Grey stood in silence, waiting.
He crouched there in the frost, the chill not so much as icing his brows. He didn’t flinch in it in the slightest.
Amunet’s Recursive Frame was a machine built for exactly this. It didn’t need to be clever. It only needed a source and enough passes, and every pass it kept a little more of what it had taken. It was like a brute force AI, dragging the both of them along, and their spatial aspects was exactly what was connecting the both of them.
It was precisely because of that affinity they had that there didn’t need to be any real direct fusion between them.
But if there was one thing that Grey had learned after burning himself alive and into the body of the goblin, it was that Neural Frames were a lot more metaphysical than it seemed.
Still... left alone, it would drag both of them forward faster than either of them could have managed in years of clawing at it the way everyone else in these games had to. While that was a good thing at the start, at some point their souls would give way.
Grey took a deep breath and continued to wait.
The frost was trickling out, slowly reaching a crescendo, and then—
A trickle of blood ran from the corner of Thi Lan’s mouth.
Grey moved.
His body was between them before the thought caught up, one knee down in the ice, and the frost he had displaced was still hanging in the air behind him as though his own warmth was too much for it to encroach into.
His Resonant Frame bloomed and he wrapped his arms around both of their waists.
His Neural Frame came out of him in a single hard expansion, spreading over both women like a canopy, and then he came to a focused, purposeful stop.
’Amunet. I have to focus on her.’
She was the engine. So long as she was stopped, Thi Lan would be released and freed of the burden.
Grey had healed Amunet through her Neural Frame before, back when he barely understood what he was doing. He knew the shape of her Frame.
He reached down and pinched the skin at her waist, hard enough to draw blood.
The blood was pulled into him and Crimson Cognition activated.
The world drained out. Color went first, then depth, until everything was black and grey and flat, and in the middle of all of it, Amunet’s Neural Frame hung reflected in his eyes.
He could see it. Every loop of it and every pass, every complex splitting edge and branching path. It spread free like an ancient tree that was somehow still continuously changing and evolving.
Old familiarity and new sight met somewhere behind his eyes and became one thing. He melded his previous understanding of where Amunet’s Neural Frame started, and where this new version of it was now, and then he roared, pushing his Resonant Frame out of himself and into her body.
White-gold flickered in his irises.
The angel lady made a sound she immediately tried to swallow.
Because she knew what she was watching. Last Paladin Spirit at the center, six abilities folded in around it, the whole impossible structure he had built to kill a Dominion Class boss less than a day ago.
A quasi Dominion. He was building it once again right before her eyes. The first time wasn’t a fluke, and this time he seemed to be doing it even easier than the last, so smoothly one would have thought he was already of the Class.
Grey’s Dominion pressed down into Amunet’s Neural Frame, suffocating it. As powerful as Amunet and Thi Lan were growing, they were no Dominion Classes. They had no right to fight against the rule of his quasi Dominion.
Their loop slammed into a brick wall and the continuous feedback shattered into a million pieces, abruptly coming to an end.
The pressure went out of the room all at once in a surging exhale, and Barkeep Ji vanished from where he stood.
Grey blinked.
He genuinely didn’t understand it. Ji had watched the whole thing without so much as putting his rag down, and now, at the exact moment it ended, the man had disappeared entirely. Well, it wasn’t the first time he had disappeared. Last time, he had disappeared from the outpost completely and then appeared here. Grey wondered if he was doing that again for whatever reason.
But then Grey looked down at his arms.
Both women had slumped into him, boneless and weak, breathing shallow and fast against his chest.
And there wasn’t a shred of clothing left on either of them.
Grey had been so focused on the frost that covered them before that he had kind of forgotten what happened to his own clothing back then. But then again, his own clothing had been ruined because he jumped into the actual pond. Plus, when he had initially brought them here, they were very much still clothed.
But now, they were in the nude and pressed against him.
"Fuck me." Grey mumbled, his body reacting with a violent heat. It was most definitely not helping that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. And because the frost didnt’ affect him at all, their bodies might as well have been a smoldering heat against his own.
Neither of them had the biggest chests in the world. In fact, both were on the more petite side, with Thi Lan being especially so. But soft breasts were soft breasts regardless of the size, and the cold only made the piercing lances that were their nipples feel all the more obvious against him.
Grey tried to look away, but he saw the curve of Thi Lan’s waist and the slope of her ass, her tanned skin starting to melt at the frost and send droplets of liquids down the trench of her spine. He watched as one vanished further down, splitting her lower cheeks and down a region he really... really wanted to see.
"Shit."
Grey looked the other way only to find the curve of Amunet’s ass the next time.
"Shit."
He coughed.
—
[Privacy Screen activated. Personal Live Stream temporarily paused.]
—
"...Huh," Grey mumbled, looking "away" again and just happening to catch the curve of Thi Lan’s ass once more. "This sexist ass Genesis System. So my dick can just be put on broad street, but the ladies get protected, huh? What happened to equality for all?"
The two women suddenly stirred in his arms.
"Shit." Grey said for the third time.
He had no idea how he was going to explain this.