Chapter 626: Badass

Amara’s arms immediately moved inward to cover herself, though she only got halfway through the motion before noticing the bomber jacket wrapped around her body.

Grey’s bomber jacket.

It hung loosely over her shoulders and covered almost everything the battle had left exposed, the material already repairing itself from the ambient heat while Amara stared down at it with a faintly puzzled expression. Without it, and without any conscious energy protecting what remained of her clothes while she was unconscious, the heat inside the crater would have finished stripping the rest away long before she ever woke up.

When her gaze returned to Grey, there was a flicker of something unfamiliar in her expression, as though she genuinely hadn’t expected him to think of that after everything she had already concluded about his personality.

Grey caught it immediately and grinned. "What? You think I’m some kind of animal?"

Brad, still lying half-dead a few feet away, coughed before answering for her. "Yes."

"Shut up, cripple."

Amara’s lips twitched as she slowly sat upright, testing her newly repaired body before pulling the jacket more securely around herself. The surprise disappeared behind her usual calm almost immediately, but Grey had already seen it, and something about that made him even more certain that bringing her along had been the right choice.

She was strong, her ability was disgusting in exactly the sort of way Grey appreciated, and more importantly, she had willingly stood between him and two Infernal Princes while he finished his mech. There were still fifteen open slots in Ma Famille, and Grey had invested far too much into the treasure to leave useful people standing outside it for no reason.

He reached into his pockets and pulled Ma Famille into his palm before holding it toward her.

Amara looked down at the small treasure, then back at Grey as he smiled wider.

"So," Grey said, "you wanna be badass, or are you gonna be a party pooper?"

Amara looked down at Ma Famille for several seconds without taking it from Grey’s hand, her expression becoming more thoughtful the longer she studied the small treasure. "What is it?"

Grey shifted slightly where he sat against the volcanic stone and gave her the short version, explaining that Ma Famille connected a group of people together so their comprehensions and insights could bleed across the network, while its higher-level effects also improved the quality of advancement for everyone attached to it.

He left out most of the unnecessarily complicated wording from the status screen and focused on what actually mattered, namely that everyone inside the family grew faster together than they would alone, while Grey could use the connections to share things the others might otherwise never understand.

Amara frowned. "So basically my improvement is forever tied to yours?"

Grey pursed his lips.

That wasn’t exactly how he would have described it, but after considering the actual function of the treasure, he couldn’t really argue with the conclusion either. "Not exactly, but functionally, yes. You can still make improvements on your own, though."

Amara’s eyes remained on Ma Famille. "But the deaths of everyone else are tied together, but yours aren’t."

Grey stopped smiling.

That was something he had never really bothered thinking about from the outside, even though she was technically correct. Death had become so strange to him over the years that he sometimes forgot how absurdly permanent it still was for everyone else, whereas Prometheus had slowly turned the concept into something Grey treated more like an extremely unpleasant setback whenever the little bastard actually cooperated.

He also had no intention of explaining that.

Prometheus was still one of the few things Grey genuinely wanted to keep hidden as long as possible, especially now that he was beginning to understand just how far outside the normal rules its abilities actually sat. Telling Amara that everyone else in Ma Famille could die while he potentially got another attempt at life would only lead to questions he wasn’t interested in answering.

Still, her point dug deeper than that. Grey had never deliberately killed himself to save somebody else.

It wasn’t as though the idea had never crossed his mind, especially during situations where another loop might have given him a better starting position, but thinking about death as something that might happen was very different from putting a weapon to his own throat and choosing it.

Grey didn’t like dying, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable position considering most people spent their entire lives trying rather hard to avoid it. His temper had simply gotten him killed more often than was healthy, and his pride probably accounted for most of the rest.

If death became unavoidable, Grey knew he wouldn’t hesitate to face it, especially if running meant surrendering something he actually cared about. Choosing death deliberately for another person was different, though, and when he searched through his own memories, he couldn’t honestly find a moment where he had possessed enough conviction to make that decision cleanly.

Ma Famille complicated that.

Grey had been the one inviting people into it, which meant every new member was effectively accepting a danger that Grey himself didn’t share in quite the same way. If Brad, Elowen, Amunet, Mauve, Xerchen, and whoever else eventually joined all died together as a consequence of something Grey dragged them into, could he really justify continuing forward alone simply on the basis that Prometheus gave him the option?

He didn’t like the answer that immediately came to mind.

More importantly, he didn’t like how little hesitation came with it.

If everyone died due to a decision he had made, Grey would have to go back. Even if that meant doing the one thing he had always avoided doing voluntarily.

After a long silence, Grey looked back toward Amara. "Yeah, I guess that is also true."

Amara didn’t respond immediately, and the silence stretched long enough that Grey became increasingly certain she was going to reject the offer. Honestly, he couldn’t even blame her, considering she had already made it clear that she came here to survive and had no interest in becoming a martyr for Earth.

Ma Famille was basically like signing up to have everyone Grey recruited become another possible way to die. And from her perspective, it was arguably worse than that.