Chapter 642: You Never Cared (1)

Grey could hear the pain in Elowen’s voice more clearly than he could feel the wounds she was leaving across his body. It wasn’t just rage, there was something underneath it that made every word dig into him, the sort of betrayal that made him feel as though her voice was crawling beneath his skin and attacking something far deeper than flesh.

"Die!"

Her claws lengthened as she screamed, the radiant gold coating them darkening until Grey wasn’t even sure if what surrounded her could still be called Holy Energy. It remained bright enough to hurt his eyes, but veins of black had begun to spread through it, twisting around the gold until the two colors blended into something that looked wrong just from existing.

A halo formed above Elowen’s head as another surge came through the catacomb formation, followed by two enormous feathered wings that burst from her back and stretched across the courtyard. Black-gold circuits spread from the base of those wings and crawled beneath her skin, covering her chest, neck, arms, and legs while more of the false flesh covering her body cracked and peeled away.

Grey barely had time to take any of that in before she moved.

Her clothing caught fire, the remaining fabric burned away in a flash as she accelerated, followed by a ripping noise that made Grey’s ears ring as the air struggled to get out of her way. He pulled himself aside with Shadow Forces and felt something tear through his shoulder anyway, a spray of blood appearing before he even realized one of her claws had caught him.

’Too fast.’

Elowen vanished from his sight again and Grey immediately ducked, relying on Center of Spirit to tell him where the next attack was coming from. He felt an intention to his left and shifted right, only for a wing to slam into his stomach from the opposite direction and send him tumbling across the courtyard.

Grey caught himself with one hand and forced his body into a roll before another claw carved through the ground where his head had been. He tried Center of Spirit again as Elowen followed, but this time he focused less on the answer it was giving him and more on why that answer kept being wrong.

There was too much coming from her.

Elowen wanted to kill him, but that single thought was being split apart by grief, hatred, desperation, rage, and another presence that felt cold enough to have nothing to do with any of them. Center of Spirit was catching all of those intentions at once, and the moment Grey committed to one interpretation, another became the action her body actually followed.

"You didn’t know!"

Grey twisted Virtueless into his hand as Elowen dropped from above, catching her clawed arm across the flat of the blade. The impact drove his feet into the courtyard and cracked the ground beneath him, while the chains wrapped around the Elementals pulled against his other arm and stopped him from getting both hands onto the weapon.

"I waited for you!" Elowen shrieked.

Her second hand came around the side and Grey bent backward, feeling four claws scrape across his chest rather than rip into his throat. He kicked upward to create some distance, but one of her wings folded between them like a shield and absorbed the blow before opening with enough force to throw him back.

Resonant Sense wasn’t helping him either.

Grey had already known the imbalance in his Neural Frames was becoming a problem, but he hadn’t understood just how badly until he needed all four of them to operate together under this much pressure. Resonant and Linear were reacting too quickly and too strongly, Recursive and Branching were constantly trying to catch up, and every adjustment Grey made caused the others to overcorrect in another direction.

It felt like trying to run while four people fought over where his legs should go.

Virtueless flashed upward as Elowen’s wing sharpened and cut down like a blade, the two colliding hard enough that Grey felt the impact all the way through his shoulder. He redirected rather than blocked, stepped inside her reach and almost drove the rod through her chest before stopping himself.

That hesitation nearly cost him his head.

Elowen twisted around him and the circuits across her leg flared, her heel crashing against the side of Grey’s skull and sending him skidding across the ground. His vision blurred as he rolled onto his shoulder, but the words she had been screaming followed him more clearly than anything else.

"You couldn’t tell!"

Grey pushed himself up.

Maybe she was right.

That thought had been sitting inside him from the moment this started, and every attack was driving it deeper.

Grey had spent years telling himself that he understood people, that he was good at reading them, that he knew when someone was lying or hiding something. Yet Elowen had apparently been trapped inside her own body for days, and when Grey finally woke up, he had walked straight toward the thing controlling her and kissed it without noticing anything at all.

Maybe that was why choosing one woman seemed so impossible to him.

Maybe there wasn’t some complicated answer.

Maybe his so-called intuition only worked when he cared enough to actually use it.

A pretty face, a nice ass, big tits, somebody who could make him laugh. Grey had spent the last hour wondering why so many women could fit into the same category in his head, but maybe that was the problem in the first place.

Maybe he had never looked deeper.

"Die!"

Elowen appeared close enough that Grey could see tears running over the golden surface of her cheek.

Darkness began bleeding into the whites of his eyes as Shadow Forces surged, but Center of Spirit betrayed him again, catching an intention to stab low while Elowen’s actual arm rose. Her claws pulled together as the black-gold energy hardened around them, five points merging into one long blade before Grey could bring Virtueless back across his body.

It punched straight through his chest.

Grey’s eyes widened as the tip erupted from his back, blood running down Elowen’s arm while the force of the strike lifted him slightly from the ground.

Prometheus reacted immediately.

Grey felt the familiar connection open, the Frame reaching deeper toward the part of him it had pulled back from death more than once before. For a fraction of a second he thought it had already begun.

Then the black-gold energy entered his Neural Frame.

Grey’s expression twisted as the corruption spread through his pathways instead of his flesh, eating at the connections from the inside and turning every attempt to circulate energy into another route for it to advance. It didn’t feel like damage alone, the foreign energy was forcing the Frame away from something deeper, separating those pathways from the connection Prometheus needed to reach his soul.

The Frame flickered.

Grey tried to call on it again and felt nothing.

Elowen pushed the blade farther through his chest, her face close enough now that Grey could see the tears still falling even while the rest of her expression remained cold.

"You never cared."

The black-gold corruption spread another step.

"Die!"