Electricity surged through Nero's body, every muscle seizing at once, his jaw clamping shut, his remaining hand spasming in its restraint. The shock paralyzed him completely, leaving him conscious but unable to move, forced to simply lie there and feel the worm burrowing deeper, deeper, until it finally settled somewhere in his abdomen.

He could feel the terrifying parasite there, coiled inside him, a foreign presence that should not exist. It moved slightly, adjusting its position, and Nero wanted to vomit, wanted to tear open his own stomach and rip the thing out, but the paralysis held him frozen.

The masked figures continued their work, performing more procedures that Nero's fractured mind could barely process.

More needles sank bone deep into his body, more strange fluids were injected into him, and some times, something cold was pressed against his chest until it burned worse than fire.

Other times, he was simply cut as pieces of his flesh were flayed right off the bone.

Through it all, the hallucinations continued.

This time, Garrick appeared before him, his body massive and tumorous, his eyes pitch black, blood dripping from his mouth. He smiled, that terrible, triumphant smile, and pointed at Nero with fingers covered in blood.

"We are the same, you and I." Garrick said, his voice echoing strangely.

"We are both monsters."

Then he laughed, and the sound went on and on, filling Nero's skull until he thought he would go mad.

The vision broke apart and reformed into something else, something worse, a landscape of flesh and bone that pulsed like a living thing, towers made of fused corpses reaching toward a black sky, rivers of blood flowing uphill, creatures made of broken geometry crawling across the horizon.

Nero's mind could not hold onto the images. They came too fast, the very essence of chaos their nature, layered on top of one another until everything blurred together into a nightmare without end.

An everlasting field of dreams.

Terrible dreams, but dreams nonetheless...

Finally, after what felt like hours or days or years, the procedures stopped.

One of the masked figures walked to the door and tapped it twice with a gloved hand. The door opened and the same Templars from before entered the room. They unlocked Nero's restraints and hauled his broken body off the stone bed, dragging him back through the corridors.

Nero could barely register the movement. His mind was elsewhere, lost in the lingering fragments of hallucinations, his body feeling like a distant thing he no longer felt connected to. He was aware, vaguely, of being thrown back into his cell, of the metal gate slamming shut.

The absence of the cold stone beneath him brought absolutely no comfort at all.

Then the Templars were gone and he was alone.

Nero lay on the straw, shivering despite the fact that his body felt like it was on fire.

The modifications had done something horrible to him, changing something fundamental about his human body.

However, to what ends?

He had no clue.

His nerves could not decide what they were feeling. Cold. Hot. Numb. Incredibly sensitive. He felt all and none, all of it at once, shifting in intensity from moment to moment.

But worst of all was the worm.

He could still feel it inside him, coiled in his abdomen, moving occasionally, a constant source of discomfort that never went away. It pressed against his organs, shifted when he breathed, made him feel perpetually nauseous.

Pain radiated through his entire body in waves, cresting and falling but never truly stopping. His muscles ached, his bones throbbed, and his skin felt like it was trying to crawl off his flesh. The stump of his left arm burned worse than ever before, phantom fingers clenching and unclenching in agony.

Tears ran down the sides of Nero's face, hot against his cold skin. He could not stop them as he could not control anything anymore. His body was broken and his mind fractured, even his will eroded to almost nothing.

He closed his eyes, seeking the escape of sleep, but the moment his eyelids fell the pain intensified, dragging him back to consciousness. He tried again, desperate for even a few moments of oblivion, but his body would not allow it.

The pain would not let him sleep.

Nero lay there through the night, eyes forced open, staring at the invisible ceiling of his cell, feeling the worm move inside him, feeling the modifications continuing to work their terrible changes, feeling every second stretch into eternity.

And in the darkness, alone with his suffering, Nero felt something stir in his depths.

He closed his eyes and opened that of the Heretic.

Their golden glow filled the cell with soft radiance.

In his depths, he could see thousands of inky black threads wormed into every part of his body.

They all originated from the same source— the worm in his stomach.

Nero grimaced,

'What is that thing?'

{That is a Nordian Worm. It is implanted into a living creature to make them susceptible to control as it weakens their natural mental inhibitions over an extended period of time}.

Nero's face paled and his body trembled even more,

"These bastards!"

He gritted his teeth as his rage rose to the surface.

He wanted to kill them all!

However, before his mind could fully descend into the pits of rage, he noticed something strange.

The dark tendrils were slowly turning a pale white.

It was slow, and he would not have noticed it before, but there was a cluster that emitted so much light, he had to notice it.

It was situated right on his heart. Or rather, the Vineheart.

Nero watched in awe as the encroaching dark threads were washed away by the power surging from the Vineheart.

'What is going on?'

{The Fruit of Zoan is an entity of protection. It grants its host protection from invasion, purifying it and changing the evil into boons. It is only a matter of time before this Nordian Worm is absorbed by the fruit and the Heretic is freed from the ill-fortune of its potential control}.

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