Surviving as a Broken Hero

She saw symmetrical features and shining plate armor that reflected her face back at her, asking her to compare her lowly existence to his.

Of course, he left his head unprotected. How could he showcase his perfectly proportioned face otherwise, with his shining blonde hair and effervescent emerald eyes, his unmarred golden skin, his perfectly pointed ears?

‘Disgusting,’ she thought. ‘Perfection is unnatural and has no place in a world of mortals.’

She was considered tall for an elf, taller than most other elves, but he looked down on her by at least a full head still.

She could see the judgment in his eyes when he regarded her, heavy and unspoken. He would rather have been there without her, and she would have been better off without him, yet they knew they could not abandon the lord’s law.

His eyes flitted over her form, focusing briefly on the two absent fingers on her left hand and over the flat of her head where her right ear used to be, hidden partially by shoulder-length black hair.

‘An elf missing an ear? Disgraceful.’

He rested a hand on the hilt of the sword sheathed at his side and asked, “Will you be fit for the task ahead?”

In other words, ‘Do you have any other abnormalities that might hinder you?’

They both knew she would have been long dead if that were the case. The Kingdom didn’t take kindly to those of her ilk who could no longer serve it. Better a death in servitude than death in fear and hiding.

The army’s encirclement served no purpose other than containment; the task of entering the village fell to the two of them—minimal casualties and a minimal chance for a breach.

They stepped forward and approached the village itself, more of a small town. A wooden palisade protected the place from attack and rose an arm-span’s height over her head.

The town was organized haphazardly into areas for living, trade, and local government matters; each area dotted with buildings seemingly tossed into arrangement from a child’s block set.

A dark fog blanketed the village, shadowing it from the mid-day sun and growing in density towards the epicenter.

Arrows littered the earth, jutting out in places where they had lodged themselves at the end of their flight.

They passed by the bodies of the dead splayed out to rot in the sun, where the army’s arrows had slain people in their attempts to reach safety. Men, women, minor nobility, beggars, all elves, and all dead.

The stench of decay hung over the air—nothing the elf wasn’t already used to.

The paladin spared a glance at her while he curled his nose at the stench, noting her lack of reaction.

“It seems your kind is as soulless as the rumors say. Damned anti-Awakened.”

They stopped before the palisade. The paladin kept glancing towards the sky. Corruption didn’t usually manifest itself in such a visible form—then again, corruption of that sort was fairly new.

The Kingdom should have sent more than one team to root it out, but who were they to question the king’s orders? The woman held up her good hand to the wooden construction and Pulled from herself.

Her hair stood on end; she could feel her pores shrink, and her toes tingled and went numb.

Fire leaped from her hand to the wall, spreading over it for its entire height and the length of two men abreast.

She clenched her hand, and the fire contracted in on itself and took the section of wall with it with such quickness that the wall appeared to vanish. The paladin mumbled something under his breath and stepped through the breach.

They emerged into one of the housing areas. The back side of a stone hut lay in front of them before they saw a loose cobblestone pathway spaced with similar dwellings along the path for as far as they could see through the black fog.

There were no bodies or signs of struggle. The silence assaulted their ears between the scuffs of their boots over the stones and the paladin’s creaking armor in their journey further into the fog.

They witnessed the first signs of struggle when they reached an open square. A short circular fountain, long inactive, stood at the center with a small wooden stage constructed before it.

‘A town crier’s stand, perhaps?’ the woman wondered.

The remains of the last gathering held there continued to inhabit the square. Shattered bones—glistening with crimson vitality—and broken bodies spilled from the fountain. The stagnant waters of the fountain were dyed a deep red, and the remains of what were once elves like them littered the waters of the fountain.

The thick odor of iron lurked just behind the ever-present stench of rotting meat and refuse.

A muffled retch came from the woman’s side. She grinned and watched the paladin bend over with one hand on his knee and the other over his mouth before he stood straight again and traced a circle over his chest, some ritual of the devout, no doubt.

It was meant to guide the dead or bring peace.

The woman flashed her teeth. ‘A waste of time and energy. Gratuitous symbolism means nothing to the deceased and their far-off stares.’

She knew his kind worshiped the System and shunned those like her for their inability to access it. She believed it was just a tool, not some benign god.

“What’s wrong, Paladin? I thought the clergy prepared your kind to combat all manner of the occult.”

He looked away from the fountain, doing his best to keep the bodies out of his direct vision. “Are you so devoid of emotion that you hold no respect for the departed? Are all of your kind really so empty inside?”

‘Empty? No, I’m not empty. Respect only matters to the living. I simply know better than to waste my energy on pointless rituals and wasteful thoughts.’

She couldn’t speak for others of her kind; she’d never met them. Everyone had heard the stories, though. Whispers to children to stay in at night, lest the anti-Awakened steal their life force and leave them to die. Naught but fables and warnings from long before their Merge.

A shadow flitted through the void between buildings behind the paladin’s head. He still waited for her response.

She raised her good hand and pointed towards it; he quirked an eyebrow. “There’s something there.”

His gaze followed her finger to the gathering of gloom hanging between the stone walls of the adjacent structures.

He moved towards the alleyway and drew his blade; the sound of the steel sliding from his scabbard rang into the silence.

The woman reached for what warmth she could find still stagnating in the cool air and found the faint heat of maggots burrowing their way through dead flesh to be sufficient.

The soft presence of the larvae in her mind vanished whilst they went cold and still, one by one, and she felt the tinge of moisture over her skin beneath her robes from their stolen warmth.

It was just enough to hold onto without too much effort.

She followed him towards the signs of movement she had seen. As they got closer, the dried streaks of dark fluid splattered along the stones became evident—the bloodied handprints where someone had leaned against the corner.

The wet slurping sound of feasting emanated from the inky blackness.

The paladin held his sword ahead with one hand, channeling his mana and using a basic skill, «Light». Light spread over the blade in a deep yellow hue that fought back the darkness.

They moved forward until the sounds of feeding grew silent. The paladin’s gauntlets creaked when he adjusted the grip on his blade. A slight widening lay ahead, where one of the buildings curved away slightly in an L shape.

The paladin took another step. It lurched from the alcove with no more than a whisper, a half-dead, lizard-like elf stood there, no telltale warmth of the living left within its body.

Hairless and scaled, its right eye dangled from the socket, and its garments were chewed through in places to its flesh, where exposed bones gleamed in the light of the paladin’s blade through the gaping flesh in its ruined muscles. The paladin’s sword flashed, and he tapped the point of it into the thing’s skull, using another skill, «Smite».

The light transferred from the blade into the thing before enveloping it entirely and vanishing to who knows where, leaving only tattered garments to drop with a muted thud to the ground beneath.

‘This paladin is going to get me killed.’

Just as he could sense their unholy power gathered at the center of the village, so too could the forces of the occult feel the holy power unleashed from his blade, a type of System skill that resonated with its opposite.

The paladin no doubt knew that as well. He lowered his weapon and leaned back against the wall opposite the corner where the corpse had attacked him from, looking at something against the wall that she could not see past the bend.

She didn’t need to see it to know what he was looking at. The paladin glanced towards the sky and traced another circle over his breastplate.

‘We don’t have the time for you to mourn the carcass of every poor soul you come across, fool.’

“Now they know we’re here. I hope you have more mana left in you.”

He fixated his eyes upon her, then looked downwards at his sword. Whatever insane logic was going through his mind was likely to get them killed.

“Don’t worry about me, Cursed One.” He spat the last words like they were an insult. To him, it probably was. “Worry about doing your job when the time comes; you don’t look like you have much more left in you either.”

She instinctively reached for her missing ear.

She wanted to tell him of the things she had seen, the things she had killed with her non-System-blessed body that he could only dream about in his nightmares, but she knew bantering with him there would be a waste of breath.

His sword radiated with «Light» again. “I can feel them closing in.”