Chapter 633: Praying to Gods (2)

Grey’s attention was still split between Amunet’s warning and the fact that she was half naked against him when one hand slipped behind her back and found the clasp of her bra with irritating ease.

Amunet felt the tension disappear from the garment and practically hissed into his ear, pulling back just enough to glare at him while Grey wore an expression of complete innocence.

"What?" Grey asked. "You’re the one who said we can’t just stand still. It’s either this, or I start pulling more sensitive garments out of the way."

Amunet’s lip twitched, yet she had known what sort of person Grey was long before she dragged him into this room, and some part of her had already accepted that this was probably going to happen. What annoyed her more was the strange need she felt to protest anyway, as though it mattered that Grey understood she wasn’t casually stripping in front of him simply because she felt like it.

In the end, she let the loosened bra slide from her shoulders and fall between them, the small amount of space giving Grey exactly enough time to shamelessly look before she leaned forward and pressed herself firmly against his chest. Grey sucked in a slow breath while his arms remained around her, then forced his attention upward toward her face with an amount of effort he found deeply unfair.

"So are you going to explain," Grey asked, "or do you want to go further?"

Honestly, controlling himself was becoming significantly harder than he’d expected. Seeing Amunet naked while she was unconscious after the Rebirth Waters had been one thing, but having her awake, wrapped around him, and effectively granting him permission to keep escalating things for the sake of hiding their conversation was making his two brains short-circuit one another.

Amunet buried her face into his neck again, and Grey braced himself for another bite while his hands continued moving almost absentmindedly against her ass. He hadn’t even realized how incessantly he’d been kneading it until that moment, but once he noticed, he found absolutely no will to stop.

Who asked it to be so damn soft?

Instead of biting him, Amunet began speaking again, and Grey could have sworn there was the faintest quiver in her voice now. He couldn’t tell whether it was real or whether his lower brain was rewriting reality for its own benefit, though said lower brain didn’t appear particularly concerned with the distinction.

"You were right," Amunet whispered. "I’m not from your time."

Grey’s hands slowed slightly.

"I came from around 1300 BCE."

For once, even the body pressed against his wasn’t enough to keep Grey’s mind from snapping fully into focus.

Amunet continued quietly, keeping her mouth near his neck while the rest of her body maintained the appearance of something far less important than the conversation they were actually having. "Humanity’s first contact with alien life happened back then, though we didn’t call them aliens. To us, they were Gods, and in fairness, the difference would have meant very little to people living in my era."

Grey’s thoughts immediately went to everything he’d learned since entering the Genesis Games, especially how easily sufficiently powerful Races could have passed themselves off as divine to ancient humans. If a Dominus or Ascendant had descended onto Earth thousands of years ago, there probably wasn’t a civilization alive at the time that would have described them as anything other than a God.

"For reasons I still don’t fully understand, many of them became deeply interested in Earth," Amunet continued. "Most people considered that attention a blessing, but my father never did."

There was something different in her voice when she mentioned him.

"I was a princess near the end of one of our greatest periods, though that sounds more impressive than it was. My father had many children and I was only one of them, but he was a wise man even if he was also one of the cruelest people I ever knew."

Grey listened without interrupting as Amunet shifted slightly in his arms, her fingers tightening against the back of his shoulders.

"He made decisions that most people considered monstrous, then slept perfectly well afterward if he believed those decisions protected his kingdom. So when Gods began descending from the heavens offering things beyond our wildest imagination, while everyone else asked what gifts they might receive, my father asked why the hell they cared so much about us at all." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Grey’s eyes narrowed.

"Smart man."

"He was," Amunet admitted. "And eventually, his suspicions led him to a God named Prometheus."

That name immediately changed the rhythm of Grey’s breathing.

Amunet felt it and continued. "I don’t know everything they discussed, only that Prometheus agreed to help him steal something from a God named Kronos. Whatever it was, they used it to send me forward through time, thousands of years beyond everyone I knew, and they did it years before Earth was ever supposed to become a Cracked World."

Grey’s mind began tearing through the implications almost immediately. Prometheus possessing a fragment of Kronos’ power already lined up with what the angel lady had told him, but apparently that stolen power hadn’t merely survived into the Genesis Games, it had interacted with Earth long before the planet ever officially entered them.

"My task was simple," Amunet said. "I was supposed to arrive early enough to prepare Earth."

Grey’s hands had finally stopped moving altogether.

"My father believed that once the Genesis Games reached our world, individual kingdoms, nations, and rivalries would become meaningless compared to what was coming from outside. I was meant to use the technology, knowledge, and strength I’d been given to become Earth’s Representative, then gradually unite humanity before the Games ever began."

The plan was cold enough that Grey could understand why Amunet described her father the way she did, yet he couldn’t deny the logic behind it. What kind of father sent their daughter off to the future, knowing he would never see her again, and sack her with a monumental task at the same time?

Most Cracked Worlds entered Genesis divided and ignorant, but if Earth had arrived with a unified government, advanced knowledge, and someone already preparing specifically for alien contact, their starting position would have been absurdly better.

"We were supposed to be organized before everyone else," Amunet whispered. "One world, one direction, with years to prepare for the moment Genesis finally noticed us."

Grey frowned. "But you didn’t get years."

"No."

Amunet finally lifted her head from his neck, and whatever embarrassment had been in her expression earlier was completely gone.

"I barely got anything."

Grey understood before she finished saying it.

"Something triggered Earth’s entry early."

Amunet nodded slowly, her expression darkening as she looked into his eyes.

"I was sent into the future to prepare humanity before Earth became a Cracked World, but by the time I arrived, I barely had time to learn the culture and ingratiate myself properly. I was supposed to go to college and rise through the normal way first, the slowly fix things over the next half century or so, but I only got less than a year."