The first thing any young man noticed when he started doing this job was the smell.
It’s hard to describe to someone who’s never smelled it themselves. How many people could earnestly say that they’d spent a long time around the bodies of the dead? In muddy fields where the blood has been spilled such that puddles gathered on the ground like rainwater. Iron and rot intertwining into a distinct stench that clung to the back of the nostrils, no matter how many scented candles you buy using your meagre pay.
I preferred to be the one picking through the remains to the ones doing the dying though. I was good at it, had a sharp eye. I could spot a wedding ring or a valuable piece of equipment from a mile away. This was the last thing I expected to be doing when I found myself in this world. A wretched thief who followed war wherever it travelled, a storm watcher who profited off the suffering of others.
I didn’t have any support. I wasn’t born into a noble family and given a great purpose by a benevolent goddess. For all I knew it was a mistake. A flip of the coin that landed on an upright edge and sent me here, into the arms of a poor local orphanage. I toiled away, took every opportunity I had and tried to use my knowledge to get somewhere. But why would they have any reason to listen to me? I was a stupid kid who didn’t know anything.
And I didn’t. I couldn’t replicate the brilliance of others and make a profit from it.
Back to square one. Scraping by on what little money I earned from selling my ill-gotten gains. A thousand faces frozen in stone, a last moment of agony and regret for what they left behind. This was a particularly bloody one. The ground beneath was blanketed by armoured bodies. Banners drifted softly in the wind, tattered and muddied. The only company I had was the crows and the two other scroungers who had followed me here, picking out their own ‘gardens’ to search through.
For a brief moment a flash of pale skin caught my attention. When I looked in the direction where it came from, there was nothing there. I returned to my work, trying to pry a tightly bound ring from a rigor-mortis afflicted finger. “Fuck this,” I broiled in hushed tones, “Stupid fucking finger.” I was growing more frustrated by the moment. Luckily nobody here knew my language, so I could swear and shout as I pleased without offending anyone.
“An outworlder,” she cackled, “Now that is interesting.”
My head snapped up once again. Someone was watching me. I scanned the horizon, finding nothing out of place. As my eyelids snapped down and opened again, that changed. Sat atop a mound of entangled bodies was a woman, naked as the day she was born, her privates only covered by her long, black hair. Her red eyes locked onto me. Surely, I had gone mad. A naked woman? Here?
My curiosity got the better of me. I abandoned my grim task for the moment and headed to the pile of bodies that she lounged upon like a throne. Sticking from one of the bodies was a blade that forebode bad tidings. It’s twisted, black blade reminded me of a tree’s branch. Rivets of red energy ran between the grooves like veins in an arm. No ordinary mercenary should have had a weapon like this.
She studied me impassively. I knew better than to touch the blade, lest my own life be forfeit. I would die for certain. This was a [Cursed Weapon]. It offered incredible power at a steep price. If the side-effects didn’t kill you, the Inquisitors would. I had seen one of these before. In the hands of a man dragged into the streets of a small town and cut down where he stood. Rendered limb from limb by the zealous knights in red.
I turned to the woman. She was beautiful, but her sudden appearance and attempts to beckon me closer had already made one thing clear – she did not have good intentions. Like a deadly flower luring in its prey, she took advantage of what people desired most, and in turn forced them to touch the blade and become its slave. I shivered as the cold bite of the wind slipped through the gaps in my coat.
“A cursed blade?” I asked, “He must not have lasted long.”
Knowing the gig was up, she laughed, “He found me in a nearby ruin, believed I’d bring him good luck in the upcoming battle.” She leaned over and pressed the tip of her finger against a soldier’s bent and battered breastplate, “Not so. I can grant you power, but lady luck is beyond my domain.”
“How am I seeing you if I’m not bound?”
“I can project myself, to some extent. After feasting on this man’s soul – I had just enough to lure in a cute young boy like yourself.”
Twenty years back home, twenty-two years here. “Technically I’m forty-two.”
She shrugged, “Men don’t change. They’re a boiling cauldron of lust and desire from cradle to grave. You’re the first to realize what I am, or to put up any kind of resistance.”
I looked over the battlefield. “In a darker time, I might have just picked you up and gotten it over with.”
“Is this not a dark time? Picking through the corpses of men for their belongings?” Her every word hung in the air with a seductive purr. A calculated and intentional attempt to seduce the heart of whoever found the blade.
“I’ve done worse. Everyone does what they have to do to survive out here.”
“As do I,” she agreed, “To be truthful – the kind of person who take up my offers are… not the most noble or well-meaning. Amoral to a fault, but still unwilling to do what needs to be done. I do the world a favour by consuming them.”
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I [Inspected] the weapon. One of the few spells that I knew, handy for finding things of value. In this world ‘concepts’ had power. The world was woven from these strands of thought and desire, and you could manipulate them as you pleased to some extent. It was a rather exhausting thing to do, and I’d burned one of my precious charges on a sword I had no intention of picking up.
STIGMA OF A THOUSAND TEETH
Level 1 Relic Strength Required – 10 Attack speed – 4.0 Damage - 3 Grants ability: [Consume] Affix: [Empty]
[Consume] allows the wielder to syphon the strength of defeated foes. 25 percent of [Experience] is transferred to the wielder.
[Consume] allows the wielder to take [Affixes] from other items and apply them to Stigma.
Low level, but obscenely powerful in the right hands. [Experience] was a key concept in this world, a numeral expression of your skill and talent. To steal it from another person was an incredible power. Used on the right target, you could master anything in mere moments. My own skills focused only on cooking, survival and thievery – none of which added to my personal power as a fighter. A few bare-knuckle brawls with fellow scavengers wasn’t much training at all. Like in my old world, training a skill could take years, or even longer without proper guidance.
[Affixes] were concepts applied to weapons and armour that gave them new effects. They needed talented mages and smiths to create. Combining them in certain ways was nearly impossible. But Stigma could steal them and use them at any time. It had the potential to be the deadliest weapon known to man.
Despite all that, I didn’t need Stigma. Working as a warrior was even more dangerous than my already dangerous job. The pay reflected it but money wasn’t much good if you were dead. Wars were raging everywhere these days, between guilds, nations and people. A work rich environment. A deadly one too. I was stood in a field of nearly two-thousand dead mercenaries as I spoke. I had no intention of joining them.
“You’re going to chill here until someone picks you up?”
She fluttered her lashes and squeezed her naked breasts together, “Why not you?”
“I don’t have a death wish. Sure, this shit sucks – but it’s better than selling my soul to the devil.”
“The devil isn’t as much fun as I am,” she insisted earnestly, “Those last moments of your life could be so glorious!”
“Like I said, no death wish here.”
I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut, because whatever god was watching me at the time had a fucked up sense of humour. The crows scattered and the field fell silent. Hooves rumbled in the distance. Before I even had time to find a hiding place the inquisitors were surrounding me. An entire convoy of them had arrived in a flash and isolated the battlefield. The red steel armour they wore hid the bloody marks. Inquisitors, representatives of the Narrow Sea. A bunch of bloodthirsty murderers who destroyed wherever they went.
I cursed my luck, “I’m done for.”
The commander of the knights dismounted his braying steed, stomping on the face of a dead man with little regard for him. He marched over to me, towering three heads above me and wielding a deadly spear.
“Thief. What have we here?”
“…A cursed sword, sire.”
He lifted the visor from his helmet, allowing me to see his scarred visage. “A cursed sword?” I stepped aside and allowed him to observe it for himself. Stigma’s spirit wasn’t visible to them, she’d connected only to me.
I worked quickly to establish my alibi, “One of the soldiers must have brought it sire, he died in the battle.”
“And how do you know this?”
“I [Inspected] it. No sire, I have not touched it,” I explained. His stern expression didn’t change for one moment. He didn’t believe a damn word I was saying.
“You are aware of the punishment for looting the dead?”
Supposedly, a few years stay in the nearest all-inclusive dungeon, but more often it was a summary execution in the town square. I kept my mouth shut and refused to play the game. We both knew what the punishment was. He was trying to make me incriminate myself more than I already had. The leather bag around my shoulder had never felt so heavy.
“I can help you,” she whispered into my ear, “All it costs… is a little bit of your life.”
“Fuck.” I didn’t have a good option. If I went with the inquisitors I’d be killed regardless of whether I had touched the sword. The zeal in which they exterminated anyone who even witnessed the items made that much obvious. And I’d rather be dead than locked in a dungeon because of my thievery. All of those paths ended in the same place.
This was all or nothing, perhaps it was fate. The reason I was sent here.
“You better not screw me!” I warned her, leaping onto the pile and wrapping my blood covered hands around the hilt. In that moment I felt my very soul sundered into a thousand tiny pieces, the cold touch of something slipping into my body and making itself comfortable. The world turned grey and my body was set alight with an intense, searing agony. The ground below bubbled and boiled, the knights and horses become immobilized by the new softened bog.
I screamed so loud that my vocal chords tore and frayed. Vicious black spikes shot from the ground with deadly force, impaling the knights and leaving them hanging in the air. They gurgled and struggled if they weren’t killed instantly, but soon even they lost their will to fight. It was over in seconds. The entire contingent of inquisitors had been destroyed in seconds. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Her voice echoed in my head, “We are now one and the same. I see what you see, feel what you feel, and taste what you taste.” The hand that gripped the hilt of the heavy blade was wrought with illness, black and pale. My veins brimmed with her corrupting essence. I felt weaker than I ever had before. I could barely stand. “Tired? [Consume] their bodies before their essence escapes!”
“…C…Consume.”
I blacked out.