Lucid looked at the ring resting in his palm, its surface dull and lifeless against his skin. He directed fate essence toward it deliberately, pushing a thin thread of fate essence through whatever remained of its structure. Suddenly everyone in the chamber reached forward simultaneously, an instinctive, unified motion that carried no obvious coordination behind it.
Then nothing.
No sound. No light. No voice. Total, complete nothingness pressed against every sense he possessed, swallowing the marble chamber, the fallen columns, the swirling golden mist that had characterized this fragment of dead Celestia since his arrival. Even Lucid, who had grown accustomed to encountering the impossible throughout his time in the Scattered Realms, felt genuine shock ripple through him at the sudden absence of everything.
'Is this what nonexistence feels like,' he wondered, his thoughts moving slowly through the void, 'or is this something else entirely?'
"Is this thing broken?" he asked internally, directing the question toward Alice.
Her voice returned, carrying confusion he rarely heard from her. "It cannot be broken. I could always feel its current running beneath the surface, faint but persistent. It had threads connecting it to something larger, something that stretched beyond this immediate location."
Lucid activated the Chain of Heart fully, focusing his enhanced perception directly toward the individual threads surrounding the ring itself. The world around him sharpened into impossible clarity, revealing structures of causality and connection that normally remained invisible to mortal perception.
They were severed.
Every thread that had once connected the ring to whatever vast network it belonged to had been cut cleanly, precisely, leaving nothing but frayed ends drifting uselessly in the still, dead air around him.
"That is not possible," he muttered aloud, his voice sounding strange in the absolute silence surrounding them. "An object cannot contract the Withering. Objects lack the biological structure necessary for corrosive fate essence to take hold. It simply is not possible within any framework. I don't understand!"
Mercyros crossed his hands slowly, looking down at the scene with calculated, patient focus, his expression giving nothing away despite the chaos unfolding around them.
"I bid the mandate of pressure," he announced, his voice carrying formal weight that seemed to press against the very fabric of the chamber. "The mandate of transaction. The first coming mandate of attraction and compression, foundational principles governing how force and value interact within any economic system."
He paused, allowing the weight of his declaration to settle fully before continuing.
"The authority of trade and commerce," he continued, making a deliberate, sweeping gesture with his outstretched hand that seemed to encompass everything within the chamber and beyond.
"Should failure to meet any of these demands with equal value occur," Mercyros stated, his tone carrying absolute certainty, "you shall reveal the source of what is destined to become a Monolith of Commerce."
[ Seconds remaining: 5 ]
Lucid's eyes widened as the countdown materialized before him, dark lettering suspended in the air with unsettling clarity.
[ Seconds remaining: 4 ]
The ring he had just moments ago rendered completely useless, completely severed from whatever purpose it once served, sat inert and cold within his palm, offering no obvious solution to whatever demand Mercyros had just placed upon him.
[ Seconds remaining: 3 ]
But he kept focusing regardless, pushing past the apparent uselessness of the object, activating domain control with deliberate intention. Brilliant weaves of thread laid themselves out before his enhanced perception, visible now in ways they hadn't been moments before, patterns of golden light stretching across the void like a tapestry only he could perceive.
Mercyros's eyes shifted beneath the dim ambient light filtering through the collapsing chamber, tracking Lucid's frantic movements with careful, predatory attention.
[ Seconds remaining: 2 ]
Lucid grasped each strand individually, treating them like separate hairs he could isolate and manipulate with precise care. He enrolled them through the ring's structure one by one, working with the meticulous focus of someone threading a needle under impossible time pressure, each movement deliberate despite the frantic countdown ticking away above him.
[ Seconds remaining: 1 ]
"Yes!" Alice yelled within his mind, urgency and excitement mixing together in her voice, the sound cutting through his concentration like a beacon of encouragement.
He channeled fate essence directly through the reconstructed pathway, feeling the connection reform beneath his fingertips. Suddenly the very air rippled around them, distortion spreading outward from the point where he held the ring, reality bending slightly to accommodate whatever process had just been completed.
He thrust the object forward with sudden conviction. Whatever law of force had been approaching him, whatever consequence Mercyros had threatened, suddenly reversed direction entirely, pulled instead toward the ring itself, consumed by whatever mechanism he had just managed to restore against all apparent odds.
"Interesting," Mercyros observed, his tone carrying genuine surprise now, the first crack in his otherwise composed demeanor. "So you revived the ring. Few mortals possess the capability to restore something so thoroughly severed from its source."
"That is precisely what I required," Mercyros continued, something almost gentle entering his voice despite its formal cadence. "Thank you, mortal. You have provided exactly what this transaction demanded."
Without warning, Mercyros extended both hands forward, palms facing outward toward the chamber surrounding them. The ground crumbled beneath everyone's feet simultaneously, marble fracturing into countless pieces that fell away into darkness below.
The purple-robed cultists, dozens of them scattered throughout the space, cultists who had pursued Lucid relentlessly since his arrival in this cursed domain, found themselves locked mid-air before being crushed into formless pulp. Their bodies compressed beyond recognition, blood and viscera spraying outward in patterns that painted the collapsing architecture in crimson.
Pilt, still frozen from the earlier chrono stasis that had locked his body in place, suddenly found himself impaled by a jagged spike that erupted violently from the shifting ground beneath him, the golden material piercing through his side with brutal efficiency.
'Pilt,' Lucid thought with alarm, though he remained equally trapped by whatever forces Mercyros continued manipulating around them.
Voices began resonating from the air itself, layered and overlapping, dozens of distinct tones merging into something that carried absolute, unquestionable judgment.
[ Mercyros, our brother of trade and commerce ]
[ You have violated the concept of Nature ]
[ You have violated the concept of companionship ]
[ You have violated the concept of freedom ]
[ You have violated the concept of contract ]
A final voice resonated through the space, deeper than the others, carrying weight that seemed to originate from somewhere beyond the physical dimensions of the chamber itself.
[ You have obtained the curse of Severance ]
Mercyros grunted suddenly, pain flashing across features that had remained perfectly composed throughout their entire confrontation. His expression finally cracked under whatever force had just been unleashed against him, decades or centuries of careful control shattering in an instant.
He looked down at Lucid, and for a brief, startling moment, his expression carried something resembling quiet satisfaction, an acceptance he had apparently never expected to genuinely want or experience within his long, isolated existence.
'He wanted to become human,' Lucid realized suddenly, understanding dawning as he watched Mercyros's reaction unfold. 'He was trading away his divinity deliberately, sacrificing everything he had built to achieve something as simple as mortality.'
"The ring.. he... used it" Alice whispered in shock.
Lucid glanced to his right, toward where the girl in the cap had been standing throughout this entire confrontation, watching everything unfold with silent, unreadable attention.
Mercyros grew visibly ill, his form flickering with distortion, edges blurring like static interference across a projection. Before Lucid could process the transformation, Mercyros lunged toward him without warning, casting Chrono Stasis at the exact moment their bodies collided.
Lucid felt himself freeze instantly, crushed beneath multiple locks that materialized around his body from seemingly nowhere, pinning him in place with overwhelming, suffocating force.
He fought against the restriction immediately, refusing to accept the paralysis, moving despite the locks, physically breaking through the stasis field piece by piece even as the effort visibly weakened him, sweat beading across his forehead despite the cold air surrounding them.
Alice's voice cut through the struggle, sharp and commanding, all traces of her earlier softness replaced by battlefield urgency. "He is an Archon now. Kill him before he stabilizes into that new authority, before the transformation completes itself fully."
Lucid stopped moving suddenly, a memory surfacing through the chaos with unexpected clarity.
He remembered the gospel. The book filled with reverent praise directed toward him personally, the countless women chanting and pleading for his attention and devotion throughout that horrifying chapter of his journey. The gospel had wanted the Monoliths dead, had specifically named their elimination as part of whatever prophecy or divine plan the cultists believed themselves destined to fulfill.
'This is exactly what they wanted,' he realized grimly, ice settling into his chest despite the immediate physical danger surrounding him. 'Me killing a Monolith with my own hands. Fulfilling their twisted scripture word for word.'
Before he could fully process the implications of that realization, a sharp golden spike materialized suddenly and lunged directly into his abdomen, piercing straight through his flesh and coating the wound in blood almost instantly, the pain sharp and immediate.