Second Genesis

Veyrath reacted almost instantly.

The wall of fire Grey had breathed toward him was still his flame in every meaningful sense, stripped of most of its spirituality or not. Veyrath was fire and fire was Veyrath, which meant even flames he had never personally refined were things he could normally seize control of with little more than a thought.

His hand lifted, his awareness reached out, and for the first fraction of a second, he fully expected the attack to turn aside before it ever touched him.

It didn’t.

Veyrath’s eyes widened.

He could feel his fire inside the attack, but something else had been mixed into it in almost equal measure, threaded through every ember and flame until taking control was no longer as simple as reaching out and reclaiming something that belonged to him. He could still do it, given enough time, but that realization came a fraction too late.

BOOM.

The wall of flames swallowed him whole.

A roar of fury peeled across the arena as Veyrath disappeared beneath his own fire, but Grey didn’t even bother watching the result. His attention had already shifted toward the last remaining clone, the one whose arm he had bitten off earlier, because Grey had left that one alive on purpose.

That bite had taught him everything he needed to know.

There was almost nothing Grey’s stomach couldn’t digest, the real challenge had always been getting whatever stupid thing he decided to eat into his stomach without dying along the way. This time, he had solved that problem by lining his mouth and throat with the same anti-heat crystals coating the rest of his body, allowing him to swallow a piece of Veyrath’s flames without cooking himself from the inside out.

Once those flames reached his stomach, Grey felt what they actually were. They weren’t merely heat and energy.

There was something threaded through them, something spiritual that felt disturbingly similar to the structures of a Neural Frame. Grey still couldn’t tell exactly what Type an Elemental’s Frame would classify as, though Resonant seemed like the closest answer, but that wasn’t the important part.

The important part was that their Neural Frames and their elements weren’t separate things.

They were one and the same.

’So that’s why.’

Grey finally understood why his Intelligence and Perception had jumped after he consumed the Lightning Seed from the Volthari.

Elementals weren’t absurdly good at controlling their elements simply because their Races had better affinities. Their minds, senses, and Neural Frames were literally woven into those elements. When an Elemental moved lightning or fire, it wasn’t controlling something outside itself in the way Grey normally would.

It was moving part of its own existence.

Which meant that when Grey breathed Veyrath’s fire back at him, he hadn’t merely added random energy to make it harder to control. He had threaded his own Resonant Neural Frame through the flames.

Grey obviously couldn’t reproduce what Veyrath did perfectly. He didn’t possess a Fire Elemental’s natural structure, and none of his Frames were particularly specialized toward fire in the first place, at least not in the most important of senses, but he didn’t need perfection. He only needed enough foreign Resonance mixed into Veyrath’s flames that reclaiming them would require more than a passing thought.

More importantly, the attack had been far more damaging than a normal blast of fire ever could have been.

Grey’s Resonant Frame had entered Veyrath through the flames themselves.

It was almost like injecting a virus directly into his Neural Frame.

The moment those foreign pathways started spreading through Veyrath’s spiritual structure, the Elemental had no choice but to cut the infected portion away before Grey’s influence reached whatever counted as his core Frame.

That was exactly what happened.

The inferno collapsed and Veyrath’s clone was gone.

Not dispersed into embers that returned to the others, not dissolved and recombined somewhere else, but truly severed. He couldn’t take any of it back without risking the influence of Grey’s Neural Frame ruining everything.

Grey grinned.

Two clones down, one left.

He walked over to the remaining Veyrath and crouched beside him, then patted the Elemental’s cheek as though he were waking a child from a nap. The heat coming off Veyrath was noticeably weaker now, nowhere near the nuclear inferno Grey had felt earlier.

Of course there had been a drawback to the cloning method. Creating three perfect copies without sacrificing raw output sounded ridiculous unless the energy sustaining those bodies remained part of the same total reserve. So long as Veyrath could recover the embers after a clone was destroyed, he lost almost nothing.

Grey hadn’t let him recover them, though.

"Hey, Sleeping Beauty," Grey said, patting his cheek again. "How long are you planning on playing dead? Feeling a little weak and helpless?"

Veyrath’s burning eyes slowly focused.

Grey smiled wider.

"Tell you what, beg and plead a little bit, and I’ll send you off to that infernal hell you keep yapping about quick and painless. If you don’t..." Grey shrugged. "Well, you’ve seen my temper."

The arena had become deathly silent.

The cracked halo remained suspended far in the distance, white-gold light still bleeding from its fractures, seemingly unable to retreat for reasons Grey had already started piecing together. The surrounding Empires weren’t doing much better, because whether they understood Elementals or not, everybody understood what they had just witnessed.

The Syrn looked sick. The big-headed midget had gone strangely still. Even the people who had no idea what an Infernal Prince represented remembered the Ranked Demon Veyrath had reduced to ash without bothering to stop walking.

And yet, somehow, Grey had just beaten him into the ground.

"Nothing to say?" Grey clicked his tongue. "What a shame."

Veyrath suddenly moved. His hand shot upward toward the white-gold blessing still hanging above the battlefield.

Grey’s grin sharpened immediately.

"Ah, ah, ah."

Veyrath froze.

"What happened to something, something, external items, something, something, not worth very much?" Grey asked. "Sorry, I can’t remember exactly what you said. I only have the patience to listen when it’s a pretty girl with big tits and a round ass."

The blessing began descending.

Grey leaned closer.

"So what makes you think I’m going to let you take that?"

He inhaled, tendrils of white-gold coming from his white gloves surging. He might not have any affinity for fire, but he did have a very strong affinity for Holy Energy. And Veyrath had just brought him a more perfect way to control it on a perfect, silver platter.

He ripped control of the blessings away from the halo and took it for himself, and at that moment, without ever having time to truly learn about the lineage in his Bringer of Light Gloves...

Grey perfected it on his own.

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