Amunet’s gaze flickered. "I really don’t know."
Grey looked away from her and back toward the Old One on the throne. It hadn’t taken action after sending Grey flying, and if it could hear them right now, it wasn’t acting as though it had. Still, Grey didn’t care.
In this case, he had gone from one timer to the next. Very little had changed. Either a city was going to fall on his head or tens of thousands of arms were going to squash him to death.
Grey bent down, stretching out a leg and hopping a bit to fully loosen up his muscles. The last of the energy that hadn’t quite combined with him diffused through his veins and he felt like his Stamina was brimming at the top.
Five minutes. That was the most time he could spend on this battle, and even that was likely to be too little.
From what he could tell, if this Old One wasn’t in the Dominus Class, then it was very close. However, likely due to basically being half dead—or maybe even fully dead considering the state of the thing—the unique aspects of the Dominus Class were dormant.
Grey could still remember how oddly he had died before, and honestly if he came across someone in the Dominus Class now, he wasn’t sure if he’d have a method of countering it. This simply wasn’t a matter raw power could overcome. However...
Grey’s body began to glow with a dark gold light.
He had been so focused on the changes the Mechanical Jaw Spirit had caused in him that he had almost missed something else.
His Dark Solveign Frame felt completely different.
This was the first time that Grey had used it since absorbing that odd lightning seed from the Volthari. He thought the only benefit he gained was a +100% to his INT and PER.
He had been very wrong.
Sparks danced in Grey’s eyes, one connection in his Neural Frame after another dancing with life and electricity as his body felt more primed than ever before.
The true benefit of the lightning seed wasn’t an increase to his stats, not his INT or his PER...
But the change in his attunement toward the elements.
Grey remembered his suffering during the first few loops of the closed loop. One of the first things Prometheus had told him back then was that as powerful as he felt his Frames were, they were limited by his bloodline and race.
His Dark Solveign—previously his Helion Frame at the time—was one of the foremost culprits. It was a Frame designed for an elemental creature, but humans were the furthest thing from such existences.
More sparks danced in Grey’s eyes, but then his Frame began to extend from his body almost as though the characteristics of his Resonant Type Frame were spilling over into his Branching Type Frame.
When Grey leapt from the city walls, it almost felt like he was the sun, not just mimicking it. Not just in quality of energy, but in scope. His wings of magnetic field lines had spread so wide he felt like a small tiny dot in the middle of it all.
And now that he thought about it, even the shots and roars he had used to shatter arms wasn’t entirely the Gnome blood flooding through him right now either. His ability to control energy, direct its flow, especially from afar, had reached an unprecedented level.
It was just that too little time had passed since he had the seed, not to mention the fact his Stamina was at the bottom of its barrel since then, so how could he have noticed?
But now... now he had noticed. Especially after he managed to divert the attack of the Old One before it hit him.
That was the real reason the Old One hadn’t moved yet. It had seen Grey’s ability to counter it...
And it was wary.
"You should be."
A grin spread across Grey’s face, the digital pixels of his Helm Frame flickering and dancing with life and vitality.
Grey changed his mind.
"Two minutes." Grey said as he stood to his full height from his stretch. "That’s how long you have to hold on for."
"And what do I get in return for that?" Amunet asked.
"Your life." Grey said with an uproarious laughter. "I’m not the one who told you to jump down here with me. Look alive, princess."
Grey hopped up, and by the time he was on the way down, the amusement in his eyes had completely vanished.
By the time the barest tip of his toes had grazed the ground, his Dark Solveign Frame had fully activated, a pair of butterfly wings formed of pulsing magnetic lines flashing out to his left and right, stretching clear for over 50 meters and incinerating every hand and arm that came in close contact with it.
The instant his toes made full contact with the ground, his legs were already bending, his quads exploding with power, his veins pumping with a deluge of endless volatile strength.
BOOM.
It wasn’t even clear when Grey went from falling to accelerating. It simply felt like he had already broken the sound barrier, leaving an afterimage in his wake as the ground shook.
Amunet had raised her hands the moment Grey spoke, and yet her hands hadn’t even quite clapped together yet by the time Grey had already closed in the distance on the Old One, his power blooming like an avalanche.
He didn’t even look human anymore. He looked like a shooting star blazing across the skies.
And the more power he poured in, the more he felt he could take in, the more he felt he could control, and so the more he took.
Since his spear was broken, he didn’t bother to use it anymore.
His fist would be enough.
The Old One’s flaming eyes flickered with shock and it immediately tried to take control of all the arms.
But it was then that the echo of Amunet’s clap resonated through the world.
BOOM.
Grey’s fist landed and it sounded as though a nuke had gone off.
Wild fluctuations of energy pooled in all directions.
—
[VICTORY: Grey Temolt]
—
[FinchTheDiddler: ...]
[GreyDominion: ...]
[EpicPelvis: ...]
[SpellSeeker: ...]