Grey came out of the teleportation room and the cold hit him like a wall.
Well, the chill did hit him, but it didn’t really feel like it penetrated. It rolled off his shoulders like a normal breeze. It was odd. He was sure it was cold—very cold, in fact. Not the sort of chill one experienced in the winter, but instead the sort that quick-froze invaluable drugs in a lab.
But he didn’t feel it. He seemed to have become immune, and it wasn’t just because his body was stronger. There was something about the cold in specific that was completely unable to affect him now.
He dashed into the bar room.
The bar top had a shallow breadth of frost growing up it in feathered spines. The stools were practically welded to the floor by ice rising up their legs. Snow drifted down from nothing, descending from the ceiling in glittering motes of white.
In the middle of it was Thi Lan and Amunet.
Thi Lan was sitting upright with her back against the wall and her head hanging forward, and she was radiating. He couldn’t really see her body, it was wrapped in such a dense layer of frost there was nothing but the swirling energies to witness.
The energy pouring off her was dense enough that Grey could see the shape of it, the air bending in slow rings of echoing silvery white.
Amunet was a few feet away, curled onto her side. She was giving off similar motes of energy like Thi Lan was. Every few seconds a shudder ran through her body, and every time it did, the rings coming off Thi Lan pulsed in the exact same rhythm.
There was a resonance forming between them.
Grey took a step closer and felt it directly. They were braiding together. Every pulse pulled the two Frames a little further into one another, and they weren’t coming back apart.
"Angel lady," Grey said in a soft huff. He didn’t have the patience to ask Barkeep Ji right now. He didn’t want to figure it out on his own, he needed the direct answer.
Barkeep Ji was standing off to the side with his hands folded in front of him. He had seen Grey come in, Grey knew he had, but he said nothing.
"What am I looking at?" Grey finished his question.
The angel lady didn’t answer...
"Lady," Grey asked again.
Still nothing. But Grey could feel her, and what he felt coming off her wasn’t the usual exasperation. It was a thin, sharp jolt that ran down the length of the rod on his back and dissipated in a continuous rhythm.
Shock.
’Oh, that’s just wonderful,’ Grey thought. ’The Dominion Class weapon with the big tits is surprised and her brain’s short circuited. Love that for me.’
Grey never took his eyes off the two women despite his thoughts, and then his eyes widened with realization.
The Great Udon’s highlight reel. Back before Grey knew Thi Lan, he had seen her on the replay... they had shown her stopping time.
But when they had actually fought together, she’d said as much herself, that most of what she had was locked away from her due to the spatial barrier. While for everyone else the barrier had meant not having access to your inventory or items, for her it locked away a whole half of her abilities.
This meant her abilities had a spatial component heavy enough that she lost a great deal of power the moment it was suppressed.
’Time and space. Of course it’s time and space,’ Grey thought.
The thoughts didn’t seem to make sense.
But then there was Amunet.
Amunet was walking the path of a Dark Kin inheritance, and Grey had seen exactly what that lineage sat on top of in the vision during the Last Paladin Trial. The Fog of Chaos was space incarnate, its most violent and oppressive form.
In Amunet, it was almost completely muted. It always had been. What little progress she’d made on that front had come from being tied to Grey through Ma Famille, riding his comprehension.
The two pieces of the puzzle slammed together for Grey.
Two people whose abilities both had space as their foundations, neither of them any good at it. Neither of them even really aware of it, because it had never been the part of themselves they needed to use.
And then they experienced the rebirth waters together.
The rebirth waters didn’t give you new abilities. Grey knew that better than anyone now. Instead, it reformed your connections with them, making them stronger, more purposeful and perfect, improving your bloodline until you could use them to perfection.
Including the parts you’d never noticed you were standing on.
Grey’s eyes moved to Amunet. She had a Recursive Frame.
’...Oh, no.’
A Recursive Frame was the quintessence of repetition. It took a process and ran it, and then ran it again. It forced learning in the most crude and fundamental sort of ways. That was how the Looping Necklace had worked, and it was something that Grey had taken advantage of several times now.
And now, while it was being forced to improve again, this time by an external source, it had happened to find itself nearby another with a compatible path that was improving as well...
So it latched on.
It started to leach into Thi Lan’s Frame through the cold they both resonated, forcing it into the same loop, sensing what she was doing with space, running it, keeping what stuck, and running it again. Learning by brute repetition, over and over again.
A process that had been ongoing for almost a full day now.
But the loop didn’t stop with Amunet. The moment Amunet’s Frame started producing something, Thi Lan’s drop of rebirth water had a new set of conditions to be compatible with, and the whole purpose of that drop was to make her compatible. So it adapted her. It pulled her into the loop as a participant instead of a source.
Which gave Amunet something new to copy.
Which forced Thi Lan to adapt again.
And then it looped.
Over.
And over.
And then over again.
Grey stared at the two of them. He would need to interfere. This wasn’t going to stop on its own.
But... he didn’t want to stop them before he absolutely needed to. Right now, as much as they were suffering, they were still holding on, their souls were growing, their Neural Frames becoming more robust, their power skyrocketing...
The timing needed to be right.
The rings coming off Thi Lan pulsed again.