Maybe the Great Udon could hear Grey, maybe he couldn’t. It didn’t really matter because he smiled nonetheless.
What was certain was that he didn’t have a feed to Grey, but before the words could be translated onto the screen, a blur appeared in front of Grey’s mouth as though they knew he would say something foul.
It seemed that maiming and killing was allowed on universal tv. But cursing? Never that.
But that didn’t matter to Grey either. He wasn’t an idiot, the main goal of that broadcast was twofold.
The first put every genius of Earth with even the slightest chance of having any sort of real success right in the line of danger. They were Earth’s greatest hope, and now because of Grey, their lives would inevitably be cut short.
How much time was there between the last time Joaquin’s zone had been revealed and the first attack Grey suffered?
Four or five days. It hadn’t been very long at all.
The good news was that they could only find the zone with precision. After that, they had to start asking around before they could finally manage to find anyone, and even then it was only because Grey happened to be there that the carnage hadn’t played out worse than it did.
However, even in the worst estimation, it would only take a week before all four of them were dead. And if it took the aliens that long to get to them, Grey didn’t even have a chance. What was he going to do? He didn’t even know how to make sense of the zone numbers like they could, he didn’t have that information on hand.
And even if he did do that, he would have just as much problem finding them as the aliens did. All he could do was go to the zone and then hope, but he would first need a method to do that, and he would have to pick just one of them to protect. There was simply no way he could protect all four of them.
The only hope was that the Great Udon had overextended himself and that those four were clever enough to connect the dots and knew that they either had to hide or run.
The Great Udon had made it clear that Joaquin was just bait, and then he showed scenes of three aliens fighting it out with Grey. There were enough context clues there to put two and two together if you were sharp enough. But it was also enough of a leap that someone not ready might not make that jump instantly.
Just because they were strong, didn’t mean they were smart.
But then what? Even if they were smart enough to connect the dots and they started hiding or running, that would ruin their trajectory of strength increase. They were already practically destined to die, what chance would they have if they also had to consider that?
But that was still just the first leg of the problem.
The Great Udon had perfectly picked his edits, swapping one after another to show Grey displaying one sort of Frame after another. This was incredibly subtle, but those who knew what to look for would certainly realize one very important thing.
Grey had more than one Frame.
This wasn’t something Grey would give a damn about normally. He had done all of this to make the Great Udon come after him. He didn’t care how many times he had to die to eventually get where he needed to get, even if it ended up shredding his soul to pieces.
But now he was trying to figure out a way to help everyone he had just screwed over. He couldn’t also deal with the added problem of this being revealed on top of that.
Even now, Grey didn’t know what the problem with having more than one Frame was or what the big deal was. He had also only just speculated, for the most part, that it would be a problem to reveal this.
But he had a feeling that with the way the Great Udon had ended up editing things, not only had he more than sufficiently stoked the fury of the Dormaji, Syrn, and especially the Volthari, he would also end up attracting whoever the fuck really didn’t want multi-Frame wielders to exist.
A string of notifications started to hit Grey one after another. More sponsorships rolled in like a steaming engine. He could practically see their data centers working overtime just to keep his own status screen online.
The predatory contracts he had gotten before started to shift in tone, but the goals of these guys were very much different from the first line of sponsors he had gotten.
The first line just wanted to enslave Grey and make him do their bidding. Right now, the Cracked Worlds got the most screen time. It was just that there were so many of them, and Grey’s producers had suppressed his appearances, so Grey didn’t really get any shine at all.
They thought that with his last performance against Joaquin, of which quite a few had watched from Joaquin’s chat, that they would be able to take advantage of Grey before he became a big name.
But now things were different. Everyone was lining up because they wanted their names plastered all over what they thought would certainly be a glorious scene of death.
The quality of the products took a hit, but the quality of the actual deals soared forward.
And yet, Grey himself was still staring into the skies, watching as the world faded back to color and the Great Udon slowly vanished, a wide grin on his face plastered for all to see.
Grey’s words had, indeed, reached him. But to the War Head, battle and war was what he lived for. This was just a slightly different battlefield.
In fact, he hoped Grey would survive this second wave of onslaughts. He wanted this spar to continue...
So he could slowly bleed Grey to death.