Grey strolled ahead with a smile on his face and his hands behind his head.
’Shit, I should have asked the spider chick if there was a hair regrowing thing,’ he cursed to himself.
But then he looked over at Mauve and his mood was instantly better again. Pretty women tended to have that effect on him.
Mauve walked forward silently by his side, while Brad and Stella followed behind them. The atmosphere was actually a bit awkward, all things considered. The shit-eating grin on Grey’s face and the way he kept looking at Mauve seemed to suggest that she had agreed to the exact sort of thing they were worried about.
But Grey didn’t mention it, and Mauve seemed fine enough to let the misunderstanding continue.
’This woman is a real killer,’ Grey thought to himself.
This time, he wasn’t talking about her looks. She was taking a reputational hit on purpose, and half of it was for his sake.
By pretending as though she was exchanging sexual favors for his help, she had effectively hidden the real reason for their exchange—a valuable Instance.
From her perspective, keeping these matters as secret as she could for Grey was doing him yet another favor he would have to repay somehow. But also, it was just true that she would do what she had to do.
The Genesis Games weren’t a joke. It was a matter of life and death. Keeping their usual moral sensibilities would get them killed, and a woman as pragmatic as Mauve knew that well.
However, there was a deeper layer to all of this that Grey could also see through. It was only all the more obvious by Mauve’s mention of him being "hands off" and leaving things to "someone he trusted".
Even if Grey didn’t explicitly say anything about it, who would everyone naturally think he would leave his power to if not the woman he was supposedly sleeping with?
Grey could obviously see through everything she was doing, and he was sharp enough to grasp it all. But he wasn’t as meticulous as she was—he could never scheme all of this out ahead of time and execute it to such perfection.
Maybe this was what the history books meant by femme fatale.
"What did you do back on Earth?" Grey suddenly asked.
"I was in college." Mauve replied simply.
"For?"
"Investment banking."
"Oh?" Grey’s gaze flickered. He would have bet the house on pre-law. But this was somehow even more interesting.
Mauve hesitated for a moment, but then seemed to decide to move forward with her own question anyway.
"What about you?"
"Me?" Grey laughed. "I was a junior in high school."
Mauve blinked in surprise, as did Brad and Stella.
"Really?" Mauve cleared her throat, showing a slight bit of discomfort.
Her reaction made Grey start laughing hysterically. There were really only two reasons she would react like this.
Either she was ashamed of being attracted to a minor—which was the story he liked a lot better and was the one he would stick to no matter what—or she was starting to wonder how many grades he had failed to still be in high school.
This latter story he didn’t like at all, but he still found it hilarious.
"I’m 16 years old. Well, the days are kind of blurry, I’ll probably be 17 soon. When we left Earth it was what? The end of December? My 17th birthday was in a couple of weeks. So I’m almost of age."
Mauve looked away as though she couldn’t meet his eyes, Brad’s lip was continuously twitching, and Stella was giving her back a pitying look.
All the while, Grey was still laughing hysterically.
"I think we should be a little more quiet," Stella said a bit worriedly, looking around.
The mist was getting thicker, and it was always hard to tell if there was going to be another problem around the corners.
Grey’s ears perked up when he heard this. "Do you usually get randomly attacked here? Aren’t they stuck in ruins?"
"You’ve never been out of the zone’s range before?" Brad asked.
Grey looked back and shook his head, a response that earned him more bewildered looks.
"... How did you grow so powerful just staying around the city?" Brad couldn’t help but follow up.
Grey shrugged. "Skill issue."
Brad’s lip twitched.
"When you travel beyond a certain range, the ruins fall away, the Fog of Chaos gets thicker, and the threats become more... free," Mauve said slowly. "Do you have a method of protecting yourself from the Fog of Chaos?"
Grey nodded. "That shouldn’t be a problem."
"Should we tell him your theory, Mauve?" Stella asked.
Mauve nodded and looked to Grey, having regained her earlier composure.
"I think that the ruins are a defensive mechanism. Whenever threats get close to a city, they’re trapped and forced into confined areas. There’s a sort of equivalent exchange happening between the threats and the space that causes treasures to appear as a result.
"The further from the city centers we get, the looser these restrictions are until they eventually don’t exist, and then fade back into reality as we approach a new city center.
"It’s very dangerous out here. We have a fairly good route, but as visibility gets lower, we’re risking a lot out here."
Grey nodded, but his senses worked just fine. He could feel everything within at least a kilometer, if not more. Rather than hindering his senses, the Fog of Chaos seemed to make it even easier for his Resonant Frame to stretch out—which felt odd since they should be diametrically opposed existences.
The group continued to walk forward, falling to silence again.
"Oh." Grey suddenly said after about a quarter hour. "Something is coming."
Mauve’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t doubt Grey’s words.
"It’s not a threat, it’s a group of people. There are six of them, and there’s a trio of triplets among them with spiky gold hair."
The expressions of Mauve and the others immediately went dark. It seemed they knew these people.