Grey blinked.
Amunet slumped over, her eyes vacant.
"Uh..."
Grey wasn’t even sure how to react, his expression a bit blank. Did she just... die? Was she dead now? What should he do?
Amunet was too important. Her bloodline was the only way he could quickly accelerate his use of the Call of the Silver Moon unless he found another graveyard of Old Ones to eat. She was also invaluable to Mauve and Brad for the same reason.
While Grey could make a Proving Class mech to digest blood, he wasn’t sure if he could do the same for the bodies of the Old Ones because they were too powerful.
Amunet was in the Proving Class, so crafting a mech that Brad and Mauve could both sustain with their Neural Frames, and that could digest her blood, was easy.
Trying to build a mech that Brad and Mauve could withstand the power of, and that could digest the corpses of what were probably Command Class and higher beings...
That was basically impossible.
The only way would be for Grey to craft them a Prosthetic Mech. Not just for an external limb or even an eye, but an actual inner organ. He might actually have to replace their whole digestive system.
No matter how much of a genius Grey was, he had exactly zero confidence in doing something like that. It was beyond him, and certainly beyond the materials he had on hand right now.
Bas’ wealth wasn’t going to cover any of that.
The only step forward seemed to be for Grey to kill himself to bring her back and stop her from taking on the sixth heartbeat no matter what.
If he didn’t go this far, then there was just no chance they’d be able to save those people his actions had put in the line of fire.
He couldn’t believe this.
He had personally experienced the Call of the Silver Moon. When you reached your limits, you would feel it. You would know that pushing past that point would shatter your heart. It was obvious to anyone, even without Grey’s intuition.
Pushing yourself to death through this technique was the equivalent of cutting your own chest open, ripping your rib cage apart, and then taking a bite out of your own heart.
It was truly that exaggerated.
It made sense for someone like Grey to push himself that far because, in the worst case, he could just revive. But he had no idea what the fuck Amunet was thinking.
Did she have a death wish?
"Fuck." Grey rubbed a hand through his hair, a bit more agitated than he thought he would be.
He didn’t even seem to notice the blood that had splattered all across the room, and maybe because he was too agitated, he didn’t notice quickly enough that the dark shroud around Amunet was very much still there.
He had seen her die several times by now, and every time that happened, the cloak would disappear afterward.
A wild pulse suddenly radiated from Amunet’s body.
Grey’s gaze snapped toward her, and he watched as a swirl of silver formed where her heart had just been. The ball of silver extended out tendrils as though to replace the veins in her body, and then a seventh heartbeat echoed.
Before Grey could see what was happening, a surging energy closed up the hole in Amunet’s chest.
An eighth heartbeat echoed.
Then a ninth.
Then, it sounded as though a rolling drum was booming past until one final, bass-filled thrum boomed through.
BADDUM.
A tenth heartbeat.
A silver light spilled out and into Amunet’s cloak. In that moment, it no longer looked like a mass of shadowy blandness that one couldn’t make heads or tails of. When Grey first met Amunet, he hadn’t even known she was a woman until she spoke.
But this time, the amorphous plumes of darkness began radiating lines of silver and black instead, extending into robes that fell down her silhouette.
Her white-gold hair gained hints of a platinum reflection, the underlayer looking truly beautiful.
Her eyes suddenly snapped open, a radiant silver flashing by until they cooled into her usual bright amber.
She looked down at herself, feeling like her body had been elevated to another level entirely.
Grey just stood there, his arms crossed, his eyes glaring.
As her aura settled down, she looked at Grey, blinking.
"What bunched up your panties?"
"You realize you just killed yourself, right? You can’t tell me that you knew this was going to happen. I didn’t sense it, so you had no idea."
"Aww, is the princess worried about me?"
"I’m worried about my blood bank."
Amunet held up a middle finger.
"Right back at you." Grey held up his own. "Now, what happened?"
"I don’t know. I just felt like I should just keep pushing—." Amunet suddenly stopped talking, and her eyes glazed over.
Grey didn’t press. Clearly, something was happening. He could feel a shift in Ma Famille as well, but he didn’t press to find out too quickly and instead chose to be patient first.
Finally, Amunet regained her senses.
"I think they call it their New Moon Form. You’re not supposed to be capable of making it past the fifth heartbeat no matter what. You die if you try, or you give up. But what people don’t know is that if you can hold on—assuming you have the right bloodline—you are completely reborn."
Grey slowly nodded. "I got it."
It seemed his dreams of making it to the tenth heartbeat were dashed now. However, that was good. It was better to find out now rather than later, especially since he was bringing Brad and Mauve along with him for the ride.
Plus... +500 physical stats and Stamina was nothing to scoff at.
Though... it certainly didn’t compare to +1,000 INT, PER, and Stamina. At the end there, Grey missed how much Amunet’s physical stats ended up going up by, but from what he could tell, by the end, they had gone up +500 as well.
She had experienced a complete overhaul, and he hadn’t even made her any mechs yet.
"This team is shaping up to be not too bad after all." Grey chuckled to himself.
"You sound like you’re losing your mind."
Grey waved a hand in response. "I have some things to prepare for tomorrow. Don’t distract me anymore. I’m going."