Chapter 643: You Never Cared (2)

Grey felt the black-gold corruption crawling deeper through his Neural Frame, severing pathways one after another until even the pain started to feel distant. Prometheus flickered somewhere far away from him, reaching for a soul it could no longer touch, while Grey watched the light fade from his own vision and realized that, for the first time since this all started, dying didn’t feel like much of a shame.

That was new, and Grey knew it even through the haze swallowing his thoughts. Ever since the first time Prometheus dragged him back, he had died unwillingly, and every death after that had been the same no matter how much he complained about it.

Even when the Genesis System’s wrath tore him apart so completely that every second made him wish the pain would stop, there had still been some part of him underneath all of it screaming that he wanted to come back.

This time, there wasn’t.

His useless intuition had finally pieced together enough of what must have happened to Elowen that Grey wasn’t even sure he deserved another chance. She had been trapped inside her own body for days, waiting for him specifically, and when Grey finally woke up, he had been so focused on reclaiming some meaningless bit of pride and tasting her lips again that he kissed the thing wearing her face without noticing anything at all.

Maybe an asshole like him deserved exactly this.

"GREY!"

The voice came from somewhere so distant that Grey almost mistook it for another fragment of his failing mind, but it struck again, sharper this time, carrying enough panic that something inside his corrupting soul finally shifted toward it. The darkness peeled back just enough for Grey to become aware of another presence, and the angel lady nearly sagged with relief when she realized he had finally heard her.

"Oh, thank the Gods, you can hear me." Her relief lasted less than a second before panic took over again. "Grey, get your act together! If you let this continue, you’re actually going to die this time, and I mean die, not whatever nonsense Prometheus has been letting you get away with."

Grey didn’t answer, and the angel lady’s expression tightened as she appeared before him, no longer some distant voice carried through Virtueless but a translucent spirit standing inside the space where Grey’s soul was housed. Her black wings trembled behind her as she looked at the corruption eating through the connections around them, and for once there was none of her usual patience left to soften the way she spoke.

"Elowen has been corrupted by a God, and at this point she may already be a lost cause. Gods have methods that even Prometheus cannot pierce through, especially like this. If he were in his final phase then maybe you could still revive through it, but he has lost too much strength."

The corruption pulsed again and a portion of the space around Grey’s soul darkened with it, causing the angel lady to look around before forcing herself to keep going. "This is probably retaliation for what happened during the Culling. A God isn’t supposed to be able to interfere this heavily during the Second Arc, at most you should start seeing their influence in the margins during the first Chapter of the Third Arc, and even then—"

She stopped herself so abruptly that her spirit form shook. "What am I doing?"

The angel lady pressed a hand against her forehead, horrified at how easily she had drifted into explanation while Grey was disappearing in front of her. It was almost as though the state of his soul was dragging at hers too, pulling her thoughts apart and making even something as simple as urgency difficult to hold onto.

Grey should have been fighting this. He had always been reckless, stubborn, rude, impossible to reason with, and so unwilling to accept his own limits that she had watched him dive into things that should have killed him without even hesitating.

Yet now that death was actually closing around him, he wasn’t clawing for another answer or trying to break some rule everyone else thought was absolute, he was simply letting it happen.

The angel lady grit her teeth, and for one brief moment Grey thought she was about to reveal some hidden ability, the sort of final method she had kept buried until nothing else would work. Energy gathered around her spirit, her wings spreading behind her as the pressure inside the soul-space suddenly changed.

Then she screamed at him.

"If you die here, no one gets revenge for Elowen! If you fall here, they win, Earth gets crushed, your friends die, your family dies, and the ones who don’t will be humiliated until they wish they had! You don’t have the luxury of lying here and drowning in your own fucking pity!"

The words tasted disgusting to her, especially when she already knew exactly which God had corrupted Elowen. She hadn’t said it aloud, but she didn’t need proof to understand what she was seeing.

Her incarnation had overseen the Culling, and if this was retaliation for what Grey had done there, then it was almost certainly another incarnation of herself that had reached down into this world and twisted Elowen into what she had become.

This was her fault, and yet here she was, unable to stop any of it, reduced to screaming at a boy a fraction of her age and using the people he loved as weapons against him. The angel lady had never felt quite so useless.

But it worked.

Grey’s soul shifted.

A thin thread of cold radiated through the corruption, so faint at first that even she almost missed it, but it spread quickly once it appeared. The despair that had been swallowing Grey didn’t disappear, nor did the guilt, but something else began winding through both of them and giving those emotions another direction to travel.

The angel lady closed her eyes, knowing that she hadn’t only spoken to him. What she had done wasn’t so different from what "Elowen" had been doing from the beginning, using real emotions already inside Grey and pushing on them until they guided his actions, except "Elowen" had been twisting those emotions until Grey acted like someone he wasn’t, drowning him in guilt until the same boy who had fought death every step of the way simply accepted it.

The angel lady was doing the opposite, using emotions that were just as real to force Grey back toward the person he already was. The thought of Elowen suffering didn’t become smaller, and neither did Grey’s guilt, but now there was something beside them, something colder and much easier for him to understand.

Someone had done this to her, someone had used Earth, Grey’s family, his friends, and the people he cared about as pieces on a board, then reached down into Elowen’s body and turned her pain into another weapon. Cold flooded through Grey’s soul as the last traces of surrender began to disappear, and for the first time since the corruption entered him, even it seemed to hesitate.

Grey still blamed himself, and he still thought he had failed her, but wallowing in it had never been what Grey Temolt did best.

Recklessness, however, was.

BOOM.