Scene 1: The Core Wakes
Jakku enters hell.
The Spore-Heart pulses — a wet, breathing cathedral made of bone and bloom. Roots twist like veins. Faces blink in the wall. One of them smiles.
A child's voice calls out. Familiar.
"Why did you let me drown?"
Jakku hesitates. He knows that voice. But he lifts his blade anyway.
First cut — and the world screams.
Not just the room — the lair. The bloom recoils, convulses, bleeds light and rot. The memory-faces weep.
Jakku grits his teeth. Keeps swinging. Sword to tendon. Ether to horror.
Jakku : "One cut won't kill a god. But a thousand might."
---
Scene 2: Reen's Hunger
Reen watches another Bloomed One fall.
She doesn't mean to inhale — but she does.
And with it, she sees. A birthday. A child's laughter. A slow fall into infection.
Memories. Not hers.
She licks her lips. Disgusted. Needing more.
Matthew flinches when she gets too close. Gift avoids her eyes.
She feels guilty—and angry at that guilt.
She whispers:
> "I didn't choose this."
The wind carries no reply. But the hunger remains.
---
Scene 3: Maiku vs. Bloom Ascendant
Maiku walks into the storm of spores like a soldier walking into rain.
He exhales fire — a cleansing wind. Spores ignite. The ground howls.
Maiku launches forward — twenty strikes across five points:
Jaw
Spine
Arm
Leg
Chest
Each blow is precise. But Momonato just grows.
Wings of root-vein. Eyes blooming like lilies. Hands become claws.
Maiku falters.
But then — he remembers.
An old promise. A friend's voice. A lesson lost in time—Lorian.
Sky-Fire surges.
His body glows — not red. Not orange. White.
Ascendancy Mode.
He blurs forward — breaks the wings, sears the limbs — and punches through to the nest.
The true body — curled inside the fungus — finally gasps.
Momonato coughs blood. Begins to split.
Maiku falls down in exhaustion—he can't control his Ascendancy Mode.
---
Scene 4: The Bloomed Collapse
Elsewhere — Jakku lands the final cut.
The Spore-Heart breaks like a cracked egg — black ichor spilling like ink in water.
The Bloomed Ones around the lair twitch — then crumble. No death cries. Just... silence.
Then — the spores rise.
Like pollen in a hurricane. Glowing. Beautiful. Apocalyptic.
Reen screams:
> "They're not dying — they're spreading!"
Matthew roars flame, but the wind takes it away.
Spores dance into the sky. Into the cracks above.
The infection is airborne.
Jakku sprints. No time to think.
---
Scene 5: Revelation
Maiku leans on a pillar, breath thin.
Momonato — barely alive — lunges.
His Feeder Mouth unhinges, ready to devour what little life Maiku has left.
But before he can—
Gift leaps in, blade-first, and slices off both tongues.
Momonato shrieks.
Jakku arrives like judgment and cleaves him in two.
The monster falls — roots and blood curling out like dead vines.
He smiles as he dies.
Final breath:
> "Cut the root… you fools… I was only a branch."
Scene 6 : The Last of the Bloomed Ones
Matthew uses his Pressure roar and stuns all the Bloomed Ones.
He then uses the largest amount of fire he's used in his whole life.
Ans burns them to a crisp and then...
Collapses.
Reen catches Matthew
Matthew : "Did...I kill them"
Reen(smiling) : "Yes you did."
Momonato(thinks to himself) : "Why was I even born, to kill my comrades."
Momonato(thinking to himself) : "I am a disgrace. Curse this terrible life of mine!!"
---
Final Lines:
> Reen stared at the sky, now veined with bloomclouds — glowing, spreading like veins in a lung.
Maiku whispered, staring at the halves of a corpse: "Then where's the stem?"
And above, the world breathed in... and was not cleansed. It was spored."
To Be Continued....
Narrator:
Chapter 28: "The Spored Sky" was not a victory. It was a revelation wrapped in ruin.
They cut the root — or so they thought. Jakku, relentless, walked through the very heart of horror and swung steel against memory and myth. Reen, once wounded, now changed — caught between predator and prophet — felt the infection burrow deeper into her spirit. Maiku burned through gods with white fire, only to fall, exhausted, in a world that refused to stay dead. Even Matthew, roaring flame like a dying star, brought one last blaze before collapsing in Reen's arms.
But Momonato's final words turned triumph to dread.
> "I was only a branch."
They hadn't won. They had pruned.
The sky, once a barrier, became a conduit. Spores danced like fireflies — not to die, but to travel. To grow.
The infection had never been local. It had been waiting.
And now, with its champions spent and its bloom broken, it reached higher.
Into the clouds. Into the lungs of the world.
The chapter ends not in applause, but in a breath.
A breath full of bloom.