Grey walked forward with a frown. He placed a hand on Amunet’s forehead.

In the past, he had used his gloves to heal her, but the situation now was a bit more complicated. He wasn’t a doctor, and usually his healing went as far as just putting energy into someone’s body and letting the rest do its thing.

The problem with that was that Grey wasn’t directing the energy. So, when he acted, he was essentially just giving someone else’s body the tools it needed to do what it needed to do—ie: heal.

In 99.99% of circumstances, that was fine enough. It wasted energy, but it worked since the benefit was that Grey didn’t have to become some medicine aficionado to make it work.

But the reason Grey hadn’t even tried to help Amunet until now was because her body wasn’t currently in a state where it could be trusted with excess energy.

If he tried to give her energy to heal herself now, it would almost be like giving a nuke extra hydrogen atoms to burst with. She was overloaded, and her body was eating itself alive from the inside out.

Thanks to Ma Famille, Grey actually understood exactly what was happening.

Amunet had over-extended herself by summoning the Old One’s Grave once again. This time, compared to the past, she was in a much better position to actually control them. But the trouble was that competency made people go further than they should.

It was said that most injuries and deaths in high risk sports were from people who were skilled enough to have confidence, but not skilled enough to know that they shouldn’t.

Of course, Amunet wasn’t exactly rushing around looking to be someone’s fool. She had had no choice but to do what she did.

However, the more she pulled on this power she hadn’t yet fully controlled, the more of a chance the Old Ones who seemed to love to control everything could seep into her being and rip her apart from the inside out.

"She’s cold." Grey said softly.

"Can you heal her?" Thi Lan asked, remembering how he helped with her leg.

"... Maybe. But it will be more complicated than usual. Hold on."

Grey took a deep breath, sat in front of both of them, and closed his eyes. He kept his hand on Amunet’s forehead, his eyes furrowed into a tight frown.

What he first needed to do was get rid of the excess Dark Kin energy lingering within her.

This shouldn’t be too hard. The Bringer of Light Gloves were the antithesis of it. The trouble was doing so without it rampaging and causing more damage.

Grey took his time, threads of white gold extended from his fingers. He used them to worm his way into her Neural Frame and saw an endless series of winding paths.

Grey had never been in someone else’s Neural Frame like this. Was it supposed to be this complicated?

His own didn’t feel complicated to him because it was, well... his own.

’Is this what a pure Recursive Neural Frame looked like? There are so many repetitions and double backed loops. You can go down one path seeing the same thing over and over again endlessly. It’s hard to keep track of everything...’

Grey realized that if he did things the one by one route, he would never finish. The energy of the Old Ones just kept spreading and spreading. If he went down one route, cleared it, and then backed out to do another, by the time he came back the corrosive energy would be back.

It was actively trying to take over Amunet’s Neural Frame and turn her into one of their puppets.

"Not on my watch," Grey mumbled, "if anything’s going to make her a puppet, it’s gonna be my dick."

Thi Lan’s lip twitched.

If Amunet was awake to hear it, she certainly would have crashed out, but Grey couldn’t control his tongue even when he was conscious, let alone now when he was completely focused on the task at hand.

Grey’s body exploded with white gold lines, his eyes glazing over.

If he couldn’t clear them all one by one, he was going to have to do them all at the same time.

The lines shot out of him, his mind flickering with a wild focus. The expansion of his senses was a sight to behold. After pushing himself so far to complete the teleportation platform, he was on another level entirely.

Maybe just a few days ago, he would have been entirely incapable of this. But between Ma Famille helping him have a better innate understanding of Amunet’s Neural Frame, his body hit a new level.

His white hair danced, his crimson eyes glowing in the heavy fog until...

Chi.

Amunet coughed, globules of black blood leaving her in gross bits of liquid and solids. She turned to the side, hacking them up onto the floor.

Thi Lan cringed when she saw this, not because of the vomit, but because some of those solid pieces looked like they were... moving. It was like something had been growing inside of Amunet, trying its best to take complete control of her.

Luckily for Grey, Amunet was still just in the Proving Class and working on getting her Abilities to Level 10, so the extent of the backlash wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

The stronger she got, though...

Grey’s eyes regained some of their focus and he raised his hands, pouring white gold energy into Thi Lan and Amunet both, helping them to quickly begin to heal.

Amunet coughed, cringed, and then coughed up some more. She had never been so disgusted in her life, but it was better out of her than inside of her.

"... Thanks..." she eventually said. "How many are left?"

Grey scoffed. "Zero, obviously. I’m here."

Amunet looked over to him as though to check if he was bullshitting her again. When she saw that he was serious, her eyes couldn’t help but widen.

How’d he get so much stronger again? Wasn’t she supposed to catch up after getting the final piece of her Frame?

"Forget all of that. We need to figure out a way to get out of this damned place?"

Amunet’s eyes almost instantly dimmed when Grey said this.

Grey frowned. "What is it?"