Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 336: The Unbreakable (2).

"Hazai," Arthur said quietly, looking at the flame rather than at Nero. "The first incantation I learned. Fire is a poor starting point — the energy cost is disproportionate and the applications in combat are narrow — but it is visually instructive." He closed his fingers slowly and the flame compressed, compacted, and went out without smoke. "Magic carries no inherent morality. It does not care who holds it. The Grigori understood that, which is why they taught it to humanity rather than hoarding it — they believed knowledge without a guardian eventually finds its own hands."

"Corruption itself," he continued, and his voice had gone thoughtful now, slightly distant, as though he were working through an idea he had been sitting with for some time, "may operate on a similar principle. The Church calls it pure evil. But I have sometimes wondered whether—"

"That is enough."

Sergeant Aldric’s voice came from behind and to the left, where he had been standing without any of them noticing, and it did not raise or quicken — but the air around it did something that had no clean description, a kind of pressure that arrived without warning and settled into the bones rather than the ears. Every instinct Nero possessed went quiet simultaneously, the way small animals go still when something large and quiet moves through the undergrowth nearby.

Aldric did not step closer. He did not need to. He looked at Arthur with an expression that contained nothing readable — no anger, no contempt, only a flatness so complete it communicated its own severity without requiring either.

"We are here to train soldiers," he said, "not scholars." A pause, and in the pause, something that was not quite a threat but was indistinguishable from one in terms of its effect on the nervous system.

"Gather yourselves."

Arthur closed his hand completely, and whatever had been in his expression while he talked about the Grigori and corruption was gone when he lowered his arm. He stood, brushed the bark dust from his trousers with two efficient movements, and said nothing further on the subject.

Jacob was already on his feet, waraxe settled back across his shoulder, watching Sergeant Aldric with an expression that mixed wariness and something private — the look of a man who had correctly filed away a piece of new information without letting the filing show.

Nero stood last, feeling the coolness of the morning settle back into the air around him as though it had never left, and followed them deeper into the Thornwood.

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## The Deeper Wood

The trees changed as they went further in — not dramatically, not all at once, but with the gradual persistence of something that had been at work for a long time and had no particular hurry about it. The bark along the older trunks had gone from dark grey to a true black in the inner wood, split where the corruption had expanded what the living tissue couldn’t accommodate. The undergrowth was denser here and stranger in shape, the ferns growing in flat, unbroken spirals where they should have been open and reaching, and certain roots had grown above ground in arches that framed the path like doorways to nothing. Overhead, the canopy was thick enough to drop the light to something between afternoon and dusk regardless of the actual hour, and what sounds there were — the occasional bird call, the distant creak of old wood settling — all felt muted, as though the forest was absorbing them before they could carry.

Nero kept track of the gradient of wrongness the way he had learned to track most things: without making it obvious that he was doing so, and with the specific attention of someone who understood that this information had a practical ceiling. There was a point past which careful observation became simple anxiety, and he had no use for anxiety.

He was aware of the way Arthur moved ahead of him — unhurried, with that particular quality of readiness that looked like ease until something required it not to be — and of Jacob a pace and a half to Arthur’s right, the waraxe resting across his shoulders in a way that took effort to make look casual. 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

Neither of them had mentioned the interrupted conversation. Neither of them, Nero suspected, had forgotten it.

The ground sloped downward over the next ten minutes, imperceptibly at first and then more definitively, until the tree line opened without warning onto the edge of something that Nero registered a full two seconds before his mind caught up with what he was looking at.

The old riverbed cut through the forest floor like an architectural wound — fifteen feet deep and perhaps thirty across, its walls sheer where the water had once carved them and now dry and pale against the dark surrounding earth, with a flat bottom of cracked silt where the current had deposited its heaviest sediment before the Church had redirected the flow. Arthur had mentioned it — referenced it at some point in the long catalogue of information he provided as easily as other people breathed — but the description had not adequately prepared Nero for the scale of it, or for the stillness inside it.

The Church had diverted the river forty years ago, trying to slow the corruption seeping out of Malady’s Garden. It had failed, evidently, though the decision had left this — a dry channel, a scar in the forest floor, and whatever the redirected water had left behind in its absence.

"Careful of the edges," Arthur said, not breaking stride, angling along the near lip of the riverbed rather than into it. "The silt underneath the crust is softer than it looks."

Jacob had slowed, though. He stood at the edge with his chin lowered and his eyes doing the kind of quiet, systematic work that Nero had come to recognize as his version of close attention. He was looking at the far wall of the channel, where something had been placed — laid, arranged — in a row along the base of the carved earth.

Nero looked.