Calixan jumped off Blood’s back as though he didn’t notice the shift in the lake. He rubbed his hands across the stone door that blocked the tomb like a madman clawing at his asylum door or a dehydrated man digging for water in the desert.

"Yes... yes..." Calixan muttered beneath his breath, breathing deeply.

Grey still stood on the shore, a frown on his face.

Walking across this water was definitely far easier than actual water. The waters here were so thick they might as well have been from a basin of vaseline. Blood hadn’t done anything special like Grey had when he crossed the surface of a lake, he had just walked. Yet, despite his heft, he easily managed to make it to the other side.

The problem was the whole sizzling, rotting flesh part.

Every time Grey even thought about touching it, warning signs blared in his mind. He wasn’t even sure what he would do if he made it over there.

He wasn’t sure what Calixan wanted to do, but what he did know was that the island over there wasn’t nearly large enough to fight on. Calixan barely had space to move with Blood looming over him. If he went over there, he would have to stand on the other side of the stone housing, or literally on top of it.

Then, any fighting he committed to would leave him with a high likelihood of falling into the lake.

’Dammit.’ Grey cursed.

Calixan was finally calming down. The man seemed to have completely forgotten that Grey was here at all. Instead, he had looked back to Blood.

"Go." Calixan said coldly.

Blood pressed his palms against the stone wall and his white tattoos lit up again.

The air itself seemed to shake.

Grey didn’t know how to describe it, but it almost felt like the world was breaking apart at its seams. It felt like he was watching one of those horror movies and some dumbass scientist was insistent on digging up something that had been buried for centuries.

’Here’s a fucking idea, how about we don’t disturb the big bad demons?’

For the life of him Grey couldn’t understand people like that. There were an endless amount of fascinating things amongst the living. Like cars, and football, and titties.

’Definitely titties.’

Why the hell would you want to do this? It didn’t even make any sense.

But here he was, about to get swept up in—

BOOM.

The stone doors shattered.

Calixan and Blood both were sent flying.

One whizzed by Grey’s left ear and the other by his right. Grey, though, didn’t even register the booming of their bodies against the opposite wall, and he certainly wasn’t paying attention to whatever blood they were certainly pissing at this point. Instead, he was watching a line of fog rise out from within the tomb and the waters bubbling far more than even before.

One plume of fog rose out from the lake after another. But what came from the tomb was very different.

The fog that came from the lake was white, misty, one could have even mistaken it for something like spurts of actual water. If Grey wasn’t so familiar with the Fog of Chaos by now, he would have mistaken it for that as well. Though, that was also because he was immune to the Fog of Chaos due to certain treasures he had on his person.

But then there was the fog that came out from the tomb. It was a dense black, heavy, and opaque in ways it almost ceased to be a fog entirely and felt a lot more like a dense, chaotic energy.

When it came into contact with the more normal fog, it was like the two spun around one another, finding a delicate sort of balance that turned the first denser and the latter far more fog-like.

Grey hadn’t thought about it clearly before, but this... he had seen both versions before.

The Fog of Chaos around Zone 234 was far more like the first kind, a fog that could have almost been mistaken as normal until it poisoned you to the point of death.

And then there was the Fog of Chaos he had seen in the Instance with the vampire pimp and Esmeralda. That Fog of Chaos had been dark and dense. Esmeralda had even been worried about that Fog swallowing up the world, she had said as much... as though that fog was sinister, alive, and anthropomorphized in impossible ways.

Grey hadn’t thought about it much before because he could ’feel’ that they were the same. Both were Fogs of Chaos to him, he just assumed that one was a lot denser than the other.

But seeing them now, it didn’t seem like this was the case. They were almost like two separate existences.

Suddenly, Grey felt like an attractive force was pulling on him. But rather than yanking him toward it, it was using himself as an anchor to come forward instead.

’The darker one sensed my inventory. Fuck me.’

That was the other thing. The darker version of the Fog of Chaos had attacked him because of his inventory and his spatial items. But the looser clumps of fog around Zone 234 had never done that despite him having been around it enough times by now.

"STAND!" Calixan roared, not to Grey, but to Blood.

Blood had taken the brunt of the blow that came from the tomb. The man looked like he was standing in little bits and pieces. In fact, he seemed far more zombie than man at this point—though technically maybe he never was a "man" to begin with.

Unfortunately for him, the difference didn’t seem to matter to the Fog of Chaos.

"YOU WILL BE THE VESSEL! CONSUME IT!" Calixan roared.

Grey was just wondering how the hell he was going to deal with the Fog of Chaos coming for him when it happened. The first time the Fog of Chaos attacked him, he had to get the worst hickey of his life to deal with it.

This time, there was obviously no choice but to weather whatever storm there was himself.

But luckily for him, it seemed that this was exactly what Calixan wanted.

And as the Fog of Chaos was dragged over to Blood’s body, Grey wondered if this was really something he should let happen in the first place.

He had hardly had the thought when he burst into movement, slashing down at Blood’s head.