Second Genesis

Grey’s joke was met with a flash of warning from both Mauve and Elowen. It wasn’t that either of them were particularly offended by what he said, at this point they had both suffered through enough of Grey’s mouth that a little vulgarity barely even registered anymore.

No, their reactions were aimed at something else, and it didn’t take Grey long to realize that something was probably the old woman standing with them.

She was short, definitely two or three inches shy of five feet, and the slight hunch in her back made her look even smaller. Her hair was long and silvery, but not in that dry, wiry way old people usually got when age started sucking the life out of them, there was a real luster to it that caught the light whenever she shifted.

In one hand she held a bulbous cane that looked like it could have passed for some wizard’s staff if someone had bothered making the damn thing a few feet longer.

Grey didn’t have to be a genius to realize there was something wrong with this setup. He just liked pretty girls more than he liked logic.

This Instance was probably the most important location in the entire Church right now, and there was absolutely no way Mauve and Elowen had been tasked with protecting it alone. Even if Elowen was an Imperial Princess and Mauve had somehow conned her way into the nuns, neither of them were strong enough for that sort of responsibility.

So unless the Church had suddenly become run by fucking idiots, the old woman wasn’t just some granny who had wandered over because she heard there would be free tea.

If Grey had to guess, she was probably the head of the convent, or something close enough to it that the distinction didn’t matter. That would put her on the same general level as the Guardians, and if she had weird bullshit abilities like the nuns Grey had run into back in Zone 234, then fighting her would probably be about as pleasant as getting his balls caught in those wrinkled palms.

’Maybe that could be ni--,’ Grey stopped the thoughts before they fully formed. His horniness was getting out of control.

Still, the old woman didn’t say anything when he arrived. She gave him a single glance, calm and almost dismissive, before looking away again.

Grey blinked. "You two are afraid of the old lady? She seems nice enough."

The warning in Mauve and Elowen’s eyes somehow deepened, but that was definitely not the attitude Grey needed, certainly not now when he was looking for members of the church to piss off.

His mischievous tendencies were already running at full speed, and now someone had basically slapped a big red button in front of him.

"You have nice hair, miss," Grey said, looking toward the old woman. "You must’ve been a real beauty in your youth."

The old woman’s eyes narrowed.

Grey’s grin didn’t move even an inch. He held a vacant innocence of someone far too socially inept to understand what he had done, even as Mauve looked like she wanted to bury her face in her hands.

Petri elbowed Grey in the ribs.

Grey ignored him.

"Really healthy too," Grey continued. "You use conditioner? Or is that one of those powered up old lady things where being ancient as shit somehow makes your hair better? Shouldn’t it make you younger too, though?"

Petri elbowed him harder.

"Ow. What the fuck?"

Before the sparks between Grey and the old woman could turn into an actual fire, footsteps echoed from the corridor behind them. Grey glanced over and recognized two familiar faces almost immediately.

Modric, disciple of The Eternal, walked in first, followed a little too closely by Legan, disciple of The Radiant. Grey remembered both of them well enough, mostly because Guardian disciples had developed a bad habit of making themselves memorable by trying to beat his ass. But he had never fought any of them, they had just been present at one of his battles.

He was already preparing some comment when a third young man walked in behind them.

Grey forgot what he was about to say.

His attention locked onto the newcomer so completely that Legan and Modric might as well have disappeared.

The young man was large, although not in Brad’s ridiculous wall-of-meat kind of way. He was broad and compact, every bit of his body looking like it had been compressed under pressure rather than built outward, and he walked with a calmness that didn’t match the weight Grey could feel coming from him.

Xerchen.

Grey didn’t know his name.

He didn’t know that Xerchen was the disciple of The Immovable, supposedly the strongest of all the Guardians. He had never met The Immovable, had never heard the rumors that some people believed the man could even stand above the Pope, and honestly, if someone had tried explaining all of that right now, Grey probably wouldn’t have been listening anyway.

Because Xerchen’s Neural Frame didn’t make any fucking sense.

Grey’s eyes narrowed.

Resonant Frames were supposed to reach outward. That was the whole point. They interacted with the world around them, connected to external forces, borrowed, redirected, amplified, harmonized. Even when Grey’s own Resonant aspects behaved strangely, there was always that underlying feeling of expansion, of touching something beyond himself.

Xerchen felt like the exact opposite.

There was no expansion, there was only absence.

Grey’s Resonant Sense brushed against the edge of Xerchen’s Neural Frame and immediately recoiled, not because it was pushed away, but because it felt like something had taken hold of it and started pulling.

It was like he was standing too close to the edge of a black hole.

Grey’s smile slowly disappeared.

’What the fuck is that?’

The more he focused, the stranger it became. The air around Xerchen didn’t feel weaker, exactly, but there was a subtle sense that everything near him was being stripped of something. Momentum, energy, presence, maybe even intent itself, Grey couldn’t quite tell.

And that was the problem.

A Resonant Frame wasn’t supposed to do this. At least, none Grey had ever seen were.

Xerchen’s gaze shifted toward him. For the first time since entering, the young man’s expression shifted.

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