Chapter 593: Hurricane

The enormous barrier of white-gold Light wasn’t something Grey had created from nothing, because what he was really doing was forcing control over the formation beneath Melix and dragging more of its dormant functions to the surface.

He couldn’t command it as completely as he probably would have been able to if he were the Territory’s recognized Representative, but limited control was still more than enough when he understood the formation better than anyone else alive right now.

After all, Grey had deduced that the damned thing existed just by looking at a map, so actually standing in the middle of its circuitry made controlling parts of it feel almost natural.

The hurricane ground against the barrier like some enormous living saw, layer after layer of wind continuously scraping against the surface while the formation repaired every instability almost as quickly as it appeared. Grey surged higher into the sky with his white hair whipping behind him, narrowing his eyes as he tried to peer through the emerald-tinted currents while his Resonant Sense pushed deeper into the storm.

Eventually, three distinct presences emerged inside the chaos, each one so perfectly blended with the surrounding wind that Grey doubted normal senses would have found them at all.

Three figures stepped forward through the hurricane, all of them wearing layered emerald armor while their lower bodies dissolved into clouds that twisted continuously beneath them.

Their heads were formed entirely from swirling green winds rather than flesh, and where eyes should have been, two emerald gemstones floated inside each storm-like face as though they were stars suspended in miniature galaxies.

Grey had never seen their kind before, but there really wasn’t much room for doubt about what they were.

’Wind Elementals.’

The hurricane itself was probably proof enough, because despite the ridiculous scale of the storm, there wasn’t a trace of rain or natural lightning anywhere inside it.

Everything belonged to the wind, from the rotating cloud walls to the pressure waves tearing across the earth beneath them, and the three Elementals stood at the center as calmly as though they were taking an afternoon stroll.

They probably should have been furious that Grey had stopped their attack so easily, but considering how much land they had already destroyed on the way toward Melix, maybe they were satisfied with the damage they had managed to cause.

Grey’s eyes narrowed as another thought settled into place, because there was something fundamentally wrong with the situation.

From everything he understood about the Melix formation, a natural disaster this large should never have been able to cross the border without triggering the Territory’s protections long before it reached the capital.

The formation offered passive defense even when nobody actively controlled it, which was part of why it could resist something as strange as the Fog of Chaos, so a hurricane capable of shredding forests should have been noticed immediately.

’No...’

Grey’s gaze sharpened as he stared deeper into the storm and finally understood what had happened. The Wind Elementals hadn’t carried the hurricane across the border at all, they must have entered Melix first and then slowly built the storm from within, controlling its growth carefully enough that the formation never registered it as an immediate disaster until it had already reached an enormous scale.

That meant they hadn’t simply figured out how to overpower the formation, they had understood enough about its rules to slip around them.

That realization told Grey something important, because apparently he wasn’t the only one who knew how the formation worked.

Of course, he doubted these three had figured it out the way he had, considering every alien bastard he met seemed to enter the Genesis Games with a complete strategy guide, generations of inherited knowledge, and probably a laminated checklist telling them when to wipe their asses.

Their understanding was probably less brilliant comprehension and more another example of how every established Race entered this place with advantages Earth could barely imagine.

Grey’s grin widened anyway, because cheating or not, they had still come all the way here and given him something interesting to play with. He raised one wrist and shook it lightly, letting the Infernal Temper Band jingle against his skin while he smiled toward the three Wind Elementals.

"What? Come here to pick up your baby from daycare?"

Their strange faces didn’t shift, though Grey wasn’t exactly sure what an expression looked like when someone’s head was literally a whirlpool. The winds around them tightened instead, accelerating in violent spirals until the outer layers of the hurricane screamed against the barrier with enough force to make the white-gold surface tremble.

Grey laughed lightly as he watched the reaction. Whatever they lacked in facial expressions, they clearly made up for in temper.

One of the Wind Elementals finally spoke, its voice rolling through the storm from every direction at once as though the hurricane itself had become its throat.

"You will die a horrible death, Grey Temolt."

"Will I?" Grey asked while lifting a pinky to clean out one ear, treating the threat like something mildly inconvenient that had interrupted his morning. He flicked away whatever he found before looking back toward the three figures, and the grin spreading across his face became steadily more unpleasant. "You know what I think? I think even if I do, you three won’t be here to see it."

Grey’s body flickered before the last of his words finished carrying across the sky, and the white-gold barrier rippled as he stepped straight through it and entered the hurricane.

The difference was immediate, because winds powerful enough to tear mature trees from the ground slammed into him from every direction, twisting vectors so violently that most people wouldn’t have been able to tell which way was up.

Grey’s body shifted once under the sudden force before his Neural Frame surged, magnetic energy rolling through him as he adjusted to the storm rather than fighting it blindly.

The three Wind Elementals remained ahead of him while the hurricane tried to drag Grey sideways, downward, and backward all at once, but his expression never changed.

Red-gold pulses spread through the air around him while his Resonant Sense mapped the constant shifts in pressure, and then he imposed his own control onto the space immediately surrounding his body.

The winds screamed harder at first, only to split around him a moment later as though they had struck an invisible island in the middle of the sky.

BANG.

A sphere of perfect calm formed around Grey, large enough that his white hair immediately settled and The Virtueless stopped vibrating in his palm.

The hurricane continued raging outside that invisible boundary, but nothing crossed into the space around him, every violent current simply bending and flowing away under the control he had forced into place.

For the first time since they appeared, the Wind Elementals shifted noticeably, and Grey’s grin widened because that tiny reaction told him they finally understood they weren’t dealing with the same opponent their plan had been built around.

Grey rolled The Virtueless once through his palm and tilted his head toward them.

"I think I’ll just kill you three now and save myself the headache."