The six pieces of Nero hung in the air like a broken constellation.
Head. Torso. Two arms. Two legs. All perfectly severed, edges glowing faint violet, drifting apart with the lazy certainty of things that will never be whole again.
Namola-05 dropped to her knees in the frost-burned grass. The sound that tore out of her was not human. It was ninety-seven years of watching children die in cages, of hiding while cities drowned, of pretending gardens could fix a species that only learned through blood.
"WHY?" Her scream cracked the false sky. "WHY HER? WHY NOW?" She clawed at the ground, fingers bleeding light. "If you wanted war, you could have started it centuries ago! You could have torn me apart the day I chose flowers over fire! Why wait until she finally found a home?"
Namola-01 hovered above them, white suit untouched by smoke or tears, thirteen silent soldiers at his back like statues carved from winter.
He looked down at 05 (small, furious, ancient in a teenager's hoodie) and for the first time in four hundred years his voice shook.
"Because I still had hope," he said.
The words fell heavy, each one a stone.
"I watched the poor starve while towers of glass kissed the sky. I watched drought swallow rivers while men sold water by the bullet. I watched girls disappear into statistics because the world decided some bodies were born to be broken."
His hands opened slowly, empty.
"I felt every second of it. Pain turned into hatred. Hatred turned into violence. And violence… takes time to ripen."
He looked at Nero's severed head (eyes still open, still burning with the last thing she ever said to him).
"It took four centuries, Five. Four centuries of swallowing screams until the only thing left in me was the decision."
He closed his fist.
The six pieces drifted a fraction farther apart.
"I needed to be filled with so much hatred for the only species ever given the keys to a garden… and chose to burn it down anyway."
05's voice cracked into something raw and small.
"She was trying to save them."
01's smile was thin and terrible.
"So was I."
Below them, the first root punched up through the obsidian (black, thick as a train, wet with sap the colour of old blood).
It speared straight through Nero's floating torso and anchored there, pulsing once.
Then another root. And another.
The garden had chosen its answer.
The roots kept coming. Thicker now, black and glistening, wrapping Nero's torso like cables of living obsidian. Each one pulsed in time with something ancient waking up beneath the garden.
Namola-01 watched them, unmoved.
"See?" he said, voice soft again, almost tender. "Every fragment of the God of Evolution feels the same thing in the end: pity. Pity for the weak. I feel it. Jack felt it. Even the garden feels it now."
05 surged to her feet, tears freezing on her cheeks.
"Don't you dare say his name." Her voice was venom and grief in equal measure. "You don't get to wear Jack like a medal. You never earned that right."
She took one shaking step forward.
"Pity isn't a death sentence. Pity is the reason Jack died with his arms full of cages instead of fists full of fire. Pity is why some of us are still trying to save the ones who can't save themselves."
01's eyes narrowed to slits of winter starlight.
"If a virus divides inside the body, you kill it." "If bacteria multiply, you burn them out." "Even leeches (hirudinaria) are crushed underfoot when they drink too much."
He spread his arms, indicating the broken world far above them.
"Humanity is the parasite that learned to build the host. They have outgrown the body. Parasites are meant to die."
Another root speared upward, this one wrapping around Nero's severed neck, dragging the head downward toward the torso with slow, deliberate care.
05's voice dropped to a whisper that somehow carried farther than any scream.
"Then you're the disease now, Zero-One. And some of us are still the cure."
The roots tightened. The first violet leaf unfurled from Nero's chest, wet and shining and wrong.
01 looked at it, and for one heartbeat, something that might have been fear crossed his face.
05's tears turned to steam before they hit the ground.
She raised both hands.
The air itself screamed as she tore hydrogen from every water molecule in the biosphere (millions of invisible threads yanked free and ignited). A dragon of pure white fire roared into existence above her, nine heads, each one a fusion reaction wearing scales.
"Pyrohydra Dragon Cage!"
The dragon lunged.
It struck 01 like a collapsing star, wrapped around him, burned hot enough to glass the ground beneath his feet. Then the fire inverted (oxygen ripped away, temperature plummeting in a single heartbeat). White flame became water, became ice, became a cage of absolute zero trying to freeze the first Namola into a perfect, silent statue.
01 stood inside it without blinking.
The ice cracked once, politely.
"Sorry," he said, almost gentle. "Game over."
He closed his fist.
The cage, the dragon, the absolute zero, everything 05 had poured four hundred years of grief into, imploded.
05 had one heartbeat to realise what was coming.
Then invisible gears closed around her.
Not a punch. Not a blast.
A slow, deliberate compression (bones, organs, centuries of memories) crushed inward like she was caught between the plates of a cosmic trash compactor. Her hoodie shredded. Her body folded. A single, wet sound, and Namola-05, the oldest living guardian of the garden, became a red sphere the size of a marble.
01 opened his hand. The sphere fell, hit the ground, and rolled to a stop against a root.
Silence.
Then Lya screamed (raw, animal, the sound of a child watching her mother die). Aze dropped to his knees, fists pounding the obsidian until his knuckles bled light.
Every Namola in the sphere scattered in pure survival panic.
Namola-02 (neon jacket already flaring emergency red) grabbed Lya by the waist and Aze by the collar.
"Move!" he snarled, voice stripped of every trace of playfulness. "Revenge later. Upgrade first. Being alive is the only requirement."
He dragged them both into a rift of shifting aurora light that opened like a wound in the air.
The last thing Lya saw before the rift closed was 05's marble-sized remains resting against the root that still held Nero's torso.
Then they were gone.
The garden burned quietly.
The tree kept growing.
And Namola-01 turned his back on the ashes, already walking toward the war he had waited four centuries to begin.
Namola-01 rose through the ruptured sky of the Dorm, thirteen white comets trailing behind him like a honour guard of death.
He broke atmosphere above the Eurasian plain at dawn.
Directly beneath him, Moscow glittered (old stone and new glass, the Kremlin's red stars still glowing against the first light).
01 stopped ten kilometres up, arms spread, suit catching the sunrise like a blade.
His voice rolled across every frequency at once (radio, satellite, bone conduction, thought itself).
"HUMANS."
The city froze. Cars braked mid-street. Phones slipped from hands. A million windows reflected the white figure and his silent army.
"BOW TO US. WE ARE YOUR END."
No threat. No ultimatum. Just fact, spoken with the calm of someone who had already mourned the world and moved on.
Far below, in the hidden garden, the tree that wore Nero's corpse pulsed once.
A single drop of blood (bright arterial red) welled from the bark and ran down the trunk.
Then another. Then a thousand.
Crimson leaves unfurled overnight, heavy and wet, dripping slow rivers of blood that soaked into the scorched earth.
Where the tiny red sphere that had once been Namola-05 touched the root, the bark split open like a hungry mouth.
It drank.
The marble of compressed flesh and memory dissolved, pulled inside the tree in thin scarlet threads.
The blood leaves shivered, drinking deeper.
Somewhere inside the burning wood, something that was no longer entirely Nero opened its eyes for the first time.
And smiled with someone else's teeth.