Chapter 36: Ashes of the old world
BZZZ!
A few minutes earlier, space fractured and out of it stepped out... a human.
The air was different.
Not just in scent, not merely in temperature, but in density, in weight, in the subtle, choking press of a world that no longer remembered comfort.
Clayton stood upon a cracked highway, its surface blistered with lichen and creeping moss, vines splitting the concrete like ancient wounds reopened. The skeletons of buildings loomed in the distance, not toppled, but hollowed.
Glassless towers pierced the sky like broken needles, their guts bare and open to the wind. Cars, rusted and half-swallowed by earth, littered the roads like forgotten toys.
Above him, the clouds churned with strange colors.
The Aurora Rift shimmered faintly in the upper atmosphere, a permanent scar in the heavens left by the Genesis Protocols. Through it, power still dripped into the world like blood from an open vein.
And within Clayton, that same power stirred.
He was no longer just the Verdant Lord. Not entirely. His humanoid form wore the transformation like a crown; green-black bark woven into armor across his limbs, faintly pulsing veins of chloroplasmic energy winding down his forearms.
Vines curled from his wrists like gauntlets. His hair, once short and wild, had deepened into a tangle of bioluminescent roots.