It was hard for others to explain death. They could wax poetic about it, maybe pull on some of the sadness they had felt when they experienced the death of close loved ones. But in reality, they could never truly know.
Despite the words of the angel lady, Grey definitely felt like he knew. He couldn’t have been more intimate with death.
He had felt that knife in his gut the first time he faced death. He had felt every inch of himself melting when he fused with the Goblin Spirit. He had experienced the arrow that stuck out of his head because of Fitz. He had withstood every furious tirade Esmeralda went on. He had faced the ire of the Genesis System more times than he cared to recall or count.
He had scratched and clawed for every moment of every day to make it to where he was today.
At first, it had felt like he would never get anywhere. But it was just like his gramps had always said. What separated the men from the boys was hair on your chest, and it took fucking time for hair to grow.
In the beginning, none of his efforts felt like they amounted to anything. He would just run into another roadblock, another unfair twist in the path, another bastard who wanted to stab him in the back.
He had lost count of the number of times he had hung his head low and felt like he couldn’t take even one more step forward.
What had kept him going was his unwillingness to give them the satisfaction. He couldn’t wait to wipe those grins off their faces personally, his heart and very soul yearned for it—no, burned for it.
With as much fire as was in his belly, as many hell flames as were in his heart...
How could there possibly be any cold that could truly snuff him out?
Grey roared from the depths of the rebirth waters as his heart itself blackened. Frost coated him from head to toe, a true death sinking into his very being.
What everyone else saw was the effect of the cold on his body. They could all see the blue, and then the violet, and then the black that followed suit. But they didn’t see what was happening underneath.
They never saw what was happening underneath.
The angel lady couldn’t see it, or else she would have never expected him to take a step back.
Thi Lan couldn’t see it, or else she would have never doubted that he’d pull her out of this.
Amunet couldn’t see it, or else she would have never doubted him at all.
That was a burden that was all his own, a burden that he would carry until the very end, a burden that not a single soul in existence would be able to make him put down.
He would continue until the end of these Genesis Games. He would continue until those that did this to Earth understood what it felt like to have their lives played with in the hands of another. He would continue until his family and his friends were back together and he could joke and laugh and have a grand time without a single worry in the world.
Grey clenched his fists, his head tilted up in a roar. Rebirth waters surged into his mouth, a whirlpool so strong and violent it made itself manifest on the surface of the fountain, drilling itself into his mouth.
His eyes went completely white, his hair frosted over, and his body... became little more than a dense rock of black.
His organs turned to ash, his bones atrophied, his flesh mummified. The frostbite ate him whole, swallowing everything in its path until even his soul itself had become little more than a smoldering pile of chill.
It landed itself in an endless, vast wasteland, nothing but an impossible landscape of white in every direction. And there was his soul, in the middle of it all, nothing but a wispy pile of billowing fog and ash.
In the middle of the dense cold, there was no reason it should keep burning, it was impossible that it could ever possibly withstand this level of torment, this level of pain.
And make no mistake about it, that was exactly what Grey was experiencing... Pain. A pain that extended across time.
Every time he dunked his head in, he was experiencing years at a time. And this time, it felt like centuries were whipping by, no singular thought able to well and truly root itself as it should.
But there, the pile that was his soul was... still smoldering... still holding on... but just a bare few seconds from being snuffed out completely.
A harsh wind passed by and seemed to wipe it out for the final time. Nothing but a faint line of black was left. That was all there was of Grey Temolt...
All there was left of a man who had once wanted to face the world with nothing but the fury burning in his heart.
But then...
There was the echo of a heartbeat.
"I told you. I’m him."
The echo of a voice filled the landscape and the moment the winds let up just the slightest bit, the burn mark in the middle of the vast whiteness caught fire.
A burning blue flame ignited and then it raged.
The echo of Grey’s roar tore out of the surface of the fountain’s water and the surface of his body cracked. Blinding white light began to spill out from the exoskeleton of black soot in the very same patterns the bright blue veins had taken before.
Grey’s eyes were no longer just white. They burned like torches, a pair of beams shooting out of them as his hair danced wildly.
BOOM.
A pillar of water shot into the air and the fountain cracked.
BANG.
Grey landed on the ground, his head slowly turning toward the angel lady.