Chapter 632: Praying to Gods (1)

Amunet didn’t stop with the skirt. Her hands moved to the hem of her shirt next, and Grey’s attention followed far more closely than he would ever admit as she pulled the fabric up over her stomach, then higher until it passed over her chest and slipped free above her head. She was still wearing undergarments underneath, but the thin material did very little to stop Grey’s eyes from widening.

Amunet tossed the shirt aside and walked straight toward him before he could decide whether this was a trap, a reward from the universe, or some combination of the two. Her palm pressed against the center of his chest and kept going until Grey stumbled backward into the wall behind him, which only made the expression on his face stranger as she stopped close enough for him to feel her breath.

"Why do you look like a deer in headlights right now?"

"Shut up, woman. I’m trying to stare at your tits and figure out if you’re a skinwalker at the same time."

Amunet’s eyes narrowed, though Grey was far too distracted to feel particularly threatened by it. If this really was some kind of elaborate assassination attempt, at least he had finally fixed Prometheus enough that the risk seemed substantially more reasonable than it would have a few days earlier.

’Good thing I fixed Prometheus. Some risks are worth taking.’

Amunet leaned forward and kissed the side of his neck, and for several seconds Grey’s brain did exactly what she had probably expected it to do and stopped being useful. Then she spoke against his skin in a low voice that had none of the flirtation her actions implied.

"You were right."

Grey blinked, and for one ridiculous instant he wondered if she was somehow confirming the skinwalker theory before a certain memory caught up with him and sharpened his expression.

Could she really be talking about that half ass hypothesis? Damn, maybe he really was a genius.

Amunet had clearly been sitting on information for a while, and the fact she had dragged him into her room, shut the curtains, and stripped down just to say it told him this wasn’t something she trusted the Genesis System to hear.

"This is the only way I could think of to talk without anyone listening," Amunet whispered while keeping her face close to his neck. "Your stream should already be cut, and the Genesis System shouldn’t be rolling either."

Grey almost laughed once the explanation settled into place. Back when the frost from the Rebirth Waters had destroyed both Amunet’s and Thi Lan’s clothes, the stream had cut out almost immediately, so apparently the Genesis System was perfectly comfortable broadcasting Grey putting a fist through someone’s skull but drew a hard moral line at exposed breasts.

Then again, it didn’t let him piss on screen either, which meant the thing probably wasn’t as sexist as he had accused it of being. The one time his dick had actually been broadcast to a ridiculous portion of the universe had been entirely The Great Udon’s fault after the lunatic went rogue, so maybe Genesis censorship was at least consistent in its prudishness.

Grey’s thoughts started wandering again when Amunet pressed herself more firmly against him, but her next words dragged him back before he could enjoy the situation too much.

"Don’t get any ideas. The system isn’t stupid, and if we just stand here doing nothing it’ll figure out there’s no reason to keep the stream down. We don’t have much time, and I have absolutely no intention of actually fucking you, so if you understand what I’m saying, stop looking at me like that and listen."

Grey understood her point immediately.

There wasn’t some literal countdown hanging over their heads, but there might as well have been one. The Genesis System wasn’t a dumb camera waiting to be fooled by two people standing awkwardly in their underwear, and if their behavior stopped matching the reason the feed had been censored in the first place, it would eventually recognize that nothing sexual was actually happening and turn everything back on.

That meant there was no exact time limit, but there was a functional one unless their actions continued escalating in a believable way.

Grey silently thanked every god he could think of.

His arms wrapped around Amunet before she could prepare for it, hands sliding around her body and lifting her by the ass as he turned them both. Amunet’s back met the wall a moment later, her legs tightening instinctively enough to keep herself balanced while Grey shifted her higher until their eyes were almost perfectly level.

The glare she gave him could have peeled paint.

Grey chuckled. "What? Would you rather I keep poking a hole through your belly while you try to whisper in my ear?"

Amunet’s jaw tightened, but instead of wasting precious time arguing, she leaned forward again and pressed her lips against the side of his neck. This time her teeth followed, biting down hard enough to draw blood and making Grey wince while the physical closeness continued selling whatever image the Genesis System expected to see.

"The Genesis Council is going to get involved soon," she whispered.

That finally wiped most of the humor from Grey’s expression.

Amunet kept speaking without pulling away. "Their control over the Genesis System is far greater than anything the usual Hosting Race has access to, and if they decide you’ve become too dangerous, they can interfere in ways the Monelay never could. Fighting back against them the way you’ve been fighting everyone else will only work up to a point."

Grey’s eyes narrowed as she continued, especially when her warning shifted away from him personally and toward something he cared about far more.

"If you push them hard enough, they’ll start looking for leverage outside you. Earth has protections as a Cracked World participating in the Games, but those protections aren’t absolute, and the Council knows how to work around systems. They can create openings, weaken safeguards, redirect threats, or make sure something else reaches Earth without ever technically violating the rules protecting it."

He could deal with people trying to kill him. At this point, enemies wanting Grey Temolt dead had become such a normal part of life that he would probably feel strange if a week passed without somebody attempting it, but Earth was different, and billions of people couldn’t be expected to survive whatever game the Genesis Council wanted to play simply because Grey refused to bow his head.

"So how do we stop that?" he asked quietly.

Amunet finally pulled back enough to look directly into his eyes, though she kept her body pressed against his so the scene still appeared convincingly intimate to anything watching from outside the room. "We make Earth part of the Games completely."

Grey frowned as he processed what she meant, and Amunet continued before he could interrupt.

"Right now Earth is still something being protected from the outside, a Cracked World whose population hasn’t fully entered Genesis. If everyone is pulled into the Games, the Council loses a large portion of the indirect leverage they have over the planet, since attacking Earth becomes much harder when every person on it falls under the system’s active protections."

Grey stared at her while the implications stacked up. Bringing everyone on Earth into the Genesis Games sounded insane on its face, but if the alternative was leaving them sitting outside while the Council searched for ways around the existing safeguards, this level of insanity might eventually become the safer option.

"You have a way to do that?"

"I think I do."

Grey immediately disliked the hesitation buried inside those four words.

Amunet’s hands tightened slightly around his shoulders as her expression grew more solemn. "The problem is that we’d have to force something far earlier than the Games are designed to allow, and if we fail, we may not survive long enough for a second attempt."

Grey held her gaze. "What do we have to fight?"

For the first time since dragging him into the room, Amunet hesitated long enough that the silence itself answered part of the question.

Then she said it.

"We have to fight a fragment of Kronos early."

The meaning settled over Grey slowly, carrying far more weight than the heat of Amunet’s body or the absurdity of how they were standing.

Now it seemed there was one other thing pulling him in that direction, huh? Wasn’t he going to do that anyway?