The air outside Boo's Den had shifted.
What was once a humid mix of incense, alchemical runoff, and Serath'Kai's stale breath now carried the iron-damp promise of something older, fouler—like the exhale of a tomb that had waited too long to be opened. The group stood in a loose formation, armor clinking, leather creaking, weapons being checked and re-checked with the quiet deliberation of soldiers who knew this wasn't just a hunt. It was a reckoning.
Boo emerged last.
She didn't so much walk as saunter into view, every step a statement of sharp intent. The leather bodysuit she wore was stitched from a material none of them could name—sleek, supple, blacker than pitch, and so form-fitting it seemed to breathe with her movements. A hole was cut for her tail, which flicked with languid menace behind her, armored in linked rings that glinted faintly under the false sun. Her hips swayed with dangerous grace, the suit cinched just so at her waist, lifting the soft swell of her breasts and the curve of her rear in ways that felt too deliberate to be coincidental.
At her hips hung twin sabers—Whisper and Promise. Ornate, curved, and glowing with a ghostlight that traced the runes along their gilded spines. Embedded jewels pulsed softly, feeding on ambient magic like parasites too beautiful to be feared. She checked one blade, gave it a quick twirl, and sheathed it with a satisfying click.
Her flintlock pistol was holstered low on her thigh. The grip bore silver skull engravings, their hollow eyes filled with faintly glowing gemstone fragments. The barrel had been carved with old hex-script—savage, almost heretical. It didn't hum with power. It purred.
"You all look so grim," she purred. "Come now. First steps into a cursed garden should be taken with a little flair."
Talon adjusted the buckles on his twin daggers. Cipher muttered a protective algorithm under his breath, fingers sparking. Mirell, ever silent, let a trail of toxin-fumes leak from her wrists and boots, leaving behind the soft scent of rot and roses.
Nyxia stared down the slope. "Let's just get this over with."
The path led down into the remains of the catacombs—once a druidic burial site nestled beneath Serath'Kai's roots. Now, it was a bloom-bed. The Hollow's corruption had twisted the fungal spires into mockeries of trees, their caps shivering like breathing things, their undersides slick with violet glow.
The group descended, single file.
The old stone was slick beneath their boots, carpeted in moss that pulsed with threads of pink and black. The air grew colder—not the clean cold of deep places, but the hungry kind that reached into your lungs and curled its fingers around your breath.
Nyxia's new armor flexed with every step. It hadn't stopped whispering since they left the Den, but now its hum seemed to shift—eager, almost... aware. She tried to ignore the sensation of eyes crawling along her spine.
Perseus, walking just behind her, carried the sealed artifact case on his back, his hammer strapped tight across his shoulders. He'd said little since the dream. Since the bruise. Since the memory of his hands around her throat had turned from nightmare to almost-truth.
Now, his jaw was tight.
"Loque?" Nyxia called softly.
The spirit cat prowled ahead, spectral tail flicking, his body shifting in and out of the deeper gloom. He didn't growl—but his ears stayed flat. The deeper they went, the more the silence pressed.
"I hate this," Cipher muttered behind them, running a diagnostic spell along the interior of his goggles. "The data hates this. The air hates this."
"Get used to it," Boo said sweetly. "We're not even close to the fun part."
They reached a junction where the path split. One fork led toward the remains of the old mycelium shrines—abandoned centuries ago when the druids began to vanish. The other led downward into a gullet of bone and stone.
Talon sniffed the air. "Fungal vents are breathing again. We take the lower route."
Boo didn't argue. She took point, sabers drawn now, their ghostlight casting shadows with too many fingers.
As they pressed deeper, the catacombs changed. The walls grew ribbed, calcified. Shapes like bones, but too big, too old, too… wrong, jutted from the stone like broken fangs. They passed one that looked like the rib of a god—hollowed and engraved with half-erased runes in blood-red ink.
Mirell stopped to trace one with her fingertip.
"It's a warning," she whispered. "Or a laugh."
The scent of the Hollow grew stronger.
By the time they reached the first chamber—wide, circular, lit by bioluminescent veins stretching from floor to ceiling—they knew they were being watched.
Not by eyes.
By memory.
"This was a grave," Boo murmured. "Now it's a throat."
Nyxia looked up.
The ceiling moved.
Not fast. Not visibly.
But she knew.
It was breathing.
And somewhere, far below, the Vault was waiting.
The Vault—and Ves'Sariel.
And whatever version of Nyxia she wanted to carve from the one who'd come to stop her.
The catacombs narrowed, roots growing thicker and wetter with each step. What had once been sacred earth had festered into something spongy and unnatural, pulsing faintly with a violet glow. The air buzzed—not with insects, but with a memory trying to speak.
Talon was the first to draw steel. "Movement," he rasped, crouched low beside a pillar half-swallowed by moss.
Shapes slithered into view—vaguely elven, all of them wrong. Their limbs were elongated by bark and sinew, their hair a tangle of vines slick with bioluminescent rot. Their eyes had no color—only the vacant, seared shine of something long since burned out.
The First Bloomed.
They stepped forward, and did not speak. Not with voices.
But the spores did.
Nyxia didn't realize when they touched her. They didn't float through the air. They entered through the seams of her armor, pricking like invisible needles into her skin.
The memory hit her like a blow.
She was back in the Temple of Silvyrin. Moonlight on stone. Warm hands in hers.
Ves'Sariel's voice. Laughing.
"If we stay here, we'll rot," Ves whispered against her throat. "Let's run. Let's be something more."
Nyxia choked, staggered. Her bow was in her hand one moment, then gone. Her breath caught in her chest like thorns.
To her right, Perseus reeled. His mouth was slack, his eyes wide with something more than fear.
"No," he muttered. "I—this isn't…"
He saw a ruined battlefield. Corpses scattered. One of them, an initiate from his first watch—someone he was supposed to protect. They were dying, and he was praying, begging for Light.
But no one answered.
"Not again," he growled. "NOT AGAIN!"
He charged.
But not at the Bloomed.
At a shadow from his past that only he could see.
Loque snarled and bounded to intercept him, slamming into Perseus's side before his hammer could strike the wall.
"Snap out of it!" Nyxia screamed, shaking herself free.
The Bloomed came then.
Fast. Fluid.
They attacked not with weapons, but with memories. One wrapped a tendril of vine around Talon's arm, and the blade-dancer dropped his dagger, staggering as if drunk. Mirell screamed—her poison cloud detonating too early as she dropped to her knees, eyes wild.
Nyxia drew an arrow and fired point-blank into the skull of one of the Bloomed. It hissed, staggered—then lunged again, vine-flesh knitting before her eyes.
"Only fire!" she shouted. "Burn the roots!"
Cipher hurled a rune-grenade. The explosion lit the corridor in sickly purple, and two of the creatures disintegrated into a mist of spores and ash.
One remained.
It was taller. Its form more intact. Beneath the twisted vines, it wore remnants of ceremonial armor—elegant, once-beautiful.
Boo froze.
"Rhelos," she whispered.
The thing cocked its head. The vines around its throat twitched. And it began to hum.
A lullaby. Faint. Off-key.
Boo's hands dropped to her sides. "You bastard," she choked. "You promised me…"
The Bloomed surged.
Boo reacted on instinct.
Her twin sabers flashed, each stroke cutting through spore and bark with surgical violence. The ghostfire in their gilded hilts left smoking trails in the air. She danced—not like the performer she'd once been, but like a woman erasing grief with every strike.
The creature tried to speak.
She silenced it with a shot from her flintlock. The pistol kicked once—etched skulls flashing red. The bullet took it between the eyes.
The lullaby stopped.
And just like that, it was over.
Everyone was panting. Perseus clutched his side, burned where a vine had torn through his tabard. Cipher leaned against the wall, a trail of blood down his temple. Mirell sat with her head in her hands, whispering the names of herbs that didn't grow here anymore.
Boo stood over the corpse of her brother, chest heaving. Her sabers dripped a black-green ichor that hissed as it touched the ground.
The silence after Rhelos fell wasn't a silence of peace. It was hollow—like the space left behind when something once beautiful is broken and swept away.
Boo didn't move for several seconds. Her sabers hung at her sides, their jeweled hilts glinting faintly in the glow of her rune-lit armor. The gold-etched skulls at the base of her flintlock seemed to stare back at her in judgment. Her bodysuit—slick, shadow-tight, almost organic—clung to her like a second skin, but for once, she seemed to forget she was even wearing it.
Nyxia stepped in beside her. Quiet. Present.
Perseus held back, sensing the moment for what it was. Loque, too, circled warily around the edge of the ruin, growling low at the fungal remnants still twitching across the chamber floor.
Boo drew in a breath—shaky, trembling on the edges of her composure.
"He was gentle," she said softly, barely louder than the drip of condensation down the walls. "Rhelos. The only one who looked at me like I could be something else. He was the only one who ever saw me before," she said. "Not the assassin. Not the infiltrator. Just… me."
Nyxia didn't speak. She just listened.
"I hated sailing," Boo continued. "Hated waking up early. The discipline. But he'd sneak out with me. We'd sit beneath the pier and watch the stars. He'd hum lullabies into the dark and swear one day he'd make a path for me to be who I wanted to be, not just what others wanted from me."
Nyxia finally said, "And what did you become?"
Boo's eyes shimmered, not with tears—but rage. "Everything he was afraid I would."
There was silence between them, stretched thin but unbroken.
Then Boo turned to Nyxia, her voice no longer soft. "She took him. Ves'Sariel. Used him. Hollowed him out and fed him to her garden like a sacrifice."
The rogue didn't look up.
Nyxia knelt. "And now?"
Boo wiped her face, not sure whether it was sweat or tears.
"Now," she whispered, "I kill her twice. Once for him. And once for me."