The rattling grew louder until even the lava seemed to tremble with it, and then Grey finally moved.
Five rings sat across the fingers of one hand, thin enough that they hardly looked impressive at first glance, while five metallic chains wrapped loosely around his forearm before trailing behind him through the air. Four of them carried the rigid architecture of his Neural Frames, but the fifth looked almost alive, faint currents of amber light flowing through its links as the preserved cells of the volcanic tree continuously rearranged themselves within.
Grey looked down at Brad and Amara, took in the blood, burns, and general half-dead appearance of both, then clicked his tongue. "Damn, I leave you alone for five minutes."
"Fuck you," Brad wheezed.
Grey grinned and disappeared from the volcanic wall.
The first Infernal Prince reacted immediately, surrounding himself with a compressed shell of flame before driving a palm toward Grey’s chest, but one of the chains snapped forward and wrapped around his wrist before the attack could land. The fifth chain stirred at the same moment, Prometheus sending instructions through its living internal network while Grey’s Resonant Ring locked onto the Prince’s Frame and began mapping the signal responsible for the technique.
Information poured back through the chains.
Grey’s eyebrows rose.
"Oh, that’s neat."
The Prince tore himself free and released the technique properly, his body erupting forward as compressed flames ignited behind him in successive bursts that changed direction several times without costing him momentum. Grey watched it once, let the artificial Frame finish tracing the sequence, then his Linear and Resonant chains rattled together as they recreated the exact same pathways outside his body.
Grey vanished.
The Prince barely managed to turn before Grey appeared above him, moving with the same flame-propelled acceleration, except Grey had cleaned the signal on the way through his Linear Ring and synchronized every ignition through Resonance. What had taken the Prince several bursts became one continuous sequence of perfectly timed detonations, and Grey kicked him downward hard enough to send him through an island of volcanic stone.
"Oh, come on," Grey laughed. "You’ve had this shit your whole life."
The second Prince roared and released a sea of concentrated flame from both hands, while the lesser Fire Elementals finally ignored their orders and attacked with him. Grey’s chains spread across the crater, catching several streams of fire directly and tracing the Neural signals controlling them, then Prometheus distributed what it learned across the four artificial Frames until Grey understood not only how they generated the flames, but how each of them shaped, compressed, and maintained them.
He copied that too.
Fire gathered around Grey in a spiralling sphere before suddenly contracting until it looked almost liquid, the temperature jumping high enough that two lesser Fire Elementals recoiled from their own element.
Grey hummed some cheerful tune as he spun once in the air, almost dancing while the compressed flames followed the movement of his hands, then slapped the entire mass downward and buried three Elementals beneath their own attack performed several times better than they could manage.
Brad stared upward. "Is he fucking dancing?"
Amara wiped blood from her lips. "It appears so."
One of the Earth Elementals tried to take advantage of Grey’s distraction, sending several pillars upward from beneath him at once, but Grey had been waiting for exactly that. His Recursive chain wrapped around the nearest pillar while Resonance reached through it toward the Elemental controlling the stone, and the fifth chain rearranged itself again as Prometheus began interpreting an entirely different Neural architecture.
Grey landed on the rising stone and crouched there for half a second, fascinated by the information rushing into him. Earth Elementals didn’t simply move rocks around, they transmitted force through interconnected mineral structures, treating everything touching the same geological body almost like one enormous extension of themselves.
His Branching Ring lit up and dozens of pathways opened simultaneously.
The crater shook.
The Earth Elemental froze as the stone beneath Grey began to answer to him.
"You guys really should stop showing me cool shit."
Grey stepped forward and the volcanic rock rose with him, flowing around his legs like water before hardening into black armor. Fire then poured through the cracks, not merely coating the stone but entering the pathways Grey had copied from the Earth Elemental, and the temperature climbed until the entire shell began glowing red.
Every Elemental in the crater went still.
The Infernal Princes understood what they were looking at before Brad or Amara possibly could.
Fire and Earth combined.
The stone around Grey softened into magma without losing the Earth Elemental pathways holding its shape, while Veyrath’s control over flame kept the heat circulating through it perfectly.
Grey rolled one shoulder experimentally, and molten rock rolled down his arm before climbing back up against gravity as though his entire body had become some bizarre artificial Magma Elemental.
"No," one Prince whispered.
Throughout the history of their race, fewer than ten true dual Elementals had ever appeared.
Grey had needed a few minutes.
He started laughing.
The next exchange barely qualified as a fight. Grey slid across the lava on a wave of molten stone while continuing to hum and dance, swaying around one Prince’s attack before copying the technique, improving it through his Rings, and throwing it back twice as hard, then spun beneath the second Prince and slapped a magma-covered palm across his ass hard enough to launch him through the crater.
"Attaboy. Form could use work, though!" Grey called after him.
The Earth Elementals tried retreating underground, only for Grey to seize their own mineral pathways and drag them back out, while the Fire Elementals discovered that hiding inside flame was considerably less effective when Veyrath could suppress them and Grey could control the rest. Chains whipped throughout the crater as he moved, binding wrists, ankles, torsos, and eventually Frames themselves until one Elemental after another was pinned against black volcanic stone.
Even the two Infernal Princes couldn’t escape once Grey stopped screwing around. The copied propulsion that had made them so fast only gave Grey another signal to resonate against, and after several humiliating attempts to flee, both were dragged back by chains and slammed beside the others.
A few minutes later, the crater finally went quiet.
Brad and Amara stood among the wreckage looking like survivors of a natural disaster, while Grey walked toward the restrained Elementals with molten stone still sliding lazily over one shoulder. He cleared his throat, straightened his bomber jacket, and arranged his expression into the most painfully polite customer-service smile he could manage.
"Hello, valued customers," Grey said in his best insurance-caller voice. "Do you have time to talk about your vehicle’s extended warranty? These old, clunky bodies of yours are no good. How about a new vessel--sorry, excuse me, I mean body?"