Chapter 627: Instinct

For Amara, tying her life to a group led by Grey sounded like voluntarily stapling herself to the side of a missile.

Grey had already started thinking about what he would say if she handed Ma Famille back when Amara finally reached forward and took it.

He blinked.

"You sure?"

Amara glanced at him. "You gave me the drawbacks without pretending they weren’t drawbacks. That’s more convincing than you probably realize."

Grey raised an eyebrow.

Before Grey could decide whether that was a compliment or an insult, Amara pressed Ma Famille against herself and accepted the connection.

The fusion completed almost immediately.

Her eyes lost focus.

The sharp intelligence behind them disappeared as her pupils went vacant, and the tension holding her body upright seemed to vanish all at once as whatever Ma Famille was doing dragged her consciousness somewhere Grey couldn’t follow. At the same time, the bomber jacket she had been holding closed loosened and started slipping away from her chest.

Grey moved before thinking.

His hand shot forward and caught the jacket, pulling it back into place before anything could be exposed.

He froze, then stared at his own hand.

"Dammit, I reacted on instinct."

Brad started laughing so hard nearby that Grey briefly considered undoing all the healing he had just done.

Amara’s body began to flicker before Grey could properly decide what Ma Famille was doing to her.

At first, it looked like her phasing ability had simply gone haywire, her outline becoming transparent enough that Grey could see the volcanic stone behind her before she suddenly flared with light bright enough to make him squint.

Then the transparency collapsed inward and her skin darkened rapidly, not merely changing color but taking on the dull grain of charcoal-black stone, only for that structure to dissolve a moment later into something pale enough to reflect the surrounding lava like polished white metal.

Grey raised an eyebrow as the changes became more violent.

Her forearm seemed to crumble without actually losing shape, individual particles separating from one another until the limb became a compact stream of roaring wind that still somehow maintained the vague silhouette of flesh.

Before Grey could properly inspect what was happening, the air ignited and flames replaced it, then those flames compressed into branching threads of lightning that crawled through a body which no longer seemed entirely committed to having one composition at a time.

’What the fuck?’

Grey had felt plenty from Brad when Ma Famille began pushing his comprehension forward, especially after the treasure reached Dominus Class, but Brad’s advancement had still followed a direction that made sense. He had taken Grey’s understanding of Linear Frames, weapons, force transfer, and the Dominion hammer before reorganizing those insights around a Path he was already walking.

Amara seemed to be doing something completely different.

It was almost as though she had spent her entire life staring through a keyhole and had suddenly realized there was an entire room on the other side.

Her phasing had always looked like a simple transition between tangible and intangible states, but Grey was beginning to suspect that was only the most obvious expression of whatever her Frame truly did. The changes passing through her now weren’t illusions either, his senses could feel her physical properties changing each time, density and conductivity shifting alongside the way energy travelled through whatever happened to make up her body in that moment.

That was where Grey’s own insights started becoming obvious.

The moment her skin became stone again, it didn’t settle into one uniform mineral. Layers formed beneath the surface with different hardness, flexibility, and energy conductivity, almost exactly like the lessons Grey had learned after eating Duko and experimenting with Dormaji biology, except Amara wasn’t wasting time slowly synthesizing one new material from an existing foundation. She was taking the principle that a body could become its own forge and applying it to something far broader.

Grey’s grin gradually widened.

’Oh, that’s nasty.’

The Dormaji were limited by what their bodies could catalyze and how much attention they could devote to changing a mineral structure, which was why most of them settled into one reliable skin rather than creating something completely new in the middle of combat.

Grey had gotten around parts of that problem through his ridiculous comprehension and understanding of raw materials, but Amara’s Frame seemed to offer another solution entirely.

Why spend all that effort manufacturing a material over flesh when the flesh itself didn’t need to remain flesh?

For several more minutes, her body continued moving through possibilities with increasingly less violence, as though Ma Famille had dumped thousands of disconnected ideas into her head and she was slowly finding the common principle linking them all.

Stone stopped looking like stone placed over a human body and began moving with the softness of skin, wind stopped scattering at her extremities, and even the flashes of fire and lightning became contained rather than bursting uselessly into the surroundings.

Eventually, the changes slowed.

Amara’s body returned to its usual appearance, her breathing evening out while the strange pressure radiating from her settled into something far calmer than before. Yet Grey could immediately feel that the calm was misleading, since the boundary between Amara and everything she had just become no longer felt nearly as rigid as it had when she first joined them.

Her eyes finally opened.

They remained distant for a few seconds as her thoughts caught up with wherever Ma Famille had dragged them, then focused on Grey and slowly sharpened. Amara looked down at the bomber jacket still wrapped around her body before reaching up, sliding it from her shoulders, and holding it toward him.

Grey accepted it automatically.

Then his eyes brightened.

’Oh?’

The ruined scraps underneath weren’t going to cover much once the jacket came away, and Grey was already mentally preparing to appreciate the reward the universe had finally decided he deserved after all his recent hard work.

Amara’s skin rippled.

Grey’s hopeful expression froze as the surface of her body separated into thousands of tiny overlapping structures, each one flexing independently like feathers caught in a breeze before tightening together with the precision of scales.

They spread downward from her shoulders in waves, their texture softening and colors deepening as the material rearranged itself, until what had been bare skin a moment earlier unfurled into a gorgeous red dress crossed with something that belonged on a Valkyrie preparing for war.

The cloth wasn’t really cloth.

Grey could see that immediately.

Some sections flowed loosely around her legs while others hardened across her ribs, shoulders, and hips into fitted armor, yet everything had grown from the same continuous material and responded to her movements as naturally as skin.

She had taken the Dormaji concept of synthesizing protective material directly from the body and somehow made it elegant to be a dress and functional enough to be armor.

Grey stared for several seconds.

"Fuck, you’re hot."

The words slipped out before he even thought about them.

Amara looked down at herself, then back toward Grey, and instead of giving him the flat stare he had grown accustomed to, a small smile touched her lips. "Your insights have helped me a great deal. Thank you."

Grey barely heard the thanks.

His attention was still locked onto the structure of the dress, the shifting material beneath it, and the implications of everything he had just watched her do. The Dormaji had spent generations studying minerals and learning how to create increasingly powerful skins from their own bodies, and Grey had already considered their understanding disappointingly limited after spending a short period experimenting with Duko’s inheritance.

Amara had just absorbed those same lessons without even being a Dormaji, combined them with her own ability to alter the state and composition of her body, then skipped straight past limitations their entire Race seemed to accept as normal.

Grey’s grin returned.

The Dormaji were going to fucking hate her.