Amunet felt the world shake around her. A molten fist landed feet from her head and it felt like she was swallowed up by the earth. The ground cracked and shattered, a strength a human shouldn’t have even had spilling out.
’He’s grown so powerful...’ she thought to herself.
But the pain she was expecting never came. Her ears weren’t working properly anymore, and everything felt so muted and hard to grasp, but she was fairly certain...
She heard him walking away.
Amunet didn’t know how long she laid there before she was dragged out of the rubble. Her Stamina actually recovered quite fast with some of the items she had, but she had stayed buried beneath the rubble because she was honestly too ashamed to get up.
"WHY?"
The roar filled her ears and she couldn’t get it out of her head no matter how many times she tried. It was the roar of a man who would never trust her again, but it was also the roar of a man who had trusted her once before.
There was an agitation in her heart, but there was nothing she could say to explain it, nothing she could say to make it better.
Did she have a reason? Of course she did. The same reason everyone had when they did something like that.
It benefitted her.
It was her chance at a truly Perfect Frame, one that would set her up for the rest of the Genesis Games and allow her a chance at controlling her own fate properly.
She had gotten lucky enough to get one part of the inheritance before entering the Instance. She had truly never thought that she would get lucky enough to come across the other half.
Could she have asked Grey for it? Maybe tried an exchange?
Yes. She could have. But then there was a chance Grey would have said no. And if he said no, he would definitely be ready for her attack and he was too powerful for her to take that chance.
Grey was a nice person, but she had only known him for a short time. She hadn’t experienced as many loops as he had, she hadn’t seen how much effort he put into scratching, clawing, and pulling them to the finish line.
And yet, none of that mattered. She couldn’t even look up.
"Amunet? Are you okay?" Jyoti tried to get her attention. "Your shroud, it’s gone. Can you put it back on? Can you manage?"
Jyoti, or J Dog as many knew him, tried to get her attention, but Amunet simply felt lost.
"Is she alright?"
A woman came over. She was tall, almost six and a half feet tall, in fact. Though, that was because she was wearing six inch heels. Even so, she stood taller than most men even on the soles of her feet.
She had dark, rich skin, and piercing brown eyes. The enormous glaive she wore across her back contrasted directly against the long red gown she wore. Though maybe she thought the leg slit that revealed a strong, robust thigh gave her enough athletic flexibility.
"Zuri." Jyoti stood a bit warily, seemingly expecting a potential attack.
Zuri smiled. "No need to be so antsy, J Dog..." she let the name drip with irony as she drawled it out. "... I’m just surprised that amongst our three forward candidates, two of them are actually women. What a world we live in."
"I think you’ve forgotten how to count."
An older man walked forward with heavy steps. His beard had greyed, but his hair was as black as night. If Grey had cared to pay attention to these people, he would have noted that this was probably the oldest person he had seen in the Genesis Games.
His stature and frame was anything but old, though. He must have been seven feet tall, his chest so large and his shoulders so broad his arms swayed by his side without interfering with his steel-like gut at all.
"I believe this—Amunet, was it—lost quite handily just now to a man."
"Oh, Hao, my favorite misogynist. I may forget how to count, but it seems your eyes don’t work. Do you see that man here now?"
Hao chuckled. "With his strength, it matters little whether he is here or not. Unless our alliance works well enough to grow a few powerful enough to face him, he can return and take what he wants whenever he so pleases."
Zuri’s eyes narrowed. "You had a hand in Alvin’s death, didn’t you?"
"Me?" Hao held up his hands, the slant of his eyes looking quite innocent. It helped that his Asian features made him look a lot younger than he was despite his greyed beard. "I don’t know what you’re talking about. What I think we should be talking about is who that man is, how he is so powerful, and how it is he knows your dear leader so well."
Zuri snorted and turned to Amunet, and then looked to Jyoti.
"Hao is an asshole, but he is right. If we are going to form an alliance, we need to share information. I remember seeing him during a broadcast, but how do you know him?"
"I..." Jyoti didn’t have an answer for them. Only Amunet knew these things, and she was entirely unresponsive. On Earth, she would get some grace. Here, however... she would be seen as weak and open to being taken advantage of.
The skies went dark.
Amunet sensed it despite her despondent state, her gaze shifting upward.
Her pupils instantly constricted into pinholes.
BOOM.
The ground didn’t just shatter, it turned to ash. The destruction spread far and wide.
Amunet reacted quickly, leaping up and shrouding her people, but by the time the commotion stopped, there were nothing but a litter of corpses around.
At least half of everyone here had died a miserable death, and for once... Grey couldn’t be blamed.
There, standing in the middle of the destruction, was a creature the likes of which Amunet had never seen before.
It had reflective, unnaturally white skin. Its body was long and skinny, its legs looking like they had been attached to its hips like knobs. Its "hair" was a twin pair of silky fins that extended down so far they nearly flapped against the ground, a tail that looked like its bony spine extended coming from the small of its back.
Its head was oblong, its nose forming a seamless curve with the top of its head, and its eyes little more than a pair of slits on either side of this seamless curve.
"So." It said in a voice that sounded akin to hissing thunder. "You are the inhabitants of the Cracked World, hm? Quite fragile, quite fragile, indeed.
"This isn’t the Zone 234 that was mentioned, but it seems that it was close enough."
It cleared its throat, its spine bone tail whipping, revealing a blade that almost looked like silk attached to it. It was so thin that at the angle it had been before, Amunet couldn’t even see it.
The creature shifted, and that was when Amunet saw its feet, a long, odd structure that almost looked like four thick, white thumbs balancing its entire body.
"Now. Who can tell me where this... Joaquin, is?"