Chapter 307: A Strange Black Flame (1).

From here on out, every choice he made could lead him down one of those two paths, and the difference between them was not always obvious from where he stood. Sometimes the path to one thing looked exactly like the path to the other, until one was too far along to easily turn back.

Nero glanced down at his hands.

They were clear as ice crystals in the torchlight, without a visible blemish on them.

The Yin form was excellent work. With the progression of the Black Body, as his monstrous form became more and more nightmarish, his human form also moved towards aesthetic perfection.

It was jarring to say the least.

So far, no one seemed to have noticed it yet, but his eyes were far more keen than others. There was no way he would go unnoticed for long.

His body, was equally as monstrous as it was human. Equally as capable of being gentle and terrible.

He possessed the Eyes of the Heretic that could see through all things, and Vineheart born a dead god.

The dove and the raven…

He thought about “angel” he had devoured.

It had been a strange creature. A spirit being, the Oracle had told him it was. However its true nature was much more complex than that.

In fact, Nero was certain the Oracle truly didn’t know exactly what the being, Rummel Abellion, was. It certainly wasn’t the ideal image of Divinity one would have in their head.

No. That wasn’t right…

What did divinity truly look like?

Endless kindness and providence? Or celestial indifference? Or ominpotent wrath and judgement?

Or could it be that Rummel Abellion was the same as him? A being of dual natures?

He didn’t know.

Perhaps he never would.

He exhaled and kept walking.

His room was where he’d left it, which was more than could be said for most things in his life recently. It was small and simply furnished, with the slightest smell of waning lumber and faint traces of his own existence accumulated over the weeks he’d spent here. He entered, locking the door behind him. Then he sat on the edge of his bed.

The quiet was quick to settle in around him.

He remained still for a while, simply existing in the silence. Then he straightened, checked the door again, and looked out the window.

He was alone.

He reached inward and summoned the runes.

They manifested in the air before him, glowing golden against the room’s dim light, hanging suspended in the air. A cascade of them, more than he’d processed recently, accumulated during the chaos of the trials and everything that had followed.

Nero read through them slowly, working from the oldest forward. There were status updates as well as incremental changes to his condition. There was also the very common Seal of Sin acquiring message. Those were quite common…

He worked through the accumulated messages with a determined focus.

Then he found it.

It was marked differently from the others. The runes that formed it carried a different quality, a certain weight and brightness that set them apart from the regular stream of runic text. He read them slowly, making sure he understood each word before moving to the next.

***

{Rejoice, Heretic. You have slain the Soul of a Chained Prince of Heaven, the Ruler of the Sporefire, and the Star of Great Calamity, Rummel Abellion}.

{Due to the high hierarchy of the being you have slain, you have accumulated for yourself Divine karma. You have also received 100 Seals of Sin}.

{You have acquired the unique skill: Grimfyre}.

{Grimfyre: A Flame of Curse. Strengthened by darkness, it devours the corruption}.

***

Nero stopped reading.

He sat completely still, the golden runes hanging in the air before him with a steady glow unseen by any other living soul while his mind attempted to process what he’d just read.

A Chained Prince of Heaven.

Rummel Abellion had not been lying.

Not about what it was, at least.

A Prince of Heaven meant it was an angel, right?

It truly had been an angel, a genuine one, a being of sufficient rank that slaying it was substantial enough to grant him a hundred Seals of Sin in a single go.

A hundred Seals.

He’d spent months accumulating his current total through battles, trials and near-death experiences that should have killed him a dozen times over, and this single act had added a whole hundred.

What in the absolute world had he done?

He stared at the runes for a long moment, the silence of the room pressing in around him like the jaws of death.

A dark hallway indeed, he could see.

One that led to infinite places with every choice he made.

A single choice just now had opened up another door. One he had no idea where it led to.

’Oracle, what is Divine Karma?’ he asked softly.

{Divine Karma cannot be qualified easily. It is essentially, a measure of recognition amongst both the holy and the profane. Depending on what side your Divine Karma falls to, your affiliations may change}.

’Well, that doesn’t sound good.’

He took a long, slow breath.

Then another.

The excitement began to build despite himself, a warmth spreading through his chest. Although the words the Oracle had just spoken was rather grim, he wasn’t going to let it weigh him down too much.

After all, the simple fact of the matter was that he had survived and he had grown stronger in the process, enduring something impossible and emerging with nothing more than a scratch. And…

A new skill.

He let the runes dissolve, taking one more moment to collect himself and contain the feeling before it became something unseemly. Then he raised his right hand, palm upward, and reached for the newly acquired skill.

Grimfyre.

“A Flame of Curse. Strengthened by darkness, it devours the corruption.” The Oracle had called it.

He focused as he would when using Shadow Shift.

The skill seemed to respond.

Something manifested above his palm.

Nero looked at it.

A single tongue of flame, roughly the size of his thumbnail, pale grey in color, floating above his palm with all the energy and menace of a candle in a room with no draft. It flickered once, with what might have been uncertainty about its own existence, then steadied into a small, unimpressive, entirely unheroic little flame that illuminated approximately nothing.

The silence in the room seemed to deepen around it.

Nero stared at the flame.

The flame, if it could be said to do anything, seemed to stare back.

“What the hell is this?!”

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