Chapter 640: Romeo

Elowen smiled when Grey finally noticed her, and after everything that had been running through his head for the last half hour, he had to consciously force himself to smile back. The last time they’d properly interacted, he’d grabbed her off the throne and kissed her in front of half the Palace, so suddenly brushing her off now would probably make him look like even more of an asshole than usual.

He had already managed to hurt one woman today, and getting strike two before the sun even finished setting felt excessive. Elowen watched his face for another second before laughing softly, which only made Grey’s forced expression look even worse.

"You’re not very good at pretending. Is that why you never bother filtering anything you say?"

Grey scoffed, some of his usual irritation surfacing almost automatically. "My acting skills are fucking incredible. You should’ve seen me in my middle school play, I played the hell out of Romeo."

Elowen chuckled. "And who was your Juliet?"

Grey opened his mouth to answer, but the words never came.

The question itself wasn’t strange, yet something about it caught against his thoughts. Nobody in this world ever understood his references unless he explained them first, not the movies, the games, the random cultural bullshit, or the things everyone on Earth would understand without needing context.

Only people from Earth ever got those.

’Why the fuck does she know Romeo and Juliet?’

Grey barely completed the thought before Elowen moved.

There was no visible transition between the smiling woman standing several meters away and the blur already in front of him, one hand driving toward the center of his chest fast enough that Grey only registered what was happening when her fingers were already close to his heart. Shadow Forces reacted before the rest of him did, darkness twisting around his body as he vanished sideways and reappeared several meters away while Elowen’s strike passed through empty air.

Grey’s shoes dragged across the courtyard as he twisted back toward her, and what he saw erased the last remnants of distraction from his mind. Elowen’s smile had disappeared completely, her face settling into something cold and emotionless while radiant gold slowly spread through her eyes from the center outward.

A small piece of skin along her chin cracked.

The fragment flaked away and fell soundlessly to the stone, revealing a smooth golden surface beneath that looked nothing like flesh. It almost seemed as though Elowen’s body had been wrapped in artificial skin, with the real thing underneath shaped from the polished surface of a golden statue.

’A golden statue...’

Grey’s stomach twisted as the image connected immediately to another one.

He had seen something like this before during the final battle of the First Arc, when Elowen’s mother had shed more and more of her human appearance beneath the pressure of all that Holy Energy. By the end, the Goddess Empress had looked less like a woman than something carved out of white-gold divinity.

Grey’s expression became ugly.

Had her mother taken over Elowen somehow? Had some portion of the Goddess survived the battle and remained buried in her daughter, or had whatever was happening started much earlier than Grey realized?

His chest tightened as a worse thought followed.

He hadn’t noticed anything.

Grey had always trusted his instincts around people, especially after spending enough time with someone to learn how they spoke, moved, hesitated, or reacted when uncomfortable. He had watched Elowen break down over her mother, seen her angry, embarrassed, frightened, relieved, and happy, yet whatever was standing in front of him had imitated her well enough that one misplaced Earth reference was the only reason Grey noticed something was wrong.

If she hadn’t slipped, would he have realized at all?

Then another question immediately complicated everything further. Why would Elowen’s mother know Romeo and Juliet either?

The Goddess Empress had spent her existence trapped within Melix and obsessed with escaping the limits of her bloodline, so there was no obvious reason for her to know anything about a play written on Earth. If this really was her mother controlling Elowen, then the mistake still didn’t fit.

Grey didn’t get enough time to untangle it.

Elowen attacked again, only this time she moved even faster.

Grey tried to pull Shadow Forces through the correct pathways while compensating for the imbalance between his Neural Frames, but his thoughts were still too fractured and his response came half a step late. Her palm slammed into the center of his chest before the displacement completed, and his ribs caved inward with a sickening crunch as he was launched across the courtyard.

His body struck the stone hard enough to bounce before rolling several meters, blood filling his mouth while broken ribs pressed inward against organs they had no business touching. Grey forced himself through the pain and immediately tightened the five chains rather than focusing on his own injuries, preventing the captured Elementals from taking advantage of the opening.

That was another problem he hadn’t had time to solve.

The Fire and Earth Elementals were still restrained behind him, their bodies bound tightly while the Prometheus Vessel fed constant corrections through the chains. Releasing them would free a large portion of Grey’s Neural Frame, but there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t immediately join whatever was attacking him.

He couldn’t afford to let them go.

That meant a significant amount of his focus remained occupied maintaining their restraints, while the tension running through the chains limited how freely he could use one of his arms. Combined with the imbalance between his Linear, Resonant, Recursive, and Branching Frames, Grey was being forced to coordinate combat, healing, restraint, and displacement through pathways that still weren’t behaving as naturally as they should.

He spat blood onto the ground and pushed himself partially upright, but something felt wrong almost immediately. There should already have been guards coming.

The first attack had crossed the courtyard in an instant, and the second had driven Grey into the ground hard enough that the surrounding Palace should have felt it. Brad should have heard something, Mauve should have noticed, and at the very least the city itself should have carried the vibrations outward through the stone.

Instead, there was nothing.

Grey pressed one palm flat against the courtyard and focused on what the Resonant Frame was telling him. The stone beneath him was far too stable, the vibrations from his impact travelling only a short distance before fading as though the entire area had been wrapped in a boundary designed to swallow every consequence before it could escape.

His expression darkened further. This definitely hadn’t started when Elowen attacked him.

The isolated courtyard, the convenient meeting, the perfect imitation right up until one careless reference... all of it had been arranged before Grey ever arrived here.

Elowen was technically considered an NPC by the Genesis System, no matter how much Grey hated thinking about her that way now. If there were people who could have their actions overwritten, controlled, or forcefully redirected by some higher authority within the Games, then someone tied directly to the world itself might be far more vulnerable than a Candidate.

That would explain the strength she was showing now as well.

Grey’s Resonant senses spread outward despite the pressure on his Frames, tracing the radiant energy flooding through Elowen’s body until he caught the pathway feeding it. His face tightened as the answer became obvious.

The catacomb formation.

The same territorial network Grey had spent so much time repairing and strengthening was pouring power into her from beneath the city. Its channels were pulsing in synchronization with Elowen’s movements, turning her into a conduit for strength that had never belonged to her, and seemingly breaking her apart all the while.

Grey slowly forced himself to his feet while the damaged ribs began shifting back into place.

His confusion hadn’t disappeared, and neither had the cold pressure in his chest, but the worst of the turmoil was settling into something sharper now.

Whoever was doing this had isolated him, hijacked Elowen, and was using the formation he had repaired to strengthen her enough to kill him.

Grey stared at those radiant golden eyes and said nothing. Somewhere deep inside, something was churning through him, a bubbling, smoldering fury. It felt like just standing here... he was losing Elowen forever.

And the worst part? He hadn’t even known who Elowen was enough to know exactly what was being erased. And it was all his fault.