Chapter 706: Valiant Effort

Grey’s expression changed as heat raced through his circulatory system.

The blood touching his new heart flashed toward steam, and every vessel connected to it started cooking from the inside out. His Solveign resistance protected his flesh from some of the heat. His blood, however, had no such protection.

Grey realized his mistake a split second before agony exploded out of his chest. His concentration broke, and the flame heart collapsed.

Blood poured from his mouth as he dropped to one knee. Even without a working heart, his body was strong enough to stay conscious for several seconds while the damage spread.

Across the stage, Aelthar’s replacement kept taking shape without any of the same problems. Water moved through his body as naturally as the fire that normally made it up.

Breejara somehow managed to sound sympathetic while enjoying every second of it.

"A valiant effort from Grey Temolt, although it appears there may have been one tiny flaw in replacing a flesh-and-blood heart with open flame. Who could possibly have predicted that pumping blood directly through fire might present complications?"

The audience’s laughter reached Grey through ears that were getting further and further away.

Aelthar looked down at him from across the stage, water already flowing through the translucent structure in his chest.

"You should have chosen a challenge you understood. Arrogance comes with its own costs."

Grey tried to answer through a crimson grin, but all that came out was blood.

A few seconds later, his vision went dark.

...

"I’ll use water."

Grey’s eyes opened. Aelthar was standing across from him, saying the exact same words, as though Grey hadn’t just watched him build half a replacement heart.

Nobody else remembered. Grey did.

He could still feel his own blood boiling in his veins. The memory was so vivid that his chest almost hurt, even with a perfectly healthy heart beating inside it.

The 3 Rebirths he could afford were already down to 2. But at least the first one had answered the most obvious question. The heat had to go.

"Fire," Grey said again.

Breejara repeated her joke about challenging a Fire Elemental with fire, completely unaware that Grey had already heard a version of it once while Aelthar waited with the same quiet confidence as before.

When the challenge started, Sabrina moved away from the projection again. This time, Grey watched her go in silence. He had to figure this out, and he had to do it in indomitable fashion. He was the shield between Earth and the worst this universe had to offer. He couldn’t afford to fail.

Grey pierced his chest again.

It didn’t hurt any less the second time. However, knowing exactly what was coming let him push past it a lot more efficiently.

Once his heart was destroyed, he didn’t immediately force the flames into the shape of a new one. Instead, he held the energy in place, and his mind went back to everything he’d learned from the Fire Elemental Prince trapped in his portable oven.

Fire Elementals could be walking furnaces when they wanted to be. The key part, though, was when they wanted to be.

Their bodies had all the properties of flame, but they didn’t constantly express every one of those properties at full intensity. The Elemental Prince, for example, could touch matter without automatically turning it to ash.

If that was the case, then temperature wasn’t some unavoidable side effect of being made of fire. It was something controlled through the deeper structure of the element itself.

Grey had already reproduced parts of that principle while designing the Elemental mech blueprints. Now, he applied it to himself.

The fire in his chest changed.

It still looked like flame. However, the heat steadily drained out of it, until Grey could wrap it around a drop of his own blood without changing its temperature in the slightest.

From there, he formed the chambers again, rebuilt the valves, and hooked the elemental organ up to his circulatory system. Then, he forced the first contraction.

Blood moved. No steam followed.

Grey grinned, hole in his chest and all.

A murmur ran through the audience as his blood finished another circuit. Even Aelthar’s gaze turned to him with more attention than he’d shown before.

Breejara kept smiling. Though, the satisfaction on her face dimmed a little as Grey’s elemental heart settled into a steady rhythm.

"Well, our human appears to have discovered that fire does not necessarily need to be hot. An impressive correction, although Death Element Formation is generally considered slightly more complicated than surviving long enough to admire your own work."

Grey already knew that. Something was wrong.

His fire heart beat exactly when he wanted it to. The pressure adjusted every time he sensed a change in his body, and the elemental valves opened and closed on commands running through his Neural Frame.

The problem was that every single one of those functions only existed while Grey was actively keeping them going.

A normal heart didn’t wait for instructions before every beat. Aelthar’s certainly didn’t.

Grey could feel energy draining out of him nonstop as he made up for every variable his body normally handled without thinking.

A change in blood pressure needed another adjustment. Every movement changed the output he needed. Even something as simple as breathing in forced him to account for shifts in circulation that a real heart would have handled on its own.

A notification appeared in front of him.

ELEMENTAL ORGAN RECOGNITION: FAILED

Reason: External Neural Maintenance Required

Grey stared at it.

He had built a machine out of fire, and he was running it by hand. He hadn’t built a true heart, he had just built something that could stand in for one temporarily so long as he had the energy. The moment he went to sleep, he was dead. But he wouldn’t even last that long.

Meanwhile, Aelthar’s water construct kept stabilizing, while Grey’s energy dropped faster and faster. The Fire Elemental eventually noticed the strain on Grey’s face. He understood it well enough to sneer.

"You imitate appearance well."

Grey looked at him. Inside Aelthar’s chest, his watery heart pulsed once, without any visible command from him.

"But you don’t understand what you’re imitating."

Grey smiled through the blood running down his stomach.

"I understood your mother just fine."

The flames around Aelthar surged before he caught himself.

Breejara laughed along with the audience. However, the numbers floating above Grey made the outcome more and more obvious.

His fire heart worked well enough to keep him alive. The Genesis System just wasn’t counting it as a valid completion. Meanwhile, Aelthar’s structure was steadily closing in on the required threshold.

So, Grey stopped worrying about winning this attempt. Instead, he watched.

He paid attention to every point where his energy drained, every function he had to consciously reproduce, and every tiny correction his body demanded from the elemental heart.

The longer he kept himself alive, the clearer it became. Suppressing the heat had only fixed a surface-level problem.

The real issue was autonomy.

Whatever Grey made had to become part of him so completely that his body treated it as naturally as flesh. Otherwise, he would always be puppeting the element from the outside.

He could keep a fake heart beating for minutes, maybe much longer if he dumped enough energy into it. But, that would never satisfy a System that was asking him to replace what he’d destroyed. He needed something as good as his heart if not even better, otherwise he would never get the acknowledgement. And even if he did get such an acknowledgement, if he didn’t do it faster than Aelthar...

Then it would all be for naught.

Aelthar’s side of the stage flashed with golden light.

ELEMENTAL ORGAN STABILITY: 100%

VICTOR: AELTHAR INFERNIS

Breejara’s delight came back in full, though she still wrapped it in the smooth professionalism of an auction host.

"And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen. Aelthar Infernis demonstrates the true domination of a High Race. I am truly in awe. I hope that lesser races can use this as a moment to look up to, something to aim toward in the future. I know that I certainly will."

Technically, the challenge was over. Grey didn’t care.

His fire heart kept beating as he studied the energy passing through it, stretching out the failure for every useful second he could steal. Only once his reserves had dropped so low that keeping the structure going wouldn’t teach him anything new did he let the flame loosen.

His artificial heart collapsed.

Grey died for the second time.