he tried to take in even the first layer.

Hundreds of regions spread across the blueprint, each one mapped through terrain, elevation, underground structures and enough detail that Grey could peel them apart one layer at a time without the entire thing collapsing into noise. He reached for one region, expanded it, then followed the information downward before realizing the structure was already complete.

"That fast?"

"Is it supposed to be difficult?"

Grey looked through the blueprint again, and the grin that spread across his face had nothing sarcastic about it this time. What would have required months of scouting, excavation and probably several very annoyed rulers had apparently taken her less time than Grey needed to make one stupid joke.

"Yes, yes, Your Holiness, peerless Goddess Superior, great mother of oceans and mistress of dusk." Grey pressed one hand against his chest and lowered his head with absurd seriousness. "Your brilliance has illuminated this poor mortal’s path, and I shall carry the memory of your overwhelming benevolence until the end of my tragically short and devastatingly handsome life."

"How do you manage to sound insufferable even when you’re praising people?"

"It’s a gift."

Prometheus flickered once in agreement, but Grey ignored him and spread the blueprint wider through Cyber Space, separating the nearest regions until the problem began arranging itself in front of him. Having the information didn’t solve anything on its own, but at least he could stop building the entire idea on guesses.

The angel lady seemed to watch him for a while before speaking again.

"What exactly are you attempting?"

Grey explained as he worked, starting with the catacomb formations and the way they normally expelled the Fog of Chaos to stabilize the territories above them. Instead of forcing all of that Fog outward, he wanted to redirect part of it into controlled borders, then use those borders to isolate each region and connect the stabilized interiors before the Genesis System finished integrating Earth’s people where they currently stood.

"If I can trigger one formation to change the next, then have that one carry the adjustment forward, I don’t need to rebuild three hundred and seventeen of them personally." Grey moved several sections of the blueprint closer together, watching the hypothetical links form between them. "I just need one reaction that knows how to keep correcting itself as it spreads."

The angel lady fell silent again, and Grey had already started dividing the calculation into smaller pieces when she finally interrupted him.

"If that is your goal, then why are you calculating it yourself?"

Grey’s hands stopped over the blueprint.

"Who else is going to do it?"

The red-gold crown above his head flared.

Grey slowly looked upward.

"... Oh."

"Yes, oh."

The angel lady’s amusement lasted only a moment before her tone became more serious. "With your current capacity, what you’re attempting is impossible, and even with the information I’ve given you, calculating a stable sequence across three hundred and seventeen independent regions would take you centuries even if you rushed."

Grey’s expression tightened while he looked back over the blueprint, but she wasn’t finished.

"You would need to account for every variation in every formation, then recalculate everything that follows each time one response differs from your expectation. Even if I slowed the process enough for you to double and triple check every stage before continuing, I would still place your odds of making one small mistake that ruins everything afterward at roughly fifty percent."

"Fifty-fifty?"

"Approximately."

Grey pursed his lips as the actual size of the problem became clearer. For once there wasn’t much room to argue. His mind had improved by an absurd amount, but this wasn’t one massive calculation so much as billions of dependent ones stacked together, where a tiny error near the beginning could poison everything that followed.

His eyes drifted toward Prometheus.

"How much would it cost to have him do it?"

The angel lady didn’t answer immediately, and Grey’s suspicion rose with every fraction of a second that passed.

"I kind of already bled an empire dry building Prometheus’ Vessel, so I’d like to know whether I’m about to bankrupt Elowen twice."

A number flashed across Grey’s vision, and his eyes tracked across it once before he counted the digits again to make sure he hadn’t somehow imagined several of them. By the time he reached the currency marker at the end, the corner of his mouth had already started twitching.

"Is that six digits followed by Blue Cyber Cores?"

Grey slowly turned toward Prometheus.

"Are you insane?"