Chapter 616: Wrong

Grey only needed a few more seconds of weaving through the meteor shower before something about the entire attack started bothering him.

The falling chunks of molten stone were dangerous enough, and one clean hit would probably turn Brad into something Grey could spread on toast, but if the Elementals actually wanted them dead, there were much easier ways to go about it.

They were standing beside an active volcano, which meant a tsunami of lava, a collapsing mountainside, or even simply flooding the entire approach in Fire Energy would have made far more sense than tossing rocks at them one at a time.

They had also prepared too perfectly for Grey to dismiss it as stupidity. The eruption had begun almost the instant they crossed into the territory, and the meteor shower followed with timing precise enough that there was no question somebody had been watching their approach and feeding information ahead.

After everything Grey had already done to the Elementals, there was no way they still underestimated him badly enough to think this kind of attack would finish the job.

Grey’s eyes narrowed as another meteor slammed into the ground several dozen meters away, and his gaze dipped toward the Infernal Temper Band wrapped around his wrist.

Veyrath had already accidentally warned him in his own stubborn way that something was wrong here, which meant the Elementals probably weren’t trying to kill Grey at all. They were probably trying to slow him down.

Grey sneered.

"Let’s dance, then. I really want to see what you think you can make happen here."

Whatever they were waiting for, Grey wasn’t about to let it stand between him and finding out what Prometheus could really become. More importantly, he didn’t actually need to reach the tree, harvest the sap, and then somehow make it all the way back to Melix before they caught him.

The moment Grey got enough uninterrupted time with the tree itself, he could start working, and considering what he planned to build from that sap, everyone trying to delay him was going to pay a very expensive price for those extra minutes.

"Buckle up, tender cheeks," Grey shouted toward Amara as another shadow passed over them. "Things are about to get bumpy."

Brad immediately sounded offended behind him. "Hey, where’s my warning?"

Grey glanced down at the thick arms wrapped around his waist. "Probably wherever you left your last chance to say ’no homo.’"

"I’m just very secure in my masculinity."

Grey laughed and twisted the throttle.

Amara’s eyebrow rose when, instead of turning away from the next wave of falling stone, Grey abruptly forced the Dark Kin Cycle’s front wheel downward. The bike plunged nose-first toward the ash, and just before they should have smashed into the ground hard enough to flatten all three of them, its frame flickered and slipped straight through the surface.

Grey hadn’t forgotten the Cycle could phase. He had simply wanted to see what the Elementals were doing first.

The moment he became reasonably certain they were trying to delay him rather than kill him outright, there was no reason to keep playing along. Grey sent the Cycle roaring through packed earth and volcanic stone beneath the surface, his Resonant Sense stretching upward through the ground so he could track where the meteors struck and steer away from the worst shockwaves before they reached them.

The Dark Kin Cycle’s phasing wasn’t limitless, and Grey had long since realized that the amount of energy stored inside whatever it tried to pass through mattered far more than simple physical density.

Ordinary stone was almost effortless compared to something saturated with active energy, which meant phasing directly through one of the Fire-Energy-loaded meteors would have been an excellent way to find out whether the Cycle could explode while intangible.

Been there, done that. He wasn’t trying to die in such a stupid way again.

Underground, though, there was nothing for the Elementals to aim at accurately anymore, and the pattern of impacts above immediately became more scattered.

Brad’s grip tightened every time a distant shockwave rolled through the earth. Amara remained perched on the handlebars in full phase, her body passing through occasional ridges of stone whenever Grey cut the route too close, while the Cycle tore through the mountain’s foundation at a speed that would have been suicidal if Grey couldn’t sense what waited ahead.

Within minutes, the slope of the terrain started rising sharply around them.

Grey grinned. "Found it."

He pulled hard on the handlebars and sent the Cycle climbing.

The bike burst out of the mountainside in an explosion of ash and loose stone, immediately hitting the steep volcanic slope with enough momentum that the front wheel lifted again. Grey didn’t bother correcting it this time, instead feeding more power into the engine while the Cycle screamed upward along the side of the mountain, passing glowing cracks where lava pushed close enough to the surface to make the air distort.

The crater rim appeared above them.

Grey accelerated again.

The Dark Kin Cycle shot beyond the edge and entered open air.

For several seconds, all three of them sailed through a wall of heat, smoke, and drifting soot with nothing beneath the wheels. The inside of the volcano opened below like another world, an enormous basin of black rock and glowing magma stretching farther than Grey had expected, while rivers of lava crawled between broken islands of stone and Fire Energy hung in the atmosphere thick enough to make his skin prickle.

Then gravity gripped them.

The Cycle tipped forward and began plunging toward the chaos below.

Grey’s grin stretched across his face as his Resonant Sense exploded outward, searching through the crater while Brad started yelling something about how bikes weren’t fucking air planes.

It barely took Grey a moment to find what he had come for, and his eyes lit up when one enormous tree appeared near the center of the crater, its dark trunk twisting directly from an island surrounded by magma.

Then he found a second, a third, and a fourth.

All four trees were growing almost directly over the lava, their roots disappearing into volcanic stone while thick amber sap glowed faintly beneath cracked bark. Grey almost laughed at his luck, though another set of presences caught his attention before he could celebrate.

Several Fire Elementals were submerged in the magma below. That much he had expected, but there were more.

Grey’s Resonant Sense swept through the lava again and caught bodies that didn’t blend into the Fire Energy in quite the same way. They were denser, heavier, their presence flowing with the molten stone itself rather than merely hiding inside its heat.

Grey’s eyes narrowed as the Cycle continued falling. So they hadn’t only brought Fire Elementals. They also seemed to think Grey hadn’t noticed them.

His grin widened.

They were wrong.