Grey stared at the arms for a short while. They looked like they had shifted a bit, straining against something. But in the end, they remained in place.
He looked back toward Amunet, but her eyes were closed, her head lowered, her fists clenched. She looked like she was having a hard time of it.
Grey sighed and shook his head. He grabbed the crown out of the air. It was a simple one, just a band of silver and black. It had some peaks and valleys to it, almost as though it couldn’t decide whether you should set it on top of your head, or squeeze it down to press across your forehead.
Finally, Grey came to a stop in front of Amunet. A bead of sweat fell down the bridge of her nose and dropped to the ground. She didn’t seem to notice that Grey was towering over her.
"Let’s go." Grey said.
Amunet’s eyes opened and she looked up at Grey who was taken aback by how red her eyes were.
He sputtered with laughter. "Were you crying? It couldn’t possibly have been that hard."
Amunet didn’t reply. Her lips were pressed into a thin line and she didn’t seem to be in a joking mood at all.
After a while, one of the arms descended and she walked over toward it without a word. Soon, she was standing on it.
Grey raised an eyebrow, but he shrugged and walked over to the hand as well.
BANG.
The arm shot forward, hurling them up like a pair of balls. Well, maybe not a pair of balls, those weren’t meant to be thrown unless you were into some really sick shit.
Grey’s cheeks whipped at the wind and he eventually found himself soaring through the air so fast it almost kind of hurt. But when he looked over at Amunet, she still hadn’t made a sound. There was no way her durability was anything close to his own, but here she was, looking just fine.
The city quickly came into view and to Amunet’s credit, they also quickly slowed down after that. Grey had no idea how she controlled it so well, but by the time they were landing on the city’s wall, they were already just about to start pitching down again.
"Huh." Grey nodded. "That was pretty cool."
Amunet still didn’t say anything. At least she didn’t say anything about his praise. Instead, she mentioned something completely different before Lloron or Kaito could ask anything about the current situation.
"I’m going to lose control of them pretty soon and the city will come crumbling down."
She spoke in a deadpan, unbothered sort of way.
Grey’s eyes narrowed, but he knew that she wasn’t lying. She probably already had lost control of them, it was for probably good reason she had chosen to throw them up instead of carrying them over. The arms could obviously reach up the several kilometers they had travelled, otherwise how else would the Old One have attacked them in the first place?
But by throwing them like this, there was at least a buffer between when they arrived here and when the arms would react.
And unfortunately for them, the dome that protected the city was already gone so there was nothing here to protect them.
The good news, though, was that the arms weren’t nearly as close now as they had been before. So if they did decide to snake their way up, it would probably take some time since they were aimless and didn’t have clear targets...
Until it was they managed to make it close enough. Once that happened, it was all over for everyone here.
It might take days, it might take months, it might even take years, but eventually it would happen.
And once it finally did happen, everyone here would be dead.
The problem was... evacuation wasn’t exactly a solution either. How would they evacuate when the entire city was surrounded by a sinkhole that stretched for hundreds of meters. It felt like there was no land or forest around them.
An echo of a far away commotion reverberated upward and Grey’s lips pursed. It seemed that arms were already beginning to rampage down there.
"Let’s go." Lloron spoke, making a move to hop down the city walls back into the city. But Grey had a feeling that this wasn’t so that they could start evacuation procedures. They probably had their own way of escaping.
"Hey. Aren’t you two going to handle this? Isn’t it your responsibility?"
The two looked at him as though he was retarded. Grey almost laughed at the unified faces, but then he instead got angry.
"All of this was going to be triggered by you all on purpose, was it not?"
"And yet it wasn’t," Kaito said coldly. "It was you who did it."
Grey chuckled, but there didn’t seem to be much amusement in his eyes again.
"Let’s think about this logically, shall we?" Grey blinked a bit innocently. "You have no idea what we did down there, but your problem is gone. You were too chicken shit to go, so you just stayed up here with your balls in your hands and your dick up your ass.
"If you had a brain between those two ears of yours, you’d think you’d be able to put two and two together that however scared you were of what was down there, you should be double scared of me. Don’t you think?"
The more Grey spoke, the colder his voice became, a flicker of a dense oppression radiating out from him.
His body gave off a silver light, and the world seemed to grow heavier in his presence, weighing down on them in ways they couldn’t fathom or understand.
It wasn’t even a pressure of the body alone...
It was a pressure of the soul.
Kaito and Lloron both froze, the weight of Grey’s words hitting them.
"Now, let’s try again. Are you two going to take responsibility and help the city? Or not?"
BOOM.
The skies above rumbled and a beam of golden light cut across the clouds.