Chapter 680: A Joke

Grey eventually allowed himself to be herded toward the door, though it took considerably longer than it should have when his eyes kept finding excuses to wander back toward the women. Even Lilac caught him looking once, which surprised him almost as much as it seemed to surprise her.

She had always been quiet, the sort of girl who didn’t ask for much and was perfectly comfortable disappearing into the background, which became even more noticeable when her best friend happened to be Sabrina. Standing next to someone that loud and forceful made Lilac seem smaller than she already was on a day-to-day basis, but looking at her now in her fitted blouse and jacket, Grey had to admit she was really fucking pretty too.

It wasn’t the same sort of beauty that punched him in the face when he looked at the other three. Lilac had a softer look about her, something warm and innocent that put a man’s heart at ease and made it genuinely difficult to imagine her hurting a fly.

But part of that was almost certainly her muting herself on purpose so the others wouldn’t think she was competing with them. Grey had always known Lilac was a show stopper too, it wasn’t hard to see, so how could he not appreciate her too.

Her cheeks slowly reddened under his attention.

"Okay, that’s enough."

Lilac put both hands against his back and shoved him through the doorway with considerably more force than her appearance suggested, then slammed the door behind him before leaning against it. She exhaled and turned around with a bright smile, only for the door to open again before she could get a word out.

"I told you to—"

Lilac froze.

Grey had apparently taken the instruction to change as some kind of personal challenge, since barely a few seconds had passed and he was already standing in the doorway again. The garment bag was gone, replaced by the simplest suit imaginable, a fitted black jacket and trousers over a crisp white dress shirt, finished with a thin black tie that didn’t have a single decorative detail anywhere on it.

There was nothing particularly special about the outfit itself. Put it on someone else and they could have passed for a bodyguard, a corporate lawyer, or some poor bastard heading to a funeral, but Grey had spent most of his life hiding his build beneath whatever comfortable clothes he’d grabbed first that morning.

The fitted jacket did none of that.

Lilac swallowed before catching herself and immediately looking away, only to discover that she wasn’t remotely alone in the reaction. Elowen had gone still near the throne, her amber eyes widening slightly as color spread over her cheeks, while Amunet’s gaze traveled over Grey with considerably less shame before stopping at his shoulders and broad chest, and remaining there a little too long.

Sabrina’s reaction was somehow worse.

She had known Grey for most of her life, had watched him fight, watched him train, watched him walk around shirtless often enough that seeing his body wasn’t anything new. Somehow putting him in a properly fitted suit made him look like an entirely different kind of dangerous, and for a moment Sabrina found herself almost grateful she’d never seen him dressed like this before.

If she’d had this version of him stuck in her head that night, maybe she wouldn’t have managed to give him that ultimatum at all.

That was an irritating thought. Sabrina quickly buried it.

Grey, meanwhile, had noticed absolutely none of this since he was too busy dragging a finger between the collar of his shirt and his neck.

"How the fuck do people wear these things every day?"

He tugged at the tie, managed to make it crooked, cursed under his breath and spent several more seconds fixing what he’d just ruined. By the time Grey finally looked up, every woman in the room had somehow returned to a perfectly neutral expression, as though the last ten seconds had never happened.

Grey grinned.

"Alright, my little beauties, your sugar daddy here is going to take you out to have some fun. Fuck the aliens, they can taste my rod."

A strange amount of color returned to several faces.

Grey raised an eyebrow.

He’d caught the innuendo as soon as the words left his mouth, obviously, but since when did Sabrina or Amunet get embarrassed by sexual jokes? Both of them had said worse things to his face, so he eventually decided women were weird and gave up on understanding it.

"Come on."

Grey waved everyone toward the teleportation platform.

Behind him, Brad watched the women leave without so much as glancing in his direction, then looked down at the suit Lilac had chosen for him with considerably less enthusiasm than before.

"They completely ignored us."

Mensah seemed equally wounded. "...Boxers are supposed to be the pretty boys. I have no idea what’s happening here."

James sighed as he adjusted his cuffs.

"You’ll get used to it. That guy nerfs himself by dressing like a hobo all the time, and he didn’t even fix his hair today. Look at them, they’re practically drooling."

Four heads turned at once.

The glare that came back from the women was strong enough that Duke, who had just opened his mouth to contribute, wisely decided his opinion wasn’t necessary.

Fortunately for the women, Grey was already distracted again.

The teleportation platform had lit beneath his feet while several coordinate strings moved through the projection above his hand, and he checked them twice before finally nodding in satisfaction.

"Alright! Off we go!"

Light swallowed the group.

"See ya later, old man!"

Benn watched them disappear with a smile, the throne room suddenly feeling considerably larger once Grey and the others were gone. This wasn’t really the sort of outing an old man needed to start inserting himself into, and after everything that had happened recently, he was perfectly content knowing his grandson was alive and apparently enjoying himself.

Benn shifted his weight, then slowly stretched one hip.

There was no pain.

He looked down at the cane in his hand, rolled it between his fingers for a moment, then tossed it into the air and caught it again with a quiet laugh. Whatever this world had done to him, the body that had been steadily betraying him for years seemed to be remembering how it was supposed to work.

"This place really is something."

Benn rested the cane across one shoulder.

Grey might be stronger than him now, but that didn’t mean Benn intended to surrender his right to beat his grandson’s ass whenever necessary. If Genesis could give an old man his body back, then it was about time he found out how much farther he could take it.

The only question was where to start.

**

Grey appeared on the other side of the teleportation platform and immediately wondered if they’d taken a wrong turn.

Lights flashed from half a dozen directions while voices crashed together around them, the entire arrival area carrying the energy of a red carpet event held in the middle of fucking Mars. Hundreds of people crowded the enormous plaza beyond the platform, except calling all of them people felt generous when Grey saw everything from familiar humanoids to creatures with eight legs, insect faces, bodies taller than buildings and tiny races that barely reached a human toddler’s waist.

His eyes widened. "Holy shit."

He hadn’t even managed to properly take in the place when someone spoke from beside the platform.

"Back of the line."

Grey turned.

An attendant sat behind a narrow desk with a screen floating in front of him, apparently bored enough that he hadn’t even bothered looking up. He lazily pointed his pen toward somewhere in the distance, though Grey followed the direction and couldn’t actually see whatever line the man was talking about even with his eyesight.

Grey raised an eyebrow.

Him? Back of the line? Was that a joke? He was a headliner at this event, his blueprints would be the final auctioned item, what the hell did this dude mean "back of the line"?

The attendant finally looked up, apparently sensing the question forming before Grey could even voice it. His jaw suddenly unhinged far wider than anything remotely human should have allowed, revealing row after row of teeth as his voice exploded across the arrival platform.

"BACK OF THE LINE!"