Chapter 615: Stalling

"Uh, is that what I think it is?" Brad asked, staring toward the volcano as another red line crawled across its face and a plume of black smoke thickened above the crater.

Grey clicked his tongue and twisted the throttle harder. "Don’t start twerking for them now, it’s just a little volcano eruption. What, you can’t hack it?"

"Fuck you, bitch," Brad said, sounding half outraged and half like he was about to cry.

"I told you this was gonna get messy."

"Yeah, but I can’t throw my hammer at a volcano and hope for the best, now can I? Do you actually have a way to deal with this?"

Grey only grinned wider and pulled back on the handlebars, sending the Dark Kin Cycle into a wheelie as ash sprayed behind them in a long black trail.

"Hey, princess," Grey called toward Amara while the front wheel remained suspended in the air, "you’re gonna want to go full phase unless you feel like finding out what terminal velocity feels like."

Amara glanced down at him, and the slight tightening around her eyes told Grey she had immediately realized that he knew exactly what she had been doing for the last hour. Her lips pursed, but the wind abruptly stopped catching against her body and dress, confirming that she had been letting it happen on purpose the entire time.

Grey finally got an unobstructed view of what the fabric had been teasing him with, and his eyes widened slightly as the dress settled naturally against Amara’s curves despite the absurd speed they were moving at.

He almost wanted to lean forward and take a bite out of it just to see if she would phase on instinct, though he had enough sense left to realize that testing her reaction while driving toward an erupting volcano probably wasn’t ideal.

"A man could run through a brick wall right now," Grey muttered with heartfelt appreciation, causing Brad to groan behind him and tell him to focus on the fucking volcano.

"I am focused," Grey said, laughing as he revved again and slammed the front wheel back into the ground.

The Cycle fishtailed violently when the tire bit into the loose ash, looking like it might spin out completely before Grey shifted his weight and recovered, only to wrench the handlebars sideways a heartbeat later when something massive screamed through the clouds above them.

A molten boulder larger than a house slammed into the place they had been heading toward and exploded with a thunderous boom, throwing liquid stone and burning fragments across the desert.

Grey’s Resonant Sense immediately spread outward, catching another pressure change before his eyes could find the source, and he cut right as a second meteor tore into the earth close enough that the heat rolled over them in a wave.

The volcano had started vomiting incandescent stone into the sky while enormous pieces of its own crater spun high above the landscape before falling back down under gravity. Some were small enough to dodge casually, others looked like pieces of the mountain itself had been ripped free and hurled toward them.

Grey leaned forward and accelerated into the chaos rather than away from it, weaving the Dark Kin Cycle through a landscape that changed every few seconds as impacts opened craters, threw up molten ash, and redirected entire rivers of burning stone.

A meteor struck to their left and Grey carved right, then another descended from that direction and forced him back the other way so sharply that one Shadow Force scraped through the ash while Brad’s grip nearly crushed his ribs.

Amara remained standing on the handlebars through all of it, phasing whenever burning fragments crossed her path and becoming solid again without so much as losing her footing.

Another shadow suddenly swallowed all three of them, and Grey looked up to find a meteor large enough to blot out most of the sky above. He didn’t brake, instead pushing the Cycle harder until the engine screamed and waiting until the descending mass was almost on top of them before wrenching the bike into a violent drift.

The meteor hit behind them with enough force that the shockwave lifted the Cycle entirely off the ground, sending all three of them tumbling through the air while Brad roared something that Grey couldn’t understand through the blast.

Grey twisted the bike with pulses of magnetism before they completed a full rotation, forcing the wheels back beneath them while Amara simply phased through the handlebars long enough to let the Cycle turn under her.

She became solid again at exactly the right moment, feet landing back on the metal as though nothing had happened, and a second later the bike hit the ground hard enough to make the suspension scream. Grey burst out laughing the instant the wheels caught.

"There we fucking go!"

Far ahead, the volcano continued filling the sky with fire while dozens more meteors began descending across their path, turning the entire ashen plain into a moving obstacle course.

Grey’s grin only grew as he drove directly toward it, partly from the adrenaline and partly from the increasingly obvious realization that the Elementals were trying much too hard to keep him from reaching the mountain. Whatever was waiting inside that volcano, they clearly didn’t want him getting there quickly.

**

Deep within the mountain, several figures stood around an open lake of magma while the walls trembled with each eruption. Their armor resembled Veyrath’s, crimson-black plates wrapped around bodies made more from flame than anything tangible, though the details varied enough to make it clear none of them carried quite the same status as the Prince Grey had captured.

A projection hovered above the magma between them, showing the Dark Kin Cycle weaving through the bombardment while Grey continued closing the distance.

"He continues forward," one of the Elementals said, its voice carrying through the chamber like the crackle of a furnace. Another watched Grey avoid yet another impact before answering that this had already been expected, and none of them moved to leave the volcano despite how quickly the distance was disappearing.

Their purpose was not to defeat Grey Temolt, only to slow him down and prevent him from reaching his target before the true reinforcements arrived.

Two of the remaining Infernal Princes were already on their way.

The Elementals gathered around the magma understood exactly what that meant, and none of them were arrogant enough to believe numbers alone could erase the humiliation Veyrath had already suffered. They only needed to keep Grey occupied long enough for the Princes to arrive, then the human who had walked into Infernal Arc territory willingly could learn exactly how expensive that decision had been.