Second Genesis

Death.

Grey had experienced it many times at this point. He didn’t even seem particularly fazed by the pain anymore. Maybe part of that was the fact that the burning the Genesis System had forced upon him was far worse than any other he had faced, but the answer didn’t actually matter all that much. Not right now.

The one thing it brought him was clarity, though.

Clarity to see the Fog of Chaos swallow them whole before he had a chance to die.

Clarity to feel the jaws sinking around him and sucking at him as though he was a fucking human-sized juice box.

Clarity to feel the shift in the darkness within him.

The instant Valdris began to suck, Grey reacted on instinct. He pulled on his inventory and it responded. The darkness was interrupted just enough, the affinity of the Vampire Lord ironically working against him in this instant.

As Valdris pulled the Fog of Chaos out of Grey’s body, Grey pounced on his opportunity.

The Ball Bearing Eye face plate fitted with Esmeralda’s eye slid into place, and in those moments of clarity, he poured into it every ounce of violent intent he had.

It fused into his face, sliding over his Skrill Mask and even forging itself into it. Pain erupted as though firecrackers were going off within every little blood vessel.

A bubble seemed to burst and the Fog of Chaos around them was ripped apart.

As quickly as a small gap formed, it started to collapse in on itself. The power coming from Esmeralda’s eye wasn’t being directed toward restricting the Fog of Chaos right now.

It was being focused in a vastly different way.

Reflections of the burning star that was Esmeralda’s Neural Frame replayed in Grey’s eye again and again along with one question.

How was he even alive right now?

The iron jaw had run out of energy and Esmeralda hadn’t allowed him to top it up. His mech had essentially bricked itself by absorbing those blueprints in the end.

That last moment when he burned away along with Esmeralda should have been his last.

So... why was he alive right now?

Prometheus was a Spirit. It needed a Vessel to work and energy to pull from in order to activate.

The thought process was simple. He gave Prometheus energy and it acted on his behalf to revive him, or at least send his mind back in time.

But if it was so rigid, then how had he gotten his first few loops? Back then, he hadn’t even found the pinky ring yet. He didn’t even know it existed. So how had Prometheus done it back then?

It was safe to conclude that Prometheus was capable of acting at range if the circumstances were right or it deemed it possible.

The range was quite far as well. After all, his first death wasn’t even in the Tutorial Zone, it was very deep in the ruins... So deep, in fact, that the Fog of Chaos had been exceptionally close...

One would think Prometheus had some sort of relation to the Fog of Chaos. But right now, Grey had never been more sure of anything. If he died within the Fog of Chaos, there would be no coming back. His soul would be lost forever.

So... how could two things be true at the same time?

Wasn’t time just another dimension of space?

’Fucking Einstein over here. Get to the fucking point, Grey. THINK!’

It felt like his brain was almost at a crossroads, like he was right there and yet not quite.

Time... the fourth dimension. Physics back on Earth had called them spacetime together for a long while, a single continuum—three dimensions of space and a last of time.

The Fog of Chaos, it didn’t just seek to devour and restrain space, it should also do so with time. And for Prometheus, a Spirit capable of allowing Grey to return across the bounds of spacetime every time he died... wouldn’t it want to control and restrain that as well?

And if the Fog of Chaos was so powerful, then how in the hell did Esmeralda restrain it so well?

No matter how much Grey thought, no matter how many straws he grasped at, he just couldn’t take the final step, he couldn’t grasp what was right in front of him. There wasn’t enough information.

But he did grasp two things.

Whether it was Esmeralda’s eye or Prometheus, both restrained the Fog of Chaos, maybe taking from it, or maybe even destroying it.

Which meant just one thing.

’There it is.’

Grey’s grin spread across his face.

He didn’t need to complete some fancy, great theory of all for what he was experiencing right now. He just wanted the answer to one question.

How do I kill this overgrown fucking bastard?

And now he had the answer for that.

Prometheus’ energy poured out of Tuned Jaw 0BJ37 and into the Ball Bearing Eye.

Cyber Cores drained out from Grey’s inventory right into the Prosthetic Mech one piece after another until a blazing fire was churning within his eye.

The radiant blue of the Prosthetic Mech became an abyssal crimson, looping lines of dark gold sinking into its body so far it felt like the world would fall beneath a single gaze.

And then it did.

-

Sync Rate: 0.71%

-

Grey felt his head snap back so hard he thought he had snapped his own spine. The concussion alone left his vision spinning, everything before him blurring under a power that went far beyond the Fog of Chaos’ obstruction alone.

A beam of concentrated red flames shot out of a single eye socket, vaporizing everything in its path.

WHOOSH.

It blasted a hole out of the cabin, taking large chunks of two walls with it with so much power and force that the rest of the structure hardly shook.

Instead, only destruction was left in its wake, the Fog of Chaos reacting as though a tunnel of rotating cyclones had blasted right through it.

Light as far as the eye could see fell onto scorched earth and an endless trench that stretched further than the horizon.

And right at the beginning of that stretch stood a man with a pair of legs, a waist, and a single arm held up by what could barely be called a ribcage any longer.

The rest of him... his head, his collarbone, his other shoulder and arm, his heart and lungs, even the stomach and guts below it...

Were all gone.

—

[VICTORY: Grey Temolt AND Amunet Khepri]