God Ash: Remnants of the fallen.-Chapter 1380: Ironic.
Nero did as instructed, setting the cup down and beginning to pull up clumps of the blue-glowing growth. It came away from the stone in thick mats, releasing clouds of spores that drifted through the air like smoke. He gathered armful after armful, carrying them to the array’s center and piling them there.
When he had what seemed like enough, the creature nodded.
"Now crush it. Use the stone floor. Grind it until it’s powder."
Nero knelt at the pile and began pressing the fungi against the black stone, crushing and grinding it with his good hand. The blue glow intensified as the plant matter broke down, releasing more spores into the air. His palm turned blue from the residue, and he could feel a strange tingling where the powder touched his skin.
After what felt like another hour but was probably only minutes, the pile had been reduced to a fine powder that glowed softly in the dim light.
"Into the cup," the creature instructed. "All of it."
Nero scooped the powder into the stone vessel, mixing it with the water from the pool. The liquid turned a deep blue, almost black, swirling with currents that seemed to move of their own accord.
"And finally," the creature said, its voice taking on a reverent quality, "the blood."
Nero looked at his hand. The cuts and scrapes from the fall had mostly healed thanks to Vineheart, but he could reopen them easily enough.
He drew his dagger across his palm, a shallow cut that immediately welled with blood.
Three drops fell into the mixture.
The moment they touched the surface, the liquid began to boil.
Not from heat—the stone cup remained cold in Nero’s hand. But the contents churned and roiled as if a fire burned beneath them, bubbles rising and popping, releasing vapors that smelled of copper and ash and something older than either.
"Place it at the array’s center," the creature said, its voice barely above a whisper. "And then speak the words I gave you."
Nero carried the cup to the exact center of the pattern he’d scraped into the fungus. Set it down carefully. The boiling liquid cast dancing shadows across the runes, making them seem to writhe and shift.
He stepped back and looked at the creature.
"The words," it said. "Speak them now."
Nero opened his mouth and felt the ancient syllables rising from somewhere deep within him. They tasted of fire and ice on his tongue, resonated in his chest like drums, emerged as sounds that should not have been possible for a human throat to produce.
The runes began to glow.The words left Nero’s mouth in a cascade of impossible syllables, each one resonating through the chamber like thunder rolling through distant mountains. The runes he’d scraped into the fungus blazed with brilliant blue light, brighter than the ambient glow, bright enough to cast hard shadows against the walls.
The stone cup at the center of the array trembled.
The boiling mixture within it began to rise, defying gravity, lifting out of the vessel in a sphere of churning liquid that hung suspended in the air. The sphere expanded, growing larger, its surface roiling with patterns that hurt to look at directly.
Nero finished the final syllable and the sphere exploded.
Not outward, but inward, collapsing into a single point of impossibly concentrated light. For a moment, everything in the chamber was illuminated with the brightness of midday sun. Every detail stood out in sharp relief—the texture of the fungus, the cracks in the stone walls, the creature’s four-armed silhouette standing at the array’s edge.
Then the light vanished.
Darkness rushed back in, deeper than before, as if the blue glow of the fungi had been temporarily extinguished by that brilliant flash.
Nero blinked, his vision swimming with afterimages. His ears rang from the sound of the final word still echoing in his skull.
"Did it work?" he asked, his voice hoarse.
The creature didn’t answer.
Nero’s eyes adjusted slowly to the dimmer light as the fungi began to glow again. He could see the array he’d drawn, the runes still faintly luminescent. The stone cup sat empty at the center, whatever mixture had been within it now completely gone.
Then he noticed the fungus.
It was moving.
Not growing or spreading, but pulsing with a rhythmic intensity that made his stomach turn. The entire carpet of blue growth that covered the chamber floor seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting like enormous lungs.
And then it released.
Spores erupted from every surface covered in fungus—the floor, the walls, the ceiling far above. Not the lazy drifting motes Nero had seen before, but a deluge of glowing particles that filled the air in seconds. The chamber became a blizzard of blue, so thick that Nero could barely see his own hands in front of his face.
He coughed, trying to cover his mouth and nose, but it was too late. The spores were everywhere, coating his skin, filling his lungs with every breath.
"What—" he tried to say, but his voice was drowned out by another sound.
Movement.
Behind him.
Nero spun, his hand going to his dagger, and his heart stopped.
Arthur was standing.
Despite his broken leg. Despite being unconscious moments ago. The noble stood perfectly upright, his weight distributed evenly on both legs as if the injury didn’t exist. His eyes were open, but they weren’t focused on anything. They stared straight ahead with an emptiness that made Nero’s skin crawl.
And beside Arthur, Jacob was rising too.
The massive warrior pushed himself off the ground with mechanical precision, his movements too smooth, too controlled. The gash across his forehead still bled, but he didn’t seem to notice. His green eyes were as empty as Arthur’s.
"Arthur?" Nero said, taking a step backward. "Jacob?"
Neither responded.
Then, in perfect synchronization, they both turned to look at him.
And smiled.
It wasn’t their smiles. Wasn’t anything human. It was the expression of something wearing their faces like masks, pulling the muscles into an approximation of joy that came out as something nightmarish.
"What’s going on?" Nero demanded, turning to face the creature. "What did you do to them?"
