Surviving as a Broken Hero

Chapter 99 – Cursed Angel (1)

Eve gasped for air, each breath a struggling rasp, following the faint yet unmistakable—to her—stench of demonic energy in the air.

It hung like a web in the air, acrid and rotten, like meat left in the sun.

Was it an effect of her being Cursed? She’d never met anyone, elf or otherwise, who could smell it like she could.

Monster, Witch, Cursed, her kin called her many names. Why was it, then, that she was better than any other at rooting out demons? Shouldn’t a Cursed have found some sort of kinship with them instead?

Countless burns covered her body—the effect of her closing the seeping cuts from the ice—and pain surged through her leg with every torturous step. Her raw skin cracked and threatened to bleed anew, but more heat toughened the skin.

Still, she continued, toeing the edge of complete collapse. She hadn’t found time to buy a new cloak, and she’d discarded her last one since it was little more than a collection of rags.

After hearing that the other elf was headed toward the city gates, she’d hobbled there to find the trace of demonic energy in the air.

The guards had tried to stop her briefly out of concern, but she only had so much time before her attack on the Lion Guild’s guard became known.

Naturally, she had no illusions that the city lord or Gregor would show her any mercy for snooping on their late-night meetings, even with the little information she’d gained.

“Ahhh… damn,” she exhaled. Every muscle in her body screamed at her to stop and just rest for a moment, but she knew that, if she did, she wouldn’t move again for quite some time.

It wasn’t her first long trek, after all.

‘I doubt it’ll be my last,’ she thought to herself.

‘When was it again? Ah, right… back after I lost my ear. No one else made it out, and I had to walk back to the Emperor on my own. Days without rest…’

‘No one else ever makes it out.’

She often wondered if she was Cursed in more ways than one. Would it be too late again? Would she come upon Aizen and Koise, fallen to yet more of the demons’ schemes?

The stench of her own burned flesh wafted up into her nose in a slight gust of wind.

‘At least I’m getting closer.’

Still she staggered forward, spurred on by the ever-rising stench of demonic corruption.

Perhaps she would have lost hope if the smell were fading, but her goal was getting closer by the step, and she just had to keep telling herself she was one step closer.

‘One more step…’

‘One more step…’

She repeated the phrase in her mind like a mantra.

She would have run, if she could have. It was all she could do to force herself forward. All the while, she focused on each step and on Pulling all the warmth she could.

The plains around the city eventually gave way to a dense forest, the road still clear ahead of her.

‘Things in the bushes… seven? Eight? Goblins?’ she idly registered, feeling heat sources lying in wait just outside of her vision to either side of the road, waiting in the shadows.

It was normal for them to avoid those they deemed too strong. Usually, they avoided her as well, even though she wasn’t an Awakener.

That time, though, perhaps due to her slow descent into darkness, they believed they had a chance.

“Squeeee!” a goblin yelled, signaling the start of an ambush.

The others charged forward from the bushes behind it, each raising their weapons to attack. Two waited in the rear of the ambush group and fired arrows at her from their short bows.

She didn’t have the time or the energy to care for technique. It felt as if wool was coating her mind.

In such moments, when the world numbed around her, she felt closer to her power than ever. The last time she’d felt such control had been when she sacrificed her left arm.

There was no need to use such power against a few goblins.

A blast of warmth sent the arrows spinning off course, followed by a stream of raw fire that boiled the goblins’ brains in moments, giving them hardly the time to scream.

It was over in mere seconds—they’d chosen the wrong target.

She stumbled past their bodies and Pulled the warmth from their burned corpses back to her, shriveling their bodies and leaving not even an ember behind.

Ahead of her, creeping through the trees, lay a sick-smelling fog in a shimmering haze, coating the foliage in a faint film of corruption.

Of course, she recognized the fog for what it was. Even without being an Awakener, she knew it would have interrupted one’s system abilities.

Somewhere ahead of her in the swirling mist, she heard the sounds of combat, echoes of steel sliding off of steel, the twang of a bowstring, and explosive blasts.

Every now and then, her heart dropped when the sounds stopped, followed by faint murmurs in the distance, a pause, and more chaos.

Each lull grew longer.

‘Faster…’ Eve forced her legs to move faster, gritting her teeth through the pain lancing through the muscle of her thigh.

Her feet dragged along the road with each agonizing step as the ringing of steel grew louder and the growing demonic odor grew stronger.

She Pulled more warmth in a slow swirl and forced her way through the fog until she saw the back of a floating wagon before her.

A bow, cleanly cut in the middle, lay next to the wagon, and a furrow in the earth led to a figure slumped with his back against a tree at the edge of the road.

An urge to check on the person flickered through her, but that was stamped down by the continuing combat just next to the wagon.

“Haaa…” she let out a soft sigh of relief when she saw Aizen’s form in the fog, just barely standing against the tall-standing figure of the elf she’d seen in the dead of the previous night.

Aizen looked like he was barely holding on.

Still, at least the elf didn’t look completely untouched either. Still standing tall, his left arm was limp at his side.

Holding a slender blade in his right hand, the elf finished murmuring something to Aizen and raised his blade in a lightning-quick motion as Aizen lunged forward with a punch that sent a brief blast of light in its wake.

Rather than meeting Aizen’s fist head-on, the elf’s blade slid to the side of it and pushed it out of the way. Had the elf been even a moment early or late, it would’ve been the end of him.

Eve dragged herself even closer until they were clear within the fog.

“Are you finally done?” the elf finished asking Aizen, who was panting with exertion.

Then, the elf looked up at Eve as she approached, his eyes raised in a hint of surprise.

“Who are you?” The elf’s eyes flickered over Eve’s missing left arm and her missing ear, one of his eyes glowing purple.

Aizen raised his head to look over at her as well. “Eve…?”

Attuned to every flicker and change in the temperature, Eve felt the elf’s body heating up as his muscles tensed and prepared for movement.

Rather than unleashing her fire outright, she Pulled at the gathering heat within the attacker.

“Get away… Eve… Alikr is disrupting the System…” Aizen managed to say.

‘Alikr?’ She didn’t recognize the name.

Alikr, the elf in question, took a shocked step back after a sudden chill set over his body and disrupted his movement before he could even act.

“What?” he mumbled, more to himself than anyone else there. “That’s not possible…”

Emotions flickered across Alikr’s face, all of which Eve had seen before, and a familiar scene played out—surprise at the sudden cold, confusion as he processed what was happening, slow realization after delving into his memories, and finally…

Alikr took a step back, his blade lowered, a new expression on his face.

—Fear.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

It was refreshing to see, in a way. Humans didn’t know what they were dealing with, but the elves, and even some of the other species, knew better.

Perhaps humans just hadn’t been around long enough for the rumors to circulate, rumors of the Cursed, of Warmth Eaters, of the disaster they’d once brought to elven civilization, far before even the New World.

Her kind was one of the only traces of ‘magic’ not of the System, and she was the last of that rare breed that most only considered grim tales and bogeymen.

Even in the half-dead state Eve was in, Alikr couldn’t escape all the years of elven culture and society, the bedtime stories and tragedies that told him and every other elf one thing from birth—fear the Cursed.

He hesitated, battling against his own fear.

That was when Eve ignited the air around her in a wreath of fire swirling around her body. Extending her Pull of warmth ever upward in an invisible pillar that touched the very clouds, her aura of burning orange and yellow fire flickered outward in a ring and gently caressed Aizen and the wagon.

When the tongues of fire crept toward Alikr, though, he felt the fiery sting of their touch.

Any sense of composure he had vanished at that moment, and Alikr took off running into the trees. Had he a semblance of other thought, he might have looped back around and stalked them until a better moment arose, but fear was a strange thing.

Sufficient fear could overcome all reason, and such was the fear that plagued Alikr until he was far, far away. Not just beyond sight of Karfana and the forest, but until he was sure the lingering feeling of the reaper at his back was beyond reach—until he couldn’t run yet another step.