Chapter 670: Cool Story

Grey stared at the number hanging in front of him for another few seconds, then slowly rubbed both hands down his face.

"You might as well just tell me I’m fucked."

Six figures worth of Blue Cyber Cores wasn’t the sort of thing he could pull out of his ass in three days, especially after he had already drained the empire badly enough building Prometheus’ Vessel.

Even if Grey started churning out blueprints right now, there was a separate question of whether the Towers actually carried enough Blue Cyber Cores for him to exchange whatever ridiculous amount of money he managed to scrape together.

His thoughts immediately went to Prometheus.

The blueprint Grey had drawn for the current Vessel had to be worth an obscene amount on its own, especially once someone realized exactly what it could do. A million Blue Credits didn’t sound unreasonable, maybe considerably more, and depending on the exchange rate that could probably buy him at least a thousand Blue Cyber Cores without needing to produce anything else.

There was just one small problem.

Grey wasn’t selling that shit.

The Tower had already proven that outside forces could manipulate it, interfere with it, and reach farther inside Genesis than Grey had once assumed possible. Handing over the blueprint to what was currently his greatest asset would be the equivalent of carefully sharpening a knife, placing it in somebody else’s hand and then leaning forward so they had an easier angle at his throat.

"Yeah, no. That sounds retarded."

Grey glanced toward Virtueless.

"Could I even buy that many Blue Cyber Cores from an Outpost shop? If I somehow got the credits, would it actually exchange six figures of them?"

The angel lady answered almost immediately.

"The shops have functionally infinite reserves. If you possess the required currency, the shop can produce what you purchase rather than drawing from a physical stockpile."

Grey’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"So there isn’t some sad little shopkeeper in the back counting cores and crying when I ask for a hundred thousand?"

"No."

"Good."

"The restriction comes at the Violet level," she continued. "Under most circumstances, Outpost shops will not produce Violet Credits or Violet Cyber Cores until the Third Arc, regardless of what you can afford."

That was one problem dealt with.

Grey didn’t need to find the cores themselves, he only needed enough value to convince Genesis to cough them up. He started running through his existing blueprints, discarding one after another as either too useful, too dangerous to expose, or nowhere near valuable enough to matter.

Then his thoughts came to a grinding halt. Grey’s grin slowly spread from one ear to the other.

"Hey, big tit sis."

"What?"

"You think the world would appreciate a blueprint that lets people use an Elemental as a mech?"

There was a much longer pause this time.

"... Are you attempting to genocide an entire race?"

"Yes."

Grey answered so quickly that even Prometheus’ flames went still for a moment.

The angel lady apparently had no idea what to say to that, and Grey couldn’t entirely blame her. His moral compass probably looked completely fucked from the outside, especially when it seemed like anyone who annoyed him enough eventually got moved into an entirely different category of acceptable behavior.

"There are countless innocent Elementals who have done nothing to you," she finally said. "This goes far beyond retaliation."

"That so?" Grey chuckled. "Cool story."

He stepped into the same room where he’d designed Prometheus’ Vessel, and Cyber Space shifted around him almost immediately, empty drafting space spreading in every direction as the tools he needed assembled themselves around his thoughts. Grey understood exactly what the angel lady was saying, and if he was being completely fair, she wasn’t even wrong.

That simply didn’t matter very much.

As far as Grey was concerned, there wasn’t some perfectly righteous side to this conflict waiting for him to discover it. The Elementals weren’t evil just because one of their own had tried to kill him in the beginning, and they weren’t wrong for refusing to establish a precedent where their Elemental Seeds could be consumed without retaliation.

Grey hadn’t even understood how serious that was back then. Though, even if he had, he probably still would have done it.

There was clearly history behind how aggressively the Elementals protected their Seeds, and Grey could easily imagine the sort of shit a race needed to endure before rules like that became absolute. Maybe people had hunted them, maybe they had spent generations being treated as walking resources, or maybe their entire civilization had nearly collapsed once before.

That wasn’t Grey’s problem. They had made him their problem instead.

One attempt could have been written off as retaliation, two could have been stubbornness, but the Elementals had continued coming after him long after it became obvious Grey wasn’t going to roll over and accept it. If they wanted to make an enemy out of him, they were free to find out exactly what that decision bought them.

Until now, the Elementals seemed to believe the worst Grey could do was kill whatever talents they sent after him, and apparently losing three of their best still hadn’t been enough to change the calculation. If killing individuals couldn’t convince them that continuing was stupid, then Grey would make the price something the entire race had to consider every time his name came up.

His hands began moving.

Fire came first, since Grey had more practical information there than anywhere else. The earliest design was simple enough that he barely needed to slow down. He wasn’t trying to create another Prometheus, he needed a structure capable of accepting an Elemental as the central living component, drawing on its natural Frame and converting that through mech architecture without destroying the thing that made it valuable in the first place.

Wind followed, then Earth. Water made Grey pause for a bit, though.

"Have I ever even seen a Water Elemental?"

Prometheus flickered negatively above him.

"Good enough."

He kept working.

Grey didn’t need a specimen standing in front of him when he understood the common foundation well enough to extrapolate the differences, especially with the material map and Neural Frame knowledge already stored inside Cyber Space. What mattered was creating a framework flexible enough that the elemental affinity altered the mech rather than requiring an entirely separate design philosophy every time.

One blueprint wouldn’t be enough either.

If Grey wanted people to actually buy this, it couldn’t be some absurd Dominus Class curiosity that ninety-nine percent of the market would never touch. He started at Proving Class, stripped the structure down until even someone near the beginning of progression could theoretically build it, then used that as the foundation for everything that followed.

Established came next, then Vector and Vanguard.

Each version carried the same basic architecture forward rather than replacing it, allowing the Elemental and mech to develop together while the user upgraded components around them. By Command, the designs were already complex enough that the Elemental itself became inseparable from the mech’s operation, and Grey carried that same progression all the way into Dominus without breaking the path between Classes.

Then he did it three more times.

Fire, Wind, Earth and Water eventually sat in front of him as four complete progression lines, every one stretching from Proving to Dominus. Grey studied them for a while before pulling all four together, linking the common pieces until Cyber Space began recognizing them as one enormous collection rather than dozens of unrelated blueprints.

Someone buying this wouldn’t be purchasing one mech. They’d be purchasing an entire path.

A path that started with a weak Elemental and, with enough resources and the proper upgrades, could theoretically carry the same core all the way to Dominus Class.

He had thought about going further, linking the mechs even further so that one could use a combination of elementals at the same time as well, but he decided that that was probably a step too far, at least to just give to the outside world, anyway. Instead, he left weaknesses in his design on purpose so that that wouldn’t be possible.

If the Elementals continued to piss him off, though, he just might. As for that idea itself, he stored it away to save for his friends.

Grey leaned back slightly as the completed collection filled Cyber Space. Now he just needed to know what the world thought that was worth.