Chapter 608: Mad Idea

Grey moved his jaw from side to side, then opened his mouth wide and rolled it around again just to make sure nothing caught strangely.

Compared to the earlier Mechanical Jaws he had worn, the Silver Maw barely felt like anything at all, its metal sitting so closely to the natural shape of his jaw and teeth that he could almost forget it was there if not for the faint pressure running through the roots of his teeth.

Sleek was definitely better than walking around with half a bear trap strapped to his face.

His gaze dropped back to the status screen.

Sync Rate: 100%

Energy Reserve: 112.7/112.7

Grey nodded to himself, perfectly satisfied with both numbers.

The Energy Reserve looked almost small compared to some of the ridiculous reserves his other mechs had accumulated, but that was mostly an illusion created by the fact he had finally stepped into using blue Cyber Cores properly, where every unit represented far more than the ordinary energy measurements he had been working with before.

More importantly, this mech hadn’t been designed to pump his Strength, Speed, or Endurance into the sky, and not a single one of his basic stats had moved after fusion.

Grey couldn’t have cared less. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

The Silver Maw was supposed to make his Neural Frame harder to break and give him a theoretical path to repairing it if he ever pushed himself too far again. On top of that, it was a proper Vessel for the Mechanical Jaw Spirit, and the moment Grey looked over his lineage abilities, his grin widened enough to show the silver borders around his teeth.

Every one of his six Mechanical Jaw Lineage Abilities had gained ten effective Levels while the mech was active.

They were all Level 30 right now, but the Silver Maw pushed their performance as though they were Level 40 abilities, which meant techniques that should have been operating around the Vector Class were suddenly functioning in the Vanguard Class.

That sort of increase wasn’t as flashy as gaining another hundred points of Strength, yet Grey knew better than to underestimate what it meant when abilities he already abused better than their original designers were handed an entire Class worth of extra performance.

His eyes drifted toward the black chunk of solidified Chaos sitting nearby.

For one brief and extremely stupid moment, Grey wondered what would happen if he bit it.

He actually reached halfway toward it before stopping.

"No."

Prometheus flickered inside him with what felt suspiciously like encouragement.

"Don’t enable me."

Grey put the black ore farther away from himself and turned his attention back to the real problem, since he had something considerably more difficult to accomplish before his self-control failed.

The Silver Maw had only taken him three or four hours from serious study to completion, which was faster than even Grey had expected, but there was a reason he had given himself three days to clear both of the first requirements rather than assuming he could finish everything before dinner.

He had experience with Dominus Class mechs now. Prometheus would be another matter entirely.

Grey took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, then stretched his fingers over the worktable. "That was a nice warm-up. Now on to the real stuff."

The angel lady stared at him in silence, feeling that everything he did and said was just more ridiculous by the second. What did he mean "nice warm-up"?

Grey was already too focused to notice.

The core idea hadn’t changed, since Veyrath had proven that a Vessel could house an entire functioning Neural Frame without replacing Grey’s own, and Prometheus needed something that could achieve the same basic result on a much larger scale.

Grey wanted an artificial Neural structure surrounding or accompanying his body, one capable of letting Prometheus act as its brain while maintaining constant communication with Grey’s natural Frame. The problem was that knowing how the system should work didn’t tell him what physical shape that system should take.

Armor still made sense. Maybe too much sense.

Grey finally glanced toward the angel lady. "What do you think Prometheus’ Vessel should actually be?"

She hesitated. "I don’t know."

Grey stared at her.

"What?"

"You’re useless."

She was going to argue, but Grey had already looked away.

His gaze landed on The Virtueless sitting nearby, and for a moment he wondered whether he had trapped himself by thinking a Vessel had to be something worn on the body. A weapon could house Prometheus just as easily in theory, especially if the weapon maintained constant Neural communication with him, though the idea became less attractive the longer he considered it.

He already had The Virtueless.

Now that his Linear and Resonant Frames had healed and expanded, Grey should be able to enter that strange state he had reached against the Goddess far more easily than before, which meant replacing or competing with the rod would be stupid.

The Virtueless had plenty of room left to grow alongside him, and making another weapon purely to give Prometheus somewhere to live would waste an opportunity to cover one of his actual weaknesses.

Grey pursed his lips.

’I do suck at long range.’

His expression slowly changed.

"Maybe I should make a shotgun."

Grey laughed almost immediately after thinking it, partly at the contradiction of solving his range problem with a weapon famous for not exactly being a sniper rifle.

Still, the image of himself walking around blasting people with some absurd Prometheus-powered firearm became more entertaining the longer he considered it, especially when Prometheus possessed the sort of processing ability that could handle all the trajectory calculations for him. The results would have definitely been disgusting.

The main reason Grey rarely bothered with ranged weapons had always been his Center of Spirit. The ability worked best when his intent, body, and attack remained tightly connected, and launching something away from himself introduced a separation that made the whole style feel less natural.

Prometheus might be able to bridge that gap, though, calculating and maintaining the attack as an extension of Grey long after it left the barrel.

He liked that idea. Just not for this.

Maybe he would build a gun later and pair it with Veyrath, turning the portable oven into something that fired compressed miniature suns or whatever other irresponsible nonsense he could come up with. Prometheus deserved something more fundamental than another way to kill people, especially when Grey finally understood that the Vessel itself would decide how much of Prometheus he could actually use.

That thought brought him back to Sync Rate.

Energy Reserve and Sync Rate were practically the only things the Genesis System considered important enough to always display for a mech, which said plenty about what truly mattered. Materials, abilities, and Class could all be monstrous, but if the Spirit and Vessel weren’t compatible, most of that potential would remain locked away.

Grey’s gaze slowly fell toward his hand. More specifically, toward his pinky.

The ring had been there so long that Grey barely thought about it anymore, yet it was the first true bridge between himself and Prometheus. Everything started there.

Grey rubbed his thumb across its surface while his thoughts began moving in a very different direction.

’Stealing abilities... storing them...’

Prometheus wasn’t simply fire, strength, regeneration, or some neatly defined combat concept.

Prometheus took things, then gave them somewhere else to belong.

Grey’s eyes slowly began to glow as an idea formed, and the more pieces that fell into place, the more insane the final shape became.

His grin widened.

If they were going to be madmen, they might as well be madmen to the very end.