Second Genesis

Grey felt like his entire body had been struck by a mountain.

The fractures he had ignored from being thrown across the arena earlier flared all at once, and like the perforated lines of a sheet of paper, several of his bones tore apart along their existing cracks as he was blasted backward again.

Pain ripped through him hard enough to make his vision flash white, but Grey still forced his body through a flip in the air, gritting his teeth as he landed hard enough for both feet to skid several meters across the stone.

He hadn’t even touched the halo. That was the part that pissed him off most.

The Holy Energy surrounding it was simply so dense that The Virtueless hadn’t managed to cut through at all, and the instant Grey’s attack collided with that wall of power, the backlash had ripped through him instead.

He was trying to strike something that might as well have been sitting behind an ocean compressed into a few feet of space.

"Your arrogance has blinded you to the distance between the divine and the profane," the halo said, its voice carrying through the arena with an authority that made several people lower their heads instinctively. "You have raised your hand against that which stands above you, and for such heresy, you will never again see the light of grace."

The air changed.

Grey felt the attack before he saw it, and this time the pillar descended so quickly that the gold blurred into a single solid line stretching from the skies to the ground.

He threw himself aside just before it landed, the stone behind him disappearing beneath an explosion of Holy Energy, and Grey was already shooting forward before the debris had even begun to fall.

Dark, foggy footsteps appeared in his wake as his Black Forces carried him ahead. He still wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the lower half of his body remained covered by the makeshift skirt he had formed from Thi Lan’s robes, meaning the closest things he had to actual equipment were the boots on his feet and the white gloves wrapped around his palms.

It probably wasn’t the outfit anyone imagined when picturing a man charging toward divine judgment, but Grey had worked with worse.

White-gold light poured through the fractures running across his body as he moved, weaving bone back together just enough that his muscles could pull against them without tearing everything apart. Grey didn’t bother waiting for the healing to finish, because the instant his body could bear another attack he leapt, raised The Virtueless overhead, and brought it down with everything he had.

BOOM.

The backlash hit even harder.

Grey’s body shot away like he had been fired from a cannon, several ribs collapsing inward before he struck the ground and bounced hard enough to leave a smear of blood behind him.

His left arm twisted at an angle it definitely wasn’t supposed to, but white-gold energy was already crawling through it before he even stopped sliding, forcing the shattered pieces back toward something resembling their proper places.

"You mistake persistence for strength," the halo continued. "There is no valor in struggling against inevitability, mortal. Your soul will be stripped of grace, your name will be forgotten, and for whatever span of eternity remains to you, you will burn within the fires reserved for those who spit upon the heavens."

Grey pushed himself up again.

The rage inside him only grew.

He attacked, was thrown back, healed whatever pieces of himself he could, then attacked again before the damage was even finished knitting together.

Every impact shattered bones that had barely stopped being broken, every backlash tore muscles and opened wounds that Holy Energy had only just managed to close, and still Grey just kept coming.

Again.

And again.

There was nothing graceful about it anymore.

Grey looked like a feral animal ramming itself against the same wall over and over, except the animal understood perfectly well that the wall was stronger and simply hated the fact enough to keep trying anyway.

The unfairness of it all seethed through his veins like hot lava, every broken bone and every sermon about divine superiority feeding something inside him that had already been far too close to boiling over.

Elowen covered her mouth with one hand as tears began running down her cheeks again, though this time they had nothing to do with her siblings or the relief of surviving the comprehension trial.

Watching Grey made his pain feel almost visible, as though every frustration he had buried beneath jokes, arrogance, and crude remarks was finally spilling out of him all at once.

He carried too much.

Elowen could see that now.

Grey was always the one figuring something out, finding a loophole, dragging someone else out of danger, or pretending that whatever horrible thing had just happened to him was funny enough that it didn’t matter. Eventually, something like that had to break somewhere, and standing here now, Elowen didn’t feel like she was watching a man trying to take revenge on the halo.

She was watching him vent.

There had been other times Grey snapped, and there would probably be more in the future, but this was different because there was no one left who could talk him down.

He wasn’t weighing consequences anymore, wasn’t plotting three moves ahead, and wasn’t even pretending that what he was doing was clever.

He was simply furious.

Grey slammed into the barrier of Holy Energy again and was thrown backward so violently that he rolled several times before finally skidding to a stop.

He coughed, and what spilled from his mouth was almost as much flesh and powdered bone as it was blood, while every breath afterward came wet and ragged through lungs that were struggling to keep up.

Above him, the halo began gathering power again.

Grey could already feel it.

His gaze dropped toward The Virtueless in his hand, and instead of fear, something colder slowly settled behind his crimson eyes. Atlas hadn’t acknowledged him, the rod didn’t want him, and whatever connection existed between them clearly wasn’t enough to make the damned thing cooperate willingly.

Fine.

Grey’s Neural Frame shifted.

The structures inside it moved like the pistons of an engine, mirrored pathways rotating and folding over one another until the entire Frame began giving off a completely different air.

The control he had stumbled into while hiding his Multi-Frame from the halo returned, except this time he wasn’t trying to conceal anything.

He was reaching inward.

Toward the rod.

Grey tightened his grip around The Virtueless as another pillar of divine light formed overhead.

"If you’re not going to cooperate," he growled, blood dripping from his chin, "I’ll make you cooperate."

His Neural Frame roared to life.

"Wake up."

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