God Ash: Remnants of the fallen.-Chapter 1386: Stolen Valor.

Nero's shadows met them all.

For every tendril that wrapped around him, his darkness tore three more apart. For every constriction that threatened to break his bones, his consuming hunger devoured the flesh that dared touch him. He was a void within a void, a hungry thing inside something meant to hunger, and he would not be denied.

His mouth opened wider still, the jaw dislocating completely now, hanging at an angle that no human anatomy could achieve. The shadows pouring from it formed a vortex, a swirling maelstrom of consuming darkness that pulled everything toward it.

Tendrils were sucked into that vortex by the dozens, shredded by the rotating shadows, torn into pieces that Nero's body absorbed with terrible efficiency.

The creature's thrashing grew more violent.

Through the crimson glow of his eyes, Nero could see the thing's interior now. The walls of its throat were lined with strange growths, pulsing organs that served purposes he couldn't begin to comprehend. Its flesh was a patchwork of different materials—here something that looked almost like scales, there a section that seemed to be made of living stone, everywhere else that dark shadowy substance that composed the tendrils.

It was a chimera, a thing assembled from pieces of a dozen different horrors and merged into one impossible whole.

And Nero was eating all of it.

His teeth found purchase on the creature's throat lining and tore a chunk free. The flesh came away in his mouth, thick and gelatinous, tasting of brine and rot and something sweet that made his gorge rise even as he swallowed it down.

The Vineheart pulsed.

The energy flooding through Nero's body reached a critical point, and suddenly his transformation deepened. His skin turned blacker still, now seeming to absorb light rather than simply reflect it. His eyes blazed brighter, the crimson glow intensifying until it illuminated the creature's entire throat in bloody radiance.

And his shadows—his shadows began to take on solid form.

They manifested as appendages of their own, extensions of Nero's will made physical. Claws of pure darkness that raked through the creature's flesh. Tendrils that mirrored the ones he was devouring, reaching out to grasp and tear and feed.

He had become a reflection of the thing he was consuming.

The horror of that realization tried to surface in Nero's fragmenting consciousness.

*I'm becoming like it. Turning into the same kind of monster. I'm losing what makes me—*

**DEVOUR.**

The thought was crushed again, but this time Nero fought back. Even as his body continued its terrible feast, even as his shadows tore through the creature's internal organs and pulled them back to be consumed, some core part of him clung desperately to the memory of being human.

*My name is Nero. I had a mother. I lived in Gor. I met Mephistopheles. I carry the Heretic Eyes. I am not just hunger. I am not just this darkness.*

It was a mantra, desperate and fragile, but it gave him something to hold onto as the Yang form threatened to consume his identity entirely.

The creature's heart—if it could be called that—pulsed somewhere deeper in its vast body. Nero could feel it through the connection of consumed flesh, a massive organ the size of a house beating with slow, ponderous rhythm.

His shadows reached for it.

The creature's heart was not in its chest.

That would have been too simple, too anatomically coherent for something as fundamentally wrong as this entity. Instead, the organ resided somewhere in the lower portions of its body, nestled among coils of intestine and clusters of smaller hearts that fed it blood through a network of vessels that defied geometric logic.

Nero's shadows found it anyway.

They pushed through layers of muscle and fat and stranger tissues, following the pulse of that massive heartbeat like hounds tracking scent. The creature thrashed harder as it felt the shadows approaching its core, its vast body convulsing with enough force to send shockwaves through the entire lake.

Above, on the shore, Nero distantly registered the sensation of Arthur and Jacob stirring. Their consciousness was returning, drawn back by the violent disturbance in the water.

But he couldn't stop now.

Wouldn't stop.

His shadows wrapped around the creature's heart—a thing of pulsing black flesh covered in nodules that glowed with that same blue bioluminescence as the fungi. The organ was enormous, each beat sending torrents of dark ichor through vessels thick as tree trunks.

Nero's consciousness, what remained of it beneath the Yang form's hunger, finally understood what he was looking at.

This wasn't a natural creature.

It had been made. Constructed from pieces of different entities and bound together through some terrible working of power. The heart bore runic markings similar to those he'd scraped into the fungus-covered floor, but older, more complex. This thing was someone's creation, perhaps even their prison, fashioned to guard this pocket dimension by devouring anything that entered the lake.

And now Nero was devouring it.

The irony would have been funny if he'd been capable of humor.

His shadows constricted around the heart, and the organ responded by pulsing faster, harder, pumping desperate floods of ichor through the creature's body in an attempt to fight off the invasion. More tendrils emerged from the walls of its interior, smaller ones this time, thin as fingers, trying to pull Nero's shadows away from their vital target.

Nero's mouth opened impossibly wide and he bit into the heart directly.

The flesh of the organ was different from the tendrils. Tougher, more resistant. His teeth couldn't quite penetrate at first, sliding off the rubbery surface. But his shadows helped, prying open the surface, creating gaps where his jaws could find purchase.

He bit down harder.

His teeth sank in.

The heart's blood exploded into his mouth.

It was nothing like regular blood. The ichor was thick and cold and tasted of metal and salt and something that made his tongue go numb. It poured down his throat in a flood, filling his mouth faster than he could swallow, spilling out over his chin and chest.

The Vineheart in his core reacted violently.

Pain—real pain, not the distant echo of broken bones but something immediate and terrible—shot through Nero's transformed body. The ichor was toxic, filled with concentrated corruption that even the Vineheart struggled to process. His stomach convulsed, trying to reject the poison.

But the Yang form wouldn't allow rejection.

**DEVOUR.**

Nero swallowed the ichor, forced it down despite every instinct screaming at him to stop. His throat burned like he'd swallowed molten metal. His stomach felt like it was being dissolved from the inside.

And still he drank.

The creature's thrashing reached a crescendo. Its massive body rolled in the lake, creating waves that crashed against the chamber's walls. The antlers on its head scraped against stone, carving furrows in the ceiling far above. Its toad-like mouth opened in a silent scream, releasing bubbles that rose through the water like pearls.

Nero's shadows tore deeper into the heart, ripping through chambers and valves and structures that served purposes beyond anatomy. Dark ichor flooded out, mixing with the crystal-clear water of the lake, staining it black.

He ate the heart piece by piece.

Each bite sent fresh agony through his system as the Vineheart struggled to process the concentrated corruption. His body was changing in response, adapting, evolving to handle the toxic influx. His bones elongated slightly, his muscles dense and compact. His internal organs shifted position, reconfiguring themselves to better process the alien matter he was consuming.

He was becoming less human with each swallow.

And somewhere in the drowning fragments of his consciousness, Nero felt that truth with terrible clarity.

*I'm losing myself. With every bite, every swallow, I'm becoming more like the thing I'm eating. Soon there won't be anything left of who I was. Just this hunger. Just this darkness.*

But even as that truth settled over him, even as he felt his humanity slipping away like sand through fingers, Nero held onto that fragile mantra.

*My name is Nero. I had a mother. I lived in Gor. I am human. I am human. I am—*

The Yang form consumed another chunk of heart.

"—human."