Chapter 52 - Eat a Curse

The children pressed closer, their little black eyes wide and innocent, but I saw more than one that made to grab for stuff that wasn’t theirs. I headed them off as well as I could.

“Hey! We’re keeping our weapons. And who’s this ‘big one?’” I said specifically to them, focusing on speaking goblin.

Again, a voice came out of the crowd, not so much from an individual kid. “Oo it speaks! Can we buy your sword? That’s a good sword. I can tell.”

“Stop it!” The big one scolded.”We take them to the big one. That’s it.”

I did a quick check on my companions. No one had been swarmed by little green things with sticky fingers yet. The two groups were standing at a moderately respectful distance from one another, but Trix was standing dangerously close to the edge of the barricade, staring at the carnage down below, his hands clenched tightly around his rifle. No part of him was still, the shudders were so heavy.

“Trix?” I called tentatively, but the little Volpa didn’t look like he’d heard me.

“Trix!”

He started, nearly fumbling his rifle and losing it over the side. Then he looked around, bewildered, wild-eyed.

“Are you still with us, buddy?” I asked.

Trix opened his mouth to answer but shut it again almost immediately, choosing, instead, to nod. Samila squatted down next to him and ruffled his hair, saying something to him I couldn’t hear over the-

“Big one! Big one!” The little goblin shouts had turned to chants now that they were on the same page. I stood on my tip-toes to try and find the oldest kid that had calmed them before. No dice.

Sissa was staring at me, the obvious question on her mind: Why do you speak goblin?

“I’ll explain later,” I mouthed to her.

“Who is this big one?”” I asked the children.

“You know their tongue, sir?” A Miur with short antlers, the beginnings of a beard, and a lot of ragged holes in his armor asked as he coiled our rope around his forearm. He must have been the guy that came to our rescue. “Command will be happy to hear that. The little ones just kind of do what they want, and we’ve just counted ourselves lucky they want to help for now. Some coordination wouldn’t go amiss.”

“I know a little bit. Where might Command be?” I asked.

“Over that way,” the guard said, pointing at a boxy building with a canted roof butting right up against the city’s giant outer wall.

“The big one. The big one!” The little goblins collectively shouted.

I retried my previous question. “Who is this big one?”

“Don’t know. He’s big.”

Right. There’s the language barrier, and I’m talking to kids.

“He got a name?” I asked.

“Probably.”

I sighed and looked to the rest of the party, but, of course, no one else understood the conversation. Trix was on Samila’s shoulder now, a thousand yard stare on his face, but at least he wasn’t going to get lost if we started moving.

“Guess we’re going that way,” I said, pointing to the building the guard had.

“Big one!” The energy level was climbing. These kids must have been surviving on energy drinks and rock candy.

I started climbing down from the barricade, having to slip down between handles that used to belong to some kind of cart, then sliding with the loose debris my weight kicked loose until I was on solid ground again.

Now that I was on ground level, the semi-circular yard these people had made their home was a bleak picture. Tired faces stared at me from all around. Guards sat on stools around little campfires that littered the cobblestone square, though none came close to the wooden ramparts. Wouldn’t want to trap yourself in an oven of your own making. None of the guards were entirely intact, either, or at least their equipment wasn’t. People were missing gloves, helms, or entire boots. Chest plates were dented or torn. Shields missing edges or entire halves.

The goblins seemed the liveliest of the bunch, hustling back and forth in lines and carrying stuff on their backs like ants. They carried furniture, doors, loose stones and the like and brought their things up the precarious climb to the top of the ramparts to deposit the objects with uncharacteristic care.

An older goblin in a ragged shirt stood at the top of their work area where the construction was happening, yelling at them all while bending down to make minute adjustments on where the garbage was placed. Was I looking at a goblin engineer, or was he just too old to do the manual labor? Whatever he was, he was in charge but not universally respected. Before I’d passed, at least two of his workers gave the old goblin the finger, which he returned with double the enthusiasm he put into the rest of his work.

I saw why the bonfire wasn’t very popular with the guards. It was hot, it produced a ton of rancid smoke, and then there were the bones. Blackened bones, teeth and other, unidentifiable things littered the pit where the bonfire burned.

“Nice setup. They better give thanks to their light every chance they get. Lucky bastards,” Bole said quietly.

Sissa hissed at him again. “Shut up, Bole. Not one more word.”

Bole rolled his eyes but stayed quiet.

I looked questioningly at Samila… behind Sissa where she couldn’t see. She leaned over to whisper to me.

“Their gear looks like it’s been through it, but they’re all healthy and well fed. Odds are good they’ve got a healer or two tucked away and a stash of food. Better than most have fared through this.”

“Wouldn’t a healer drain their food?” I asked.

Samila shook her head. “No. Not a church healer. Trix isn’t one of those.”

“What is he then?” I asked, leaning forward a bit to check on the little fox. He was just staring straight ahead and holding on tightly to his weapon.

“A rarity,.” She looked like she wanted to say more, checking over her shoulder to make sure the little Volpa wasn’t listening, but then she thought better of it. Probably for the best. The little guy had good ears. “Ask him yourself if you really want to know,” she said before clamming up again and getting back into line behind her sister.

We made our way to the little building next to the city wall and entered through a door frame whose previous occupant appeared to have been forcefully ripped out, probably used in the building of the barricade. The little goblin children streamed into the building in front of us, still believing themselves to be our captors but also really excited to get into the place for some reason.

The kids all gathered around a… well, it was a big one. A big man to be more precise. A familiar big man in what used to be white robes, more dirty and ragged than I’d last seen them. Bishop Kolash, the hulking, slightly damp, frogman stood in the center of a circle of occupied sick beds, one hand raised in the air, the other resting on his staff.

A low, humming song suffused the room, deep and resonant with something in my soul. It reminded me of family dinners, rides with mom, straight As on my report card, and Christmas afternoons all at once. Golden light surrounded the bishop and everyone within ten feet of him. All of the people gathered around were wounded, most bleeding from their extremities, but they all seemed to rest easier as the song progressed. Their skin, those that didn’t have fur at least, looked less and less pale as well.

Sissa put a hand on my arm to stop me from getting closer.

“Better to not,” Sissa whispered to me.

“He likes to sing alone. Where did your sword go?,” one of the goblin children whispered in my ear. How the hell did she get up there?

“It hides. This is the big one?” I asked.

“The big one. He’s very big.”

I had to agree. He wasn’t Geddon big, but he was impressively large but more Frog Santa Claus than Incredible Hulk.

Sissa looked from me to the kid on my shoulder. “What are they saying? Also, you speak goblin? What else are you hiding?”

“They say this is the big one. They were supposed to bring us to him. We can’t go further right now, though.”

Sissa nodded. “Glad the goblins could be taught that much. Don’t want to step into an already active ritual. You wait for it to-”

The Bishop’s song crescendoed, deepening in its tone and resonance. His voice broke or maybe expanded, and suddenly, I could feel it pass through me like a shockwave, burning and crackling all the way and absolutely overloading my nervous system until I saw (and tasted) yellow. I stayed on my feet, but it was a close call.

Damn, that was much worse than the first time he’d hit me with one of those.

I looked around to check on everyone else. My friends all seemed… better. Refreshed. Bole, however, was conspicuously absent. Had he even entered the building with us?

The song was over. Two of the wounded soldiers were already putting their feet over the edges of their beds and putting on already soiled clothes. Their wounds were entirely gone.

Wow. This really was a breed apart from Trix’s magic.

“Brothers and Sisters, it gladdens me to see that you have thus far survived our great trial,” the Bishop croaked as he hobbled toward us, his staff making heavy *thumps* on the wooden floor as he went. He was leaning heavily on it, much more heavily than when I’d met him. “It is good that you have come now. We have need of strong sword arms and tempered resolve.”

He waved his arms over his head gently, making shooing motions at the gathered crowd of green children. “Go on then, little ones. Go find somewhere else to play. Go.”

The goblin kids got the hint. I almost didn’t feel it when the little goblin girl jumped down from my back to be swept up in the river of little bodies heading out of the door.

“Your holiness,” Sissa began once the noise died down. “It is good to see you alive as well. We come to you with news. There is a large contingent of survivors and enlisted people in the Spire, and they would have you and our people come join them. They have a plan to get everyone out of the city.”

Kolash’s shoulders relaxed slightly, and he let out a long sigh. “Thank the light for that. We run short on supplies and people. The infection worms its way into our ranks every day, and we cannot always be vigilant. What would you have us do, Sister Sissa?”

“We have a way to get our people to the Spire, through the smugglers’ tunnels,” Sissa said. “From there it is a nearly direct route to safety. Headmaster Jassin offers a place for us all and a way out.”

The Bishop made a displeased sound in the back of his throat. “The plagued will not make this an easy thing. We, too, had the idea of fleeing the city. We lost half of our own, and now the enemy wears familiar faces when they come for the rest of us.”

“They wear- Are the living turning as the Returned did?” Sissa asked.

Kolash shook his head mournfully. “Not yet. The goblins insisted we burn the dead, theirs and ours. At first we did not see the purpose behind it, and we had no way to ask for an explanation. Their queen, however, was adamant, so much that we allowed them to burn their own but kept ours in repose in one of the empty barracks.”

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He stared into the middle distance for a long few heartbeats as he recalled the difficult memories.

“Would that we had listened to their warnings. There was a raid two nights after our failed escape, not in overwhelming numbers, mind you. At least, that is what we thought. The plagued, however, took our honored dead below, and now we see them again from time to time, come back to haunt us. It has been… disheartening.”

“There were never any bodies,” I observed quietly. In the Undercity, even in the places we were sure were a slaughter, there were never any bodies. I had just assumed the scourge had been eating the living. Everything had to eat, right? Apparently not in this case, or at least not everyone that died was food. The scourge-touched must have been recruiting.

“Quite so, young man” the Bishop said, turning to me.

So the dead could be ‘touched.’ What did that mean? Returned were already dead. That made some sense. As for goblins, I’d not heard of any live ones getting turned, no infections. To hear the Stone Hearts tell it, their people were always taken or outright killed. Interesting.

“Your Holiness,” I ventured. “Have you had a chance to examine a living example of the plague? A goblin perhaps?”

“*Glorp* Yes,” he replied with a hint of trepidation. “Why?”

“So,” I began. I had a theory cooking in my head somewhere, but it wasn’t done yet. “They were alive in the conventional sense? They aren’t like the Returned?”

“In the early days of the plague, all of them were more or less alive. Quite mad but technically alive. ” He punctuated his sentence by reaching out and putting a heavy hand on my shoulder. His tone was grave. “You have insights, I imagine.”

“Maybe,” I answered. My mind was working hard, taking the pieces and rearranging them to try and make sense of them all. “There has to be some common thread between them all. I can’t explain it all yet.” What was it that united them all? Blackish blood? Maybe. Once they were too far gone, they didn’t speak. There was that too.

“Perhaps you could start with explaining how it happened to you.” The Bishop said.

He had me there. I was a data point on living infection, but that was useless because I was different. I got my infection from the Sys-

Every thought in my head came to a calamitous, crashing, halt.

What did he just say?

His countenance fell until the corners of his mouth hung well and truly past his bottom jaw. “I’m sorry, young one,” Kolash croaked. He sounded genuinely sad, like he was giving me my last rights.

Oh, no. Kolash was one of the only people in the city that could detect the scourge, and I, as of recently, just got a(n) (un)healthy dose of experience and stats through the System. I was more scourge now than I had been last time we’d met.

Everyone I cared about turned toward me, worried expressions all around.

My mouth had gone dry, and my throat tightened until I could barely breathe, not because this was a revelation for me. Of course I was infected. Apparently, all Exotics were infected. That was item number 4,025 on my list of impossibly complex things to fix in the near future.

What upset me was that I’d planned to tell them all eventually, when I figured out how to confess to the whole human thing without causing some worldwide religious schism, but now this giant frog man had taken a portion of that truth I wanted to share and just slapped my friends in the face with it. It was just another breach of trust I would have to reckon with later.

If I didn’t act soon, I wouldn’t have any confessions left to make… or friends to make them to.

I reached up and took off my mask.

Kolash’s eyes widened in shock. “Brother Ryan. *Grop* I did not realize it was you. A true tragedy. I had hoped you were still out there and working to save us. I am very sorry.” Resignation dripped heavily from his words.

Sissa reached over and grabbed my arm, squeezing so tightly it hurt. “Ryan? You- You don’t look surprised,” she breathed.

I shook my head, guilt sealing my lips.

Sissa pulled on my arm until we were facing each other. She stood tall to try and look me in the eye. “How long?” She asked.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Samila cut in, stepping forward to flank her sister, her tone quietly accusatory.

“Because,” I started, but Kolash cut me off.

“Let go of him, Sister,” the Bishop ordered. It didn’t sound like something said in my defense, though. It was something else.

Sissa did let go, but she looked confused, as if she’d done it by reflex.

At the edge of my awareness, I felt something then, a tingle in Kolash’s hand, a current of unpleasant warmth flowing into my skin. The air around me quivered in anticipation, and then, some kind of tipping point was reached. Something seized me from the inside, took a hold of my body and squeezed. Stabbing, electrifying pain ran down my arm and burrowed into my chest..

“How did it happen, Brother Ryan?” Kolash asked. “Did they take you? Did they speak to you? Do they tell you to do things?”

I shook my head in answer, suddenly very dizzy. My vision blurred, and I felt my muscles go slack. There was motion out there, disembodied voices.

“What is this? What did you do?” Sissa demanded.

Samila sounded even more alarmed. “Ryan? Look at him. He’s-”

“It is as I feared. He is too far gone. Do not touch him.“

“What?”

“He was just fighting with us! We need him!”

“He will turn on us. It is only a matter of time.”

The world was out of focus. The System was nice and clear, though.

Status effect gained: Cursed [10 hp/sec]

….

-a purge of his body. It will buy him more time if he lives.”

“No! Take it back!”

“I will not. I will not have a being as dangerous as he turn to the side of the enemy. He, of all people, would understand.”

My thoughts were slowing down, grinding gradually to a halt as my world dissolved into fire. I knew this much, though. The Bishop had cast a spell on me, and I didn’t remember the last time I’d taken a breath..

I felt my body shudder as a bead of sweat dripped down my nose.

Come on. Breathe. It should be easy. Just breathe!

Kolash was purging the scourge from my body. Unfortunately, the scourge was a part of what I was, an essential part.

Suddenly, my limbs lost their battle with gravity, and I fell to the floor, face first with a *whomp.* Concerningly, I didn’t feel the impact in the slightest.

“Ryan!”

“Do not touch him, unless you wish to join him. The infection is insidious.”

“Your Holiness,” Trix squeaked. “This is extreme. Brother Ryan has-”

“He has done his best but failed his mission. We can only bid him farewell now.”

“I thought you said he could pull through?” Sissa sounded irate, bordering on full on panic.

“No one has done so yet, but if his spirit is strong enough, he may. Understand that we do this because it is necessary. We cannot allow the infection to walk among us. We have lost too much already.” Kolash didn’t sound, at all, like he held out much hope.

Inside of me, I felt the Bishop’s spell cling to me. Then it blossomed, folded out from itself and latched onto my soft tissues, my arteries, my channels, and systematically began to destroy them. Blue tinged me-mana haplessly flowed through the cursed area of my body but never escaped, dissolving into nothing. The tempered walls of my mana channels cracked and split like dry wood.

My entire body burned.

Tempered Channels is now level 4.

“He’s dying! Let me help him!” Trix’s voice.

“Sacrifice, Brother Yik’i’trix. This is how we have survived thus far as a people. We cut out the infected flesh so the body may survive.”

“Ryan!”

I was burning to death from the inside.

Scoured.

Purged.

With one final desperate effort, I gasped a single shallow breath. The edges of my vision darkened. Then…

I stopped breathing altogether.

I missed having a heartbeat. It was a good way of making sure I was still alive. That had been taken from me, however..

Not your best move, System.

The world around me went out of focus then melted away like old film on a hot projector.

Fog swept in. More like smoke really, billowing up to obscure the physical and cloud everything else, a byproduct of the burning furnace inside of me that was using my life as fuel. In the smoke, however, there were some things that didn’t fade like everything else.

Little blue motes, tiny, bowl-shaped things that glowed against the backdrop of the dead world, drifted sluggishly upon nothing, still, stale.

That didn’t seem right. So strange to have everything so still. It felt like the motes should be moving.

Like me. I should be moving. It’s weird that I’m not moving. Why am I not moving?

I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t moving anymore. There was something that was happening, something important.

I poked one of the little glowing motes, mentally, a sort of numb fumbling slap from my fading consciousness. I should have been concerned about that… the fading. Emotion was hard to conjure in this place.

The little blue thing quivered in response to my touch.

There were more of them too, not just outside of my body. The motes were in me, clustered in greater numbers, too many to count. The blue motes bobbed through my mana channels, a lazy, cool river of life that illuminated what they touched… No, it wasn’t illumination. I wasn’t using my eyes. Whatever the little motes touched, I could feel, touch, smell, hear, and see all at once. Perfect knowledge.

Not everything, though. The metal of my prosthetic pieces were notable exceptions. Those were as cold as a dead star.

As I watched, the little motes flowed throughout my body, bringing soft blue light to all they passed. That is, until they reached my shoulder. The Bishop’s curse was a cluster of golden shards of light with razor sharp edges that cut and ripped as they darted through my soft tissues. They swarmed my blue motes with angry zeal, attached to them, brought them down, and burned them to dust.

Hey. I needed those. I needed… my mana. That was my mana, and my mana was me.

My attention swerved toward my status.

HP: 50/220

My mana had to flow.

Needed to flow.

Or I would die.

A problem to be solved. I liked those.

The first step was to get things moving. There was an emptiness within me that called for it. The curse was killing me by starving me of my mana, and I was critically low already. I focused on the vacuum it left as it destroyed me, the hollow. I reached out and swept one of the motes inside. It seemed eager to go, like it, somehow, knew I needed it there. Success.

So I gathered another, then another. I gave the new additions a place to go, paths to take.

Move. Move together.

They did. Sort of. They drifted through me mostly on momentum, slowing to a crawl unless I was actively moving them, but every cell they touched felt healthier, alive.

I reached for more. I brought it all into myself, as much as I could reach, gave it momentum. Nudged it until it was all moving as one. I made it flow.

The Bishop’s spell was voracious. It penetrated and dissolved mote after mote when they came into range, but soon I’d gathered so much, the sheer volume of mana flowing through my body overwhelmed the golden light constructs. The motes flooded the cursed area and drowned the invaders in a sea of blue before spreading through the rest of my body like water breaking through a dam.

I lost so much but gained more.

More.

For the first time in seemingly forever, I gasped, sucking in a huge, cold, rattling breath, and my mana rushed into me like a tide, naturally joining the currents I’d already established inside of me and turning the trickling streams into rushing rivers.

My burning limbs twitched as oxygen starved muscles finally received what they needed.

HP: 30/220

With great effort, I rolled over onto my back, my metal hand coming up to rest on my opposite shoulder.

This was going to hurt.

Devouring Grasp (Magivore) [5 MP/sec]

The metal fingers dug into my flesh. The bones in my shoulder cracked and popped under the pressure. This was physical pain, though, something I was familiar with. The important part was still-

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!

Like metal fillings under an industrial grade magnet, the sharp, little golden constructs were ripped from my body. Blood vessels burst, and my mana channels blew ragged holes in their sides. The little golden bastards did a lot of damage on the way out.

Create reservoir? Y/N

No way I wanted that stuff inside of me again, even to use as fuel. I chose ‘Yes.’

Reservoir created: Purge Unclean [Total value: 210 MP (light)]

I layed there, weak and hurt but alive. The bones in my shoulder were a mess, my insides scrambled. The pain was overwhelming. My mana, however, flowed within me, which I consciously encouraged. There was nothing else I could do. Wherever my mana touched, I felt better. When I searched for more to sweep into myself, there was none to be found.

Skill unlocked: Mana Manipulation

Your current skill level is 1.

Skill unlocked: Curse Breaking

Your current skill level is ERROR (invalid_me:core).

Resolving…

Skill unlocked: Curse Breaking.

Your current skill level is 0.

Slowly, normal feeling returned to my limbs as my HP climbed toward its max. The bones in my shoulder stabbed and sliced my already tender tissues as they came together again. I longed for the days of being unconscious for that part. However, I wouldn’t let myself slip into sleep. There was too much to do.

I kept my mana moving, healing. I didn’t think I needed to anymore, but it felt right.

By the time I was near max HP, I was feeling energized. More so, I was feeling pissed, increasingly pissed as time went on.

Kolash had tried to kill me. Worse, he tried to kill me in front of my friends. He’d hurt me, and he’d hurt them in turn. What were they all thinking right now? Were they mourning me? They had to think the worst. I heard the pain and fear in their voices when I was dying. Kolash had done that.

I opened my eyes and rose, slowly, from the ground, muscles flexing, hands balled into fists. I was aware, now, of how my mana flowed in my channels and how my heart was humming again.

A finger-sized yellow crystal fell to the stone floor with an angry *clang.*

Oh, yeah. My captured spell.

I didn’t want it anywhere near me.

Looking around, I realized I was somewhere else now, a different room. This one was dark and dirty, a little damp too. The ground under me was stone, slightly wet with condensation that pooled in the grouting. Wooden pillars jutted up from the floor and held up thick, cobwebbed joists that supported the flat ceiling. A basement, maybe? The area around me was littered with odds and ends. Leather pouches, bowls, cups, stained cloths, a tiny mortar and pestle. Pungent smoke slithered up from a stick of some kind of incense.

I needed to find my party, get them out, tell them everything, save the world. What about Kolash though? Kolash was-

Someone cleared their throat.

I whirled around to see… no one. Wait. There in the shadows. A figure in the corner of the room, picking his nails with a tiny knife. A quick pulse with Detect Steel revealed lots and lots of otherwise hidden blades like little constellations of stars.

“I know that look, monk,” Bole rasped in the dark. The little knife danced across his knuckles before disappearing into his sleeve. “And it warms my black heart to see it there. Who do we kill first?”