Grey didn’t know when he fell asleep, but he did.
In fact, he was so tired that despite the fact he had given Amunet the crown specifically to sense the changes to her Frame, he knocked out before he could even experience that. His mind was just too overloaded, his body had gone through too much, and he didn’t have the bandwidth left to do much of anything else but sleep.
And much like usual, his mask naturally flowed onto his face.
On the one hand, this was probably some form of protection for him. On the other, it was certainly a protection for those around him as well, because his snores could have probably leveled small hills at this point.
Whatever changes the Mechanical Jaw Lineage had made to his body, they were certainly still there during his sleep, and the feeling of getting real rest for the first time in a long while really let everything within him reset down to his very cells themselves.
Grey managed to keep anything he could bind to his soul and force into his body during every one of his loops. In another way, that was essentially saying that he had been wide awake since the very first of the closed loops began.
While he "woke up" at the start of every checkpoint, he didn’t benefit from the sleep he had had before that at all.
That was all to say that Grey had practically been going on nothing but fumes for what amounted to at least four or five days in accumulated time.
Grey might have surpassed the limits of humans, but he hadn’t surpassed them by that much. Yet, even setting aside how little rest he had gotten in that time, what he had put his body through was even worse.
The battles themselves were just the most obvious of the problems. Continuously beating his body down, continuously dying and ripping his soul apart just to patch them together was little more than problem number one.
In the middle of all of this he had gone on a mech crafting heater that really burned down his mind to the last of its embers. But as though that wasn’t enough, even after he managed to finally break through the last challenge of his closed loop and free himself, he immediately went to challenge the Mechanical Jaw Spirit, got himself trapped in yet another battle, only to completely break down his body to its smallest unit.
The Call of the Moon tempering had ripped him apart down to his very seams.
His stamina had hit rock bottom and rebounded again, and again, and then again so many times during the last several days he had experienced that it was a wonder he was even still on his feet at all.
Then the cherry on top of it all was that the last of his mental acuity was burned away by his unbridled fury at the end. There was little better at making a man tired than rage, and Grey had certainly had to vent a lot of that recently.
The culmination of it all was as such.
Grey wouldn’t have woken up even if the world was ending. Even when his feet ended up on the head of the couch and his head sagged off the bottom, he didn’t notice at all.
He snored up a storm that only didn’t shatter the roof because his mask muffled it for him.
Prometheus went around chittering like a little bird, complaining about all the work it had to do to keep this damned host alive. All its previous owners had been so smart, so insightful, such a burning light for humanity.
And then it ended up with this guy.
Had it chosen Grey? Yeah, sure. But clearly it had been muddle-headed.
Despite its complaints, Prometheus still did its job, filtering energy into the deepest crevices of Grey’s body.
While Grey thought that his Prometheus Frame hadn’t really displayed any of its might yet, he was very wrong. In fact, the only reason he could adapt to so many bloodlines so quickly was because of Prometheus.
Anyone else who tried to maintain so many incompatible bloodlines within themselves would have been ripped apart. In fact, just having a Savage Bloodline right next to a Dark Kin Bloodline was a recipe for disaster.
However, Prometheus was ultimately just a tool, a fire to bring enlightenment, but if others couldn’t make proper use of it, then it was little more than a nagging little flame.
And Grey... Grey was one of the very best at following its subtle hints.
While it was true that anyone else would have been ripped apart by these bloodlines without Prometheus, what was also true was that even if you handed someone else all these bloodlines, comprehending them to the extent that Grey had would have likewise been impossible.
But Grey...
Sometimes Prometheus wondered if he was the flame or if it was.
And that was very, very interesting...
**
Grey sniffled awake.
BANG.
His head slammed against the bottom of the coffee table. It had successfully survived his last tirade, only to be destroyed the moment he woke up. A pitiful life, to be sure.
Grey didn’t even really feel it, though. In fact, he felt greater than he had in a very, very long time.
Every part of him was brimming with power, his joints moved like they had been freshly oiled, and his muscles practically revved with every beat of his heart.
Sprinkling bits of glass fell toward his eyes, and yet he just blinked them away when he was pretty sure not even a month ago that might have blinded him for life.
"Well, damn. Not bad."
Grey still didn’t seem to notice his weird sleeping position.
"What the hell are you three looking at? Never seen a handsome man take a nap before?"
Amunet, Mauve, and Brad were all looking down at Grey, but then they pointed in unison toward a certain direction, only for Grey to realize that he definitely wasn’t in their room anymore.
And the only reason the coffee table was still here was because he had been clinging to it like some sort of antique pillow.
They had tried to wake Grey up several times, only to fail, so they had no choice but to drag him here...
Grey blinked again. Where the hell was this?