As he walked, Nero began to notice damage.

Some of the ribs were broken, massive bones snapped like twigs and left to heal at odd angles. Light filtered in through the gaps, along with hanging curtains of moss that swayed in that impossible breeze. Each break was clean, not shattered or splintered, but cut with surgical precision.

Nero stopped beside one of the broken ribs and ran his good hand along the edge of the break. The surface was smooth as glass, the kind of smoothness that only came from something impossibly sharp moving impossibly fast.

"What could do this?" he wondered aloud, his voice small in the enormous space.

Each rib was several times thicker than the largest tree trunk he'd ever seen. The kind of structural support that should have been able to withstand almost anything. And yet something had cut through them like they were made of paper.

As he continued forward, he found more damage. Gouges in the sternum, cracks in the vertebrae, sections of bone that looked like they'd been subjected to tremendous force. All of it old, all of it healed as much as dead bone could heal, but still visible to his enhanced sight.

This Grigori hadn't died peacefully. It had been killed, violently and thoroughly, by something with the power to carve through divine flesh.

"Could this be how it died?" Nero muttered, examining a particularly deep gouge. "Maybe it got into a fight and lost?"

That seemed like the only logical explanation. Gods didn't just drop dead from old age or illness.

They were killed, either by other gods or by something even worse.

Nero frowned, working through the implications.

What could kill a Grigori? The Divine Will itself, maybe, if the Oracle could be believed to have that kind of active agency. Or another Grigori, one of the fallen's siblings turning against it in some ancient conflict.

He thought about Sariel and Orion, about the way their story had ended. Sariel had been corrupted by worship, transformed into something monstrous, and had eventually died or been sealed or whatever had happened to create the Dead Godtree.

Orion had... well, the Oracle had never said what happened to Orion, had it?

"Thinking about such things is completely above my rank," Nero said to himself, shaking his head.

"Gods? Grigori? Such existences can snuff me away without even a thought. Why am I even trying to understand this?"

The answer, of course, was that he couldn't help himself. Understanding was survival, and survival was all he had left.

He kept walking, traversing through the chest region at a pace that felt agonizingly slow. His injured leg throbbed with each step, and his broken arm had gone numb in a way that probably meant bad things for his future. But he pushed on, following Gungnir's call deeper into the corpse.

Hours passed. Or maybe minutes. Time felt strange here, stretched thin and taut like a rope.

Eventually, Nero reached the neck.

The vertebrae here were enormous, each one large enough to serve as a foundation for a large building. They rose up in a column that disappeared into the darkness above, connecting the body to the skull.

And there, right in the center of the column, was a gash.

Nero stopped, staring at the wound. It was deep, cutting through several vertebrae in a single stroke.

The edges were impossibly smooth, just like the broken ribs, the kind of cut that spoke of a blade sharper than anything that should exist.

This was the killing blow. It had to be.

Someone or something had struck this Grigori in the neck with enough force and precision to sever the connection between body and head. A decapitation on a divine scale, executed with surgical precision.

The thought made Nero's blood run cold.

What kind of weapon could do that? What kind of being could wield such a weapon?

And more importantly, was that being still around?

Nero glanced around the darkness nervously, suddenly very aware of how vulnerable he was. If whatever had killed this Grigori decided to show up, he wouldn't even have time to scream before he was erased from existence.

"Stop it," he told himself firmly. "If something was going to kill you, it would have done it already. Probably. Maybe."

That wasn't as reassuring as he'd hoped.

He approached the gash carefully, examining it from multiple angles. The cut was clean through, leaving a gap wide enough to walk through without ducking. Beyond it, he could sense Gungnir's presence even stronger now, practically vibrating with excitement.

The spear was in the skull. Of course it was.

Nero took a deep breath, immediately regretted it as the Mark of Mephistopheles pulsed again, and then jumped across the gap.

His landing was less graceful than he'd hoped, his injured leg nearly giving out and sending him sprawling. But he caught himself, balanced on the far side of the gash, and looked up.

The skull loomed above him, a cathedral of bone that dwarfed everything he'd seen so far. The entrance at the base of the neck was a dark opening, like a mouth waiting to swallow him whole.

Gungnir's light gleamed from somewhere inside.

"I really, really hate this," Nero muttered, but he was already moving forward.

He crawled into the skull, his body scraping against smooth bone as he squeezed through the opening. The space beyond was vast and hollow, echoing with sounds that filled him with trepidation.

And there, floating in the center of that impossible space, was Gungnir.

The spear hung suspended in mid-air, rotating slowly, its silver light painting strange shadows across the interior of the divine skull. As Nero watched, the weapon began to pulse with energy, and he realized with growing dread that it had brought him here for a reason.

A very specific, probably terrible reason.

"What have you gotten me into now?" he whispered to the spear.

Gungnir pulsed brighter in response, almost cheerfully.

Nero sighed and pulled himself fully into the skull, ready to face whatever fresh nightmare was about to begin with a mumbled curse.

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