For a long while, Grey just stood there, not moving, not saying anything, not even really thinking.
Even when he did start to move, his mind was a blank slate his feet practically skated past, his limbs moving to a rhythm and thoughts of their own as he slowly cleaned up and wrapped up Memm’s corpse.
He didn’t even realize when he ended up just sitting on the ground beside the white-tarp-wrapped corpse, his mind still blank. He couldn’t even leave the city to bury Memm beside Globb.
All he could do was sit here and stare.
That was when he started having his first thoughts.
Who did this?
It was all too obvious.
Could this be a frame job?
As if. He was a Knight and Memm was hardly a citizen. Even if they caught him red-handed, they wouldn’t do anything. And that was maybe the saddest thing here.
There was no greater purpose to Memm’s death. It was probably done out of frustration after nothing was found on Grey’s person or in Giyoto’s mansion.
It made sense for Memm to be on the suspect list, at least superficially. Memm was a good friend of Globb’s, they were both of the lesser races, and Memm seemed to have the motivation and race traits to sneak into the catacombs.
But after that, it made no sense at all. Memm had probably been running his shop all day and there would have certainly been witnesses to that. Plus, Memm didn’t have even remotely the level of strength that would be necessary to pull something like this off.
Terran definitely knew this. But the bastard had some sort of sick fetish for extinguishing life he felt was beneath his own.
When Grey’s thoughts reached this stage, he finally felt it.
Rage.
His jaw clenched so tight his teeth couldn’t even grind against one another. They just sat there, eroding under the pressure, spikes of pain arching like electricity up to his mind. Just a moment now, any moment and they just might crack under the pressure.
He was more furious than he had the thoughts to describe. He didn’t even have a torrent of curses, his mind having become little more than a white.
—
[You have been Cursed]
—
[Plague of the Savages Status Effect is currently impacting you]
—
[Plague of the Savages has been greatly reduced in efficacy]
—
Motes of black swallowed up Grey’s vision, but this time it was little more than a decoy.
The sound of the world began to fade from him. First what little bustle there was left in the city and its night lights went, then the sound of the flickering light circuit clicking on and off above him. For a moment, all he could hear was the raging drum of his heartbeat, only for that too to vanish into little more than the feeling of vibration in his chest.
But then a spark came from Prometheus and it burned, and burned. Maybe it was responding to Grey’s emotions, or maybe it was something else, but it burned away far more than just the Curse, purging every foreign force from within Grey’s body to the point it even reached for his inventory.
Luckily, before it could do that, his mechanical jaw ran out of energy, sputtering to a stop.
Grey stared forward in the same daze of fury. It took him a while before he frowned, realizing that something more had changed in his body than he initially expected.
’The restriction.’
Grey suddenly jumped to his feet, his eyes widening.
It was gone. It wasn’t there anymore.
’I can leave the city.’
A cold light radiated from Grey’s eyes.
**
It wasn’t long before Grey was walking through the halls of Baron Giyoto’s place.
The house had once been so orderly, but now there were chips in the floor, cracks in the walls, and what furniture there had been had either been tossed to the side or sliced in two as Terran’s goons had quite literally turned over every tile.
Grey made it to Giyoto’s office and shook his head. The idiots had done all of that and yet still somehow failed to find Giyoto’s secret passage to the sewers.
How utterly incompetent.
Baron Giyoto was squatting on the ground, organizing what was left of his files into neat piles by the side. It seemed that he cared more about making sure that these were in order as opposed to fixing up the rest of his house.
"I’d like to go now. Give me the coordinates to the Instance." Grey said.
Giyoto looked up from his documents. Squatting there, he almost looked like an old man tending to his garden. It was hard to imagine how much power he was storing within that body.
The old Baron’s head tilted to the side, observing Grey for a while. He wasn’t sure why Grey was so eager all of a sudden. Had he even slept?
"You should rest for the evening. We will do this tomorrow if you’re sure. I have waited long enough for this, I won’t allow a moment of rashness to ruin everything."
"I’ll do it now." Grey said again.
There was a slight twitch in Giyoto’s eye. For the first time, Grey felt like the man was actually trying to hold his temper back. Even back in the loop he found Grey snooping in, he had somehow seemed more controlled than this.
But maybe it was because quite a lot had happened today. Grey almost forgot that he had nearly been caught snooping again.
"Sir Temolt—."
"I don’t have time to waste, Baron." Grey squatted down himself until his crimson eyes were eye-level with the Baron. "If you thought those three idiots could clear the Instance themselves, then I can do it right now."
Giyoto’s jaw set. "... I did not think that they could do it."
Grey’s gaze flickered. "What?"
"I needed them to get a lot stronger than they were first. But their team had good balance and cooperation that made their power more than the sum of their parts. I was going to help them improve significantly.
"While I do believe you are much stronger than they are, you are one lone person, and you are not ready either."
"Tell you what, Baron." A dangerous smile spread across Grey’s face as his patience reached its limits. "You stop yapping and wasting my time, then hand over those coordinates. Or I let the Bishop know you’ve got treasures left by the Savages down in his catacombs. Hm? How about it?"