Grey exhaled a steaming breath. This time, the flames calmed considerably, his body cooling to the point they vanished as his Frames relaxed.
This wasn’t good enough.
Despite the battle, that was the one thought Grey had. This wasn’t good enough.
How many more were coming? How could he stop this? What was he going to do?
Did he have to leave Thi Lan here and try to see if he could get the others instead?
The fact he couldn’t use his mechs was putting a lot more stress on him as well. It wasn’t easy to sustain two Frames like that, especially when he didn’t have solid control over the Bringer of Light gloves in the first place.
Just using it alone had nearly shattered his fists. This time, he managed to offload a lot of that weight by throwing things and using other methods, but...
Grey looked down at his hands. They were already healing, but they were a mangled mess. He could feel his knuckles through his torn skin, one of his wrists had a bone sticking out at an awkward angle it definitely shouldn’t have been in, and there was a slight tremble to his hands that was a sign of one thing and one thing alone.
Pain.
He was in a lot of pain right now, it was just that the reflection of that pain wasn’t making it to his face. He couldn’t afford to let it make it to his face in the first place.
Somehow he had to win, and he had to do it convincingly. Otherwise, who the hell was going to follow him?
All the while, those damned bastards were taking advantage of them from the background, pulling strings and signing them to predatory contracts.
Maybe the worst part was that the better he performed—so long as Thi Lan was around—the more money they would make.
Grey snapped his wrist back into place and turned to face the others.
"We might have to raze the whole thing to the ground," Grey said to Amunet.
Amunet’s gaze flickered. She didn’t need to think very hard to realize what Grey meant.
Back when they first fought in a loop that Amunet probably shouldn’t remember, Amunet had summoned the arms of the Old Ones to attack for her. She ended up losing control of them, triggering a Rare Instance, which eventually led to Grey’s most ridiculous death yet.
Grey really didn’t think he was going to top that one anytime soon, but he also didn’t want to jinx himself.
If she summoned it here, the hope was that the same thing would happen. But... doing something like that would have to be the last resort and it would take the perfect trap as well.
If their timing was off, they would get trapped in the Rare Instance too. Then what would be the point?
But even if they did that... so what? It just didn’t feel like it fixed anything.
The only way to get people not to come here was to remove the incentive. And right now the incentive was Thi Lan who was trapped here by the bindings of the contract she signed.
—
[Top-priority Sponsorship Request Received]
—
Grey had gotten so many of these that he almost directly ignored it. But the "Top-priority" part was definitely new, new enough that his eyes narrowed as he clicked through.
When he read the contract through, he almost laughed out of pure rage.
At the top it read: "Sponsorship Request Sent By [REDACTED]". Then it went on to describe the terms of the contract.
There were endless piles of legal jargon, but the raw and unfettered truth of it all could be summarized in a few lines.
They wanted Grey to appear on a talk show to apologize for his wrongs. The series of apologies would end with his public execution, whereupon the sponsor promised to support the other four geniuses of the human world with their full effort, and even Amunet if he would like until the day they died.
Grey read it a second time, and then a third. Then a fourth.
His speed of reading was completely unlike what it had been back on Earth. His mind was simply on another level. He probably could have remembered the gist of it the first time.
But right now, he just stood there and read it over, and over, and over again.
It seemed to sink into his very bones how serious this matter was. Maybe it was easier to take everything as a joke, but these people wanted nothing more than to see him lose everything in the most horrifying way possible.
They wouldn’t rest until he had nothing left.
The last line of the contract was practically seared into Grey’s mind. He read it more than any other line by a mile.
—
"[Party B] hereby cedes, releases, and forever waives any and all rights, claims, or interest — legal, moral, or otherwise — in his corporeal remains upon the cessation of life, said remains to become the sole and exclusive property of [REDACTED], free and clear of any encumbrance."
—
They wanted to execute him publicly, and then they wanted full rights to his body after the fact.
Grey wasn’t sure what happened when people of Earth or any other planet, for that matter, died in the Genesis Games. Maybe they were even sent back to their worlds, or what remained of them, anyway.
That had only been Grey’s speculation before, but now it was essentially assured. Otherwise... what need would there be of a rule like this?
Grey read the line through again.
Who was it? The Syrn? The Dormaji? Was it the Volthari? Maybe it really was them, they were probably the most furious with him.
Or was it a company who wanted to please and/or had a working relationship with The Great Udon?
The contract was so ridiculous Grey was sure they knew he wouldn’t sign it. They didn’t send it so that he would.
They sent it as a method of foreshadowing what his end would be in payment for what he had already done.
Finally, Grey broke and he started to laugh. He started to laugh so hard the air started to combust around him.