Chapter 644: Separation

Pain was the first thing to rip through Grey when his mind came back to him, but compared to what the Genesis System had done in the past, this was practically baby food. His chest had been opened from front to back, several ribs were shattered, one lung was struggling to expand properly, and the black-gold corruption was still eating through his Neural Frame, yet his thoughts were clear enough that he mapped every bit of the damage before "Elowen" could even pull her arm free.

Grey didn’t bother preserving anything anymore. The chains wrapped around the Elementals tightened all at once, tearing through bodies of fire, stone, and flesh until every one of them came apart in a violent burst, whatever value they might have had for experiments or crafting becoming meaningless the instant keeping them alive lowered Grey’s odds of surviving.

The moment that burden disappeared, the chains flashed and folded inward, each link shifting from restraint into a crude imitation of the Neural Pathways that had been destroyed through Grey’s chest. They traced routes where flesh should have carried energy, forming temporary circuits around torn muscle and shattered bone, and while it wasn’t true healing, it was enough to keep those damaged sections functioning while his body tried to rebuild around them.

Grey’s hand clamped around the wrist still buried in his chest, his jaw locking so tightly that his teeth hurt as he ripped the arm free. Blood poured down his torso, but he pivoted with the same motion and drove his foot into "Elowen’s" stomach, releasing her wrist the instant the kick connected so all of the momentum transferred cleanly and sent her flying across the courtyard.

Grey stumbled as soon as the motion ended, the blood loss hitting him hard enough that his knees almost folded, so he drove Virtueless into the ground before they could. His fingers locked around the hilt until the veins across the back of his hand looked ready to split through his skin, while the chains inside his body burned through energy simply to keep the artificial pathways stable.

A shriek tore across the courtyard as "Elowen" rose from the crater in the distance, dark-gold tendrils extending from her body and snapping through the air like enormous whips. Grey breathed heavily while watching them spread, already aware that the solution he had forced together inside his body was temporary at best.

Most of his Neural Frame had gone dormant beneath the corruption, and while the chains could imitate the pathways that had been lost, they couldn’t restore the connection Prometheus needed to reach his real body. Worse, every second Grey maintained the replacement structure ate through more of the energy stored inside them, and once that reserve disappeared, the corruption would finish what it had started.

If this continued, he was going to die.

Grey knew it, but right now he couldn’t bring himself to care very much. The only thing he could feel clearly was rage, some of it aimed outward and far too much of it aimed back at himself. He had failed Elowen, so much so that someone else had been able to turn her pain into a weapon and use her own body against him.

He wanted to speak, but even that felt like a waste of energy he no longer had, so he made the promise silently instead. Whoever had done this would eventually end up in his hands, and when that happened, Grey would rip them apart slowly enough that they understood exactly why.

The tendrils shot forward.

Grey closed his eyes and shut down every Neural Frame except Resonant, allowing the rest of the pathways to fall away until all he could feel were Resonant Sense and Center of Spirit. Trying to force all four Frames to work together had already nearly gotten him killed twice, and right now he needed one thing working properly far more than he needed four things interfering with each other.

The first tendril tore past his cheek, another cut across where his chest had been a moment later, and Grey shifted between them without trying to read "Elowen’s" intent at all. Instead, he focused entirely on the attacks themselves, on what they did to the air, how they displaced pressure, how the energy around them bent, and how the courtyard responded before each strike arrived.

Grey had already realized that allowing Elowen’s real emotions to leak through benefited whatever was controlling her, since the grief and betrayal made every word hurt more while filling Center of Spirit with too many contradictory intentions to predict anything cleanly. Rage, desperation, hatred, and something much colder all seemed to point toward different actions, and whenever Grey committed to one of them, "Elowen" moved according to another.

But the same thing that made her intentions impossible to read also made her actual movements worse.

"Elowen" was powerful, absurdly fast, and completely unstable, with almost no real battle experience behind what she was doing. Even the little experience Elowen had was being twisted beneath a lack of control and overwhelming fury, so although the tendrils carried enough force to tear Grey apart, they moved more like a child’s painting than a master’s, full of wasted motion and obvious excess once he stopped trying to predict them through emotion.

Grey no longer needed to know what "Elowen" wanted to do, he only needed to understand what she had already begun doing.

A tendril curved through the air and Grey shifted one foot before the pressure reached him, while another snapped in from behind only for Resonant Sense to catch the displaced atmosphere first. He bent beneath it, moved around the next, and slowly began building a map from every change in pressure, vibration, and energy passing through the courtyard.

One attack became three, three became ten, and then the movements stopped looking random to his senses.

Grey started noticing repeated changes that happened before the tendrils moved, first in the surrounding air, then in the black-gold energy flowing through "Elowen’s" body. A pulse through one circuit shifted a shoulder, that shoulder movement altered the pressure around her, and only then did the actual strike begin.

Once he had enough of those pieces, Grey started feeding them back into Center of Spirit and prediction returned slowly.

At first he could only tell which side an attack would come from, then whether it would curve or travel directly, and after that the overlapping intentions inside "Elowen" began separating into patterns rather than blending together as meaningless noise. One stream was wild, emotional, desperate, and full of pain, while the other was colder, cleaner, and constantly redirecting the first toward violence.

One belonged to Elowen.

The other didn’t.

Grey’s eyes opened as the distinction finally became clear, and for the first time since the battle began, the cries of Elowen and the shrieks of the thing controlling her stopped overlapping inside his senses. They became two separate streams, one filled with real hurt and fury, the other using that hurt for a purpose of its own.

Grey looked half dead, his skin drained of nearly all color while blood continued to run from his chest and every step made his body tremble like a dried leaf. But now he understood what he was looking at.

This time, Grey moved first.