Chapter 594: Imbalance

The moment Grey took his first real step forward, power surged through him so suddenly that his eyes widened. The lingering tenderness inside his Neural Frame seemed to stretch itself out like a stiff muscle finally getting its first movement of the morning, and when Grey pumped energy and signals through the pathways, the discomfort became pleasurable.

It felt like millions of tiny angel hands had gotten together and decided to give every nerve in his body the greatest massage of its life.

Grey’s grin widened and he pushed harder, expecting his body to complain only for the exact opposite to happen. Power flooded through his legs, his Neural Frame thrummed in satisfaction, and the next instant he vanished with enough force to detonate the air behind him.

A thunderous boom rolled through the hurricane as Grey shot forward, only to grind to an awkward halt several hundred meters later with his lips twitching.

He slowly looked over his shoulder. The three Wind Elementals were behind him.

"The fuck?"

Grey had passed all three of them without even realizing it.

Before he could properly process the mistake, the hurricane slammed into him from the side and sent his body swaying wildly through the sky. The sphere of calm he had formed earlier flickered around him as conflicting currents ripped against its edges, forcing Grey to spread his stance in empty air and fight just to stop himself from tumbling away.

Whatever beautiful control he had felt moments ago had apparently decided to fuck off the instant he actually tried doing something complicated.

Grey’s brows furrowed as he studied the winds, and the more attention he paid, the more he understood why these Elementals had been able to create something so ridiculous in the first place.

They hadn’t generated an entire hurricane through raw strength, because doing that would have required energy reserves so absurd that Grey doubted even a Dominion Class could casually manage it.

Instead, they had sparked the right conditions, fed those conditions at key moments, guided the developing currents, and then allowed the world’s own physical laws to do ninety-nine percent of the work for them.

At this stage, they weren’t really maintaining the hurricane at all, they were only steering it.

That was probably how the Ashen Arc candidate had wiped out an entire city during the first Chapter as well. Elementals became horrifying with preparation because they didn’t need to overpower nature, they could simply give it a gentle shove in the direction they wanted and then stand aside while the world did the heavy lifting.

Which meant Grey wasn’t fighting the strength of three Wind Elementals right now, he was fighting a genuine hurricane that happened to have three assholes holding the steering wheel.

That still didn’t explain why his own control had suddenly become so fucking weird.

Grey dodged another violent current, only to overcorrect so sharply that he nearly launched himself straight into the hurricane wall on the opposite side. His eyes narrowed as he looked inward, tracing the signals rushing through his Neural Frame.

When he realized what was wrong, he clicked his tongue.

"Shit."

His Neural Frame was imbalanced.

Grey possessed all four Neural Frame Types, something that was supposed to be impossible enough on its own, but The Virtueless hadn’t cared about maintaining that balance when Grey forcefully dragged out its power.

The rod was fundamentally aligned toward the interplay between the Linear and Resonant aspects, one focusing overwhelming force into a single direction while the other allowed that influence to spread outward and impose itself on the world.

In order for Grey to use the weapon beyond what his actual level should have permitted, those two portions of his Neural Frame had effectively been forced to evolve ahead of schedule.

The problem was that his Recursive and Branching aspects hadn’t followed them.

Those two were still operating at the level Grey had possessed before the battle, which meant the four parts of what should have been one seamless system were now badly out of step.

His Linear and Resonant pathways wanted to race ahead with their new capacity, while Recursive and Branching couldn’t process, loop, divide, and stabilize those signals quickly enough to keep everything coordinated.

That was why moving in a straight line had felt fucking amazing, but the instant Grey tried balancing thousands of variables inside a hurricane, his control went completely sideways.

"Ah, shit."

Three presences appeared around him while Grey was still looking inward.

The Wind Elementals spread themselves into a loose triangle, their emerald bodies barely distinguishable from the storm surrounding them. One of them spoke through the screaming air, amusement hiding beneath the strange layered quality of its voice.

"We wondered how we would convince you to enter the storm."

Another continued, "It seems there was no need."

"The fool came willingly."

Grey stared at them.

Then his expression twisted.

"You’re idiots."

The winds paused for the briefest moment.

Grey pointed toward them with The Virtueless. "If your entire plan relied on me being dumb enough to come inside, but you didn’t know how you were going to get me inside, then that isn’t a fucking plan."

The surrounding currents sharpened.

"Anyway, hurry up and attack already, because standing there explaining how stupid you are isn’t making it less embarrassing."

The three Elementals vanished into the hurricane.

Grey’s Resonant Sense flared just before a compressed beam of wind tore toward his head, allowing him to jerk aside as the invisible edge passed close enough to peel several strands from his white hair.

Another attack came from below before he had properly recovered, and Grey twisted his hips to avoid it while the hurricane itself shoved against his shoulder from the opposite direction, nearly forcing him back into the strike he had just dodged.

’Fucking troublesome.’

The Wind Elementals were fast as hell inside their own storm, but worse than their speed was the way every movement blended into natural currents. Grey would sense an approaching pressure shift and have to decide whether it was an attack, ordinary hurricane turbulence, or one of the Elementals deliberately using the latter to disguise the former.

If his senses were even slightly worse, the first exchange alone would have carved him into several pieces.

A compressed crescent of wind appeared near his spine and Grey dropped hard enough that it passed overhead, but another Elemental had already used the movement to position itself beneath him.

Grey twisted at the last possible instant, The Virtueless catching an emerald-armored forearm with enough force to send both of them spiraling apart while dozens of hurricane currents immediately rushed in to separate them.

By the time Grey stabilized himself, the other two were already attacking again.

His white-gold tendrils spread, only to twist into useless spirals as the imbalance in his Neural Frame caused several to react too quickly while others lagged behind.

Grey barely escaped another beam of wind by allowing the hurricane to take him instead of resisting it, tumbling several hundred meters before using a magnetic pulse to right himself. The entire time, those three green gemstone eyes remained fixed on him from different points inside the storm.

Grey slowly narrowed his eyes. Trying to force his old style of control clearly wasn’t going to work.

His Recursive and Branching Frames couldn’t keep up with the other two anymore, at least not like this.

But maybe...

A wild idea began to form.