Nero gasped, his bloodshot eyes snapping open, the stone bed beneath him cold and jarring enough to snap him out of his fever dream.

It all had felt so real.

He looked around.

The masked figures were still there, working and injecting things into his body.

'What...!'

His eyes widened as another surge of pain filled him. The pain had not stopped, not even lessened. It continued to burn through him, relentless and unyielding despite his compromised state of mind.

At first, he had thought madness had made its way into his mind again. However, that didn't seem to be the case.

At least not directly this time.

This time, he was simply seeing and feeling things that weren't there.

Hallucinations layered on his mind as it fractured under the strain of the modifications, unable to distinguish between reality and nightmare.

His vision flickered again...

He stood in a vast emptiness, the ground beneath his feet smooth and featureless, stretching out in all directions. Above him, impossibly high, three enormous figures hung suspended in the air.

They were giants, each one hundreds of feet tall, their bodies muscular and perfect, their skin pale as marble. They hung upside down, their arms spread wide as though crucified in reverse, thick chains wrapped around their wrists and ankles. The chains extended upward, disappearing into roiling clouds that churned and twisted like enormous living entities beyond his comprehension.

They simply hung there, silent and still, their eyes closed.

Nero stared up at them, trying to understand what he was seeing.

Were they dead? Sleeping? Imprisoned?

Then one of the giants opened its eyes.

They were white, completely white, with no pupils or irises, just blank voids that stared down at Nero with terrible intensity. The giant's mouth opened slowly, impossibly wide, and a sound emerged that was not a voice but something deeper, something that vibrated through Nero's entire being.

The other two giants opened their eyes as well, all six white voids locking onto him, and the sound grew louder, resonating in his bones, in his blood, in the very core of his existence.

A moment later, Nero found himself back on the stone bed, his body convulsing, the needles still embedded in his flesh, the masked figures still working with cold efficiency. He tried to speak, tried to beg them to stop, but his voice would not come.

Another hallucination took him.

He stood in a ruined city, buildings collapsed into rubble, streets torn apart, bodies scattered everywhere. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, piled on top of one another, their faces frozen in expressions of terror and agony.

Standing in the center of it all was Aisha.

But it was not the Aisha he knew. This version of her was monstrous, her body elongated and twisted, her skin pale as death, her fingers ending in long black claws. Four additional limbs protruded from her back, bone spurs curved and sharp, dripping with blood. Her hair had turned silver, her eyes glowing crimson, tears of blood streaming down her cheeks.

She was eating.

Her claws tore into a corpse at her feet, ripping it apart, shoving chunks of flesh into her mouth. She chewed mechanically, her expression blank, her crimson eyes staring at nothing. Around her, more corpses lay scattered, some whole, some torn to pieces, all of them fresh.

Then the sky above her split open.

Templars poured down like a crimson flood, thousands of them, their armor gleaming, their weapons raised. They descended on her from all sides, blades flashing, spears thrusting, and Aisha turned to face them with that same blank expression.

She fought. She killed dozens of them, her claws tearing through armor like paper, her bone spurs impaling multiple Templars at once. But there were too many. They swarmed her, their blades cutting into her flesh, their spears piercing her body, and she fell, her monstrous form collapsing under the weight of countless attacks.

The Templars did not stop. They continued to hack at her even after she fell, their blades rising and falling in a terrible rhythm, until there was nothing left but shredded meat and blood soaking into the ruined streets.

Nero tried to look away but the vision held him, forcing him to watch until the very end.

***

He was back on the stone bed, his body shaking, his mind breaking further as tears, spittle and snot ran down his face.

"P-please. S-stop."

His pleas fell on deaf ears.

The masked figures had moved on to a different part of the procedure now, one of them holding something that Nero could not quite see through his blurred vision.

Then they brought it closer and Nero's blood ran cold.

It was a worm. Not a small one either.

It was rather enormous in worm sizes, perhaps two feet long and as thick as his forearm. Its body was black and segmented, covered in some kind of slick mucus that glistened under the harsh incandescent light. At one end was a mouth, circular and lined with rings of tiny teeth, pulsing open and closed in a rhythm that told of its ravaging hunger.

The masked figure brought the worm to Nero's stomach and pressed it against his skin.

Nero's eyes widened in panic and he tried to struggle, screaming violently as he raged and thrashed against the restraints, but his body was too weak and his mind too drained and broken.

His struggling died as his energy was drained even more.

All he could do was watch as the worm's mouth latched onto his flesh.

It began to burrow.

The sensation was indescribable. Nero felt the teeth grinding painfully through his skin, through the muscle beneath. Then he felt the worm's body pushing inward, worming its way deeper into his abdomen.

He screamed out again. He could feel it eating through, consuming his flesh as it carved a path through his insides, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Having his body and dignity violated in such a manner created a seed of wrath in the depths of his being as his hatred for the Church and their wicked ways intensified.

He opened his mouth to scream again but before the sound could emerge, one of the masked figures pressed something against his side.

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