Nero knew he had stepped too far. Noman was clearly uncomfortable sharing the details of his ability, and Nero couldn’t force him. Although Nero’s reasoning was genuine, and his need urgent, it was a fact that Noman probably didn’t have enough aether to use his ability effectively.
That likely meant that in the next few minutes, maybe half an hour at most, that soldier was going to die.
It was disappointing that he couldn’t get Noman to reveal his innate ability but... what really hurt Nero was another soldier under his command was going to die - and there was nothing he could do about it.
Of course, if he survived long enough, Noman could try to seal him or his injuries. But, honestly, it seemed unlikely.
Nero recalled that whenever Noman sealed something he had to wrap it in string that he produced. The stronger the item, or the stronger the seal required, the more string he would need to produce.
To seal a soldier, Nero could guess the amount of string needed...
"You’re probably right," said Nero, standing up as he did. "I’ll figure something out. You focus on recovering your aether and healing from the poison."
Noman weakly nodded, though there was a look of disappointment, mixed in with a bit of shame, painted on his face.
The group was silent. There were only a few of them now, and none of them had anything left to say. Lina was healing herself, Bael was healing the soldier, Vanessa was trying not to vomit and Nero...
Nero went and sat beside the unconscious soldier, looking through his cards to see if there was anything that could help the situation. There wasn’t.
The silence weighed heavily on Nero, an invisible pressure pressing him down into the ground. He did not let it get to him, though. Instead, he kept thinking of ways he could help the soldier.
If he had been bleeding out, Nero could have frozen the wound shut, but with no external injuries, there wasn’t much he could do about that. Also, his new ability, Frostburn, mentioned wrath a lot within it. He wasn’t so sure the flames wouldn’t be hurtful in some way.
His second innate ability mentioned purification. Maybe its upgrade would have some healing element to it. Before he could look, however, Bael let out a barely audible sigh, and lifted his hands from the soldier’s body.
"What happened?" Nero asked, whose senses were especially sharp at the moment.
"He’s dead," Bael said.
There was no dramatic build up, no last words, no emotional exchange. He simply... died in his sleep. It had barely been a minute since Nero talked to Noman.
Deep in his chest, Nero felt a surge of mixed emotions rise up, but he suppressed them. Death during a mission was... well, it wasn’t necessarily inevitable, but it was a part of life. This particular life was given because of his decision to go look for the pound with Vanessa. The cause was good - the more capable he was, the more he would be able to help Kolar and everyone in general - but that didn’t change the fact that he influenced it.
He hated a lot of things about Kolar - the hidden corruption underneath, the infighting, the loss of honour to name a few - but that didn’t mean Nero hated all Kolaris. This soldier, who had served, fought, and died, Nero didn’t hate him, or those like him.
If he was being critical, then this soldier had died exactly because Nero had influenced change to benefit himself. In this instance, Nero was every bit as much of a villain as he painted those he hated.
Nero closed his eyes and took a deep breath, holding it in until the pressure was too great, before slowly exhaling. When he reopened his eyes, Nero had suppressed all his emotions.
There would be time for introspection after the mission. Right now, everyone’s lives were in his hands.
"Everyone get up, we’re going to be heading deeper into the cave now," Nero said.
"What about him? Are we going to leave him here?" Noman asked weakly as he looked at the dead soldier. He, too, had heard Bael. Everyone had.
"I’m going to cremate his body," Nero said, his tone neutral. "We can’t afford to carry a corpse out with us, and keeping it risks allowing it to get cursed."
They were all hesitant, but they all got up anyway. Though some deaths affected them more than others, growing up in this cursed world, they had all seen death far too often to let it affect them.
Nero bent down and searched the soldier’s body, removing his card case. He had no other personal effects on him, not that Nero expected any.
Even though Nero had successfully suppressed his emotions countless times before, for some reason he found it a lot harder to do so now. It wasn’t just because he was kneeling in front of a corpse. No, Nero had been trained and conditioned from birth by his father to be able to calm his mind regardless of the situation.
Yet now, he found his mind unwilling to fully obey the training he had instilled into himself. Suppressed though they were, his emotions slipped through nevertheless.
This was not his imagination, nor was this due to the severity of the situation. No something had changed, and considering that he had only recently gone through an ascension, he could only attribute his unstable emotions to that. It seemed gaining the wrath of a Phoenix involved more than he initially assumed.
Right now, as he looked down at the soldier, he was unable to get up. He was grabbed entirely by the feeling that something was incomplete. The moment lacked ceremony, or a gesture of some sort.
Nero looked over the dead soldier’s body one more time and noticed, through a large tear in his protective suit, that he wore a shirt underneath with metallic, deep green buttons. It was small, insignificant even... just like the worth of a single life in this hazardous world.
"I will remember you, Shawn Grindel," Nero said, as he tore off a single button from his shirt, his voice oddly deeper than usual. It was slightly bent from the top, despite being of good quality. It had probably happened during the last fight.
Putting the button and Shawn’s card case away, Nero stood up, and for the first time, let Frostburn out into the world.
Unlike Cryoflame, which flickered and danced like a normal flame, Frostburn was steady. It did not dance, did not flicker. Instead, it was a single, steady flame that consumed all the heat around it, as if no amount would ever sate the endless wrath contained within.
Shawn’s body immediately began to freeze, much faster than the cryoflame would have done it. In fact, even before the whole body was frozen, it began to crack and shattered into dust.
In about a dozen seconds, without Shawn’s internal aether to resist Frostburn, the body was gone, leaving behind only the flame that had begun to freeze the cave floor. Frostburn was angry, rebellious almost, considering the slight difficulty Nero felt in controlling it, but it was also incredibly powerful. More importantly, it was not a huge strain on Nero’s aether.
He could fight using that flame for a long time.
When Nero moved forward he noticed that Vanessa was giving him an unusual look, but now was not the time to dwell on such matters. He led them through the level towards the opening he was familiar with, all the small animals and insects ignoring the group as if they didn’t even exist.
None of them were in the mood to think too deeply about that, yet when the natural cave suddenly started to turn into a carved underground structure, even the weakest of them could not help but pay attention.
Then, they saw the corpses. Well, the corpses of the undead that Nero had fought off, the signs of battle still evident for them all to see.
Their numbers weren’t few, and it was amazing and slightly unbelievable to think that one person took them all out. Yet when they realised that person was Nero, all of them felt like it only made sense.
Vanessa, though, paid most attention to the bleached stones. Neither the marble pillars, rows of mauselems or undead corpses could distract her from this. From the moment she had heard about Perilith, she had been dreaming of the Purification pond!
Increasing aetheric talent was not something that could be easily done, even in the time of the Velariyan empire, or during the time of the Eldrim. The earlier she underwent purification, the greater its effects would be, even drastically increasing her chances of becoming Sage.
Her trip to Kolar had been far more fruitful than she could have ever imagined, and now that she was so close to her final goal, she could not maintain her calm at all. She was too excited!