Surviving as a Broken Hero

‘The paladin is far too confident in the power that his oh-so-worshipped ‘System’ gives him, but then, all of his ilk are. They believe themselves to be above mortals.’

“No more hiding in the shadows fearing every movement in the Darkness while we wait for evil to strike, Cursed One. We cleanse it all here and have a free walk to the source of it all. Have more faith in the Light.”

‘That’s precisely the problem. Can you not see that Darkness won over Light here long ago? If you were so insistent on the sanctity of the Light, I would have thought that you would want to get to the center as soon as possible, not stop and risk your life for diversions of violence.’

Not to mention that the “Light” he spoke of was just a System feature.

He was adamant on that path, though, leaving her no choice in the matter. At least he had chosen a fitting place to make a stand.

The scaled demons could only come at them from either end of the alleyway. She turned her back to the paladin to face the way they had come and waited.

The paladin’s sword grew brighter, bright enough to illuminate the alley to either end.

Frantic shuffling sounded from not far behind her on the paladin’s side—the sound of more clothing thudding to the ground.

Then she saw movement.

Summoned by the call of the paladin’s Light, the demons crashed upon them in earnest.

She had naught the time or energy to keep track of the paladin; she could only trust that he could handle whatever came.

She was saved by the fact that the demons only fit through three abreast to stumble their way towards her.

They jostled against each other in their desperate hunger to reach her. Their rotting, scaled flesh tore from their muscles and dripped along the walls in their passing, where they knocked each other aside.

She waited until they were no farther than a double arm span from herself and she could see their dull eyes before she let loose the heat still gathered in her body upon them.

The fire shot through the length of the passage and tore through them like a rock through wet paper. After a moment, when her skin cooled and the cold nibbled at her extremities, she released the fire and drew in what residual warmth she could from the flame’s path, warming herself again to the point she felt as if she stood below a midsummer sun.

That wasn’t the end of it; more already pushed through the ashes of their brethren in their fearless advance.

The paladin was more than willing to engage them in melee, tearing apart the majority of the undead that had been but low-level or even Unawakened denizens of the city before.

Even if they retained their stats, his stats far surpassed theirs. Almost all of them were fellow kin—elves turned undead, with the occasional human or dwarf mixed into the fray.

She had no such luxury. She had no stats, no System to rely on. As a ‘Cursed One’, all she had was her very mortal body and the latent power she carried.

She eventually resorted to concentrating her gouts of fire along the heads of the swarming horde.

The chill nipped at her again, her remaining ear aching from the cold, but by that point, the demons crawled over their still-smoldering counterparts and freely ignited themselves in the lingering flames.

It wasn’t often that her fire had willing fuel to keep itself going. Flashes of luminosity from the paladin’s fight overpowered the soft orange hues thrown by her waning blaze.

The horde trickled to a stop. She drew the last heat of the charred husks into herself, enough to reduce the numb cold of winter to the shivering chill of the autumn ocean.

The overpowering scent of burnt meat tickled her nostrils, and the smoke irritated her eyes as tears trickled down her face.

A metallic clanking rang behind her; the paladin backed into her hard enough to send her stumbling forward. She caught herself on the slick wall just after stepping into one of the crumbling bodies.

The wetness clung to her fingertips, and she turned to see the paladin struggling against one of the unholy creatures—an orc Awakener with scaly skin tearing over its body, with the stats to back up its huge physique.

It clawed at the paladin’s face; he held it back with his gauntlets gripped upon its skull. His fingers dug into its bloated cheeks, and one hand found purchase in an eye socket whilst the other held its neck.

He strained against it. Light cascaded through his armor as he pushed and pulled against it with a grunt.

Its head ripped from its body; the thing went limp and fell. The paladin tore the head from his gauntlet and did his best to shake the clinging gore.

He leaned down and picked up his previously discarded blade.

She wiped her hands on her trousers.

“It didn’t look like you had that handled to me.”

He took another long look down the passage to confirm that the assault was truly over.

“I’m still here, aren’t I?”

Clothes littered his end of the alleyway where he had struck down the multitude of the creatures.

Closer to where he stood lay hacked apart and decapitated bodies where his Light had failed him. His cheek dripped from a shallow cut below his eye.

She gestured towards the wound. “Did one of them get to you?”

He wiped the back of his gauntlet along the cut and looked at the blood smeared along the silver metal.

“That last one must have scratched me at some point. I’ll be fine. What about you? Any more missing body parts I should know about?”

She ignored the barb, only interested in finishing the mission so she could be done with his foolishness.

She hoped that was the last of them; they couldn’t afford a similar confrontation.

The paladin sheathed his sword, and she followed behind him towards the center of the village, wary of whatever might be lurking just out of sight, what things the shadows might harbor.

‘That paladin has to be the most reckless one I have ever had the displeasure of working with. Overly righteous and self-confident to a fault, traits that the temple found desirable. Luckily, those types of problems are usually self-correcting.’

She caught her reflection in the blood-smeared metal of the paladin’s armored back. Despite her so-called ‘Curse’, she had far outlived many of the ‘Blessed’ that took too much comfort in the aid their ‘System’ gave them.

They continued unhindered through the silent streets of the city towards the center. No bodies could be seen, but evidence of struggle and death remained in the blood pooled in the slight depressions between stones, the scattered droplets of ichor that almost sparkled in the faint light diffusing through the fog. It should have dried long ago, but something kept it all fresh—as if the blood had just been spilled.

She couldn’t help but notice the paladin continuing to rub at his cheek from time to time.

Only a block or two from the center, they found the upper body of one of the demons attempting to drag itself through the empty streets. Separated from the waist down from its absent legs, the thing scraped at the stones beneath it with one hand, skin flayed and peeled back until the bones of its fingers scratched softly against the hard surface; its other arm hung limp at its side, twisted and broken from the shoulder.

The paladin didn’t even bother to call the Light or unsheathe his blade; instead, he walked over and stomped onto its skull with all his weight. A cracking sound followed by a heavy clanking as his armored foot hit the ground echoed through the street, and its head popped like a melon.

Wetness splattered across her face; she rubbed it away with the hem of her cloak. The paladin continued to stomp into the mush of the thing’s head.

She approached and put her hand on his shoulder. He whipped his head to look at her and panted heavily.

The cut below his eye festered green pus, and black tendrils crawled below the surface of his skin in a pulsating web around the wound. His eyes darted back and forth; sweat beaded on his forehead.

‘At least that answers any questions I might have had about how the creatures infect the living.’

“We need to hurry. It’s starting to affect you too.”

His eyes calmed, and he stepped away from the ruined carcass. “The Light will protect me.”

“I thought it was already well established that the Light doesn’t reach here, Paladin.”

He spared a glance towards the obscured heavens and repeated the circular motion over his chest. “It does through me, and it will protect me as its agent in the Darkness.”

She wondered if it had ever occurred to him that his god might not care.

Her only hope was that, by cleansing the source of it, they would also cleanse his wound; otherwise, she knew she would be leaving alone.

As much as she might have disliked him, she didn’t wish for her kin to die.

The temple was a relatively simple structure compared to the grand temples larger cities were wont to harbor. It stood at the center of a large, circular clearing, and its central spire stuck out only marginally above the buildings around the clearing.

Wooden double doors stood out only half her height above her, with more than ample room for a congregation to flood through its doors. A mosaic covered the rest of the entrance wall from the top of the doors to the slightly sloped roof of the single-floor temple.

The image of a circular sun on the mosaic marked it as a temple to the Light, not that she expected any other such temple to be the centerpiece of one of the Elven Kingdom’s lands.

The exposed earth around the temple might have once hosted natural grass. A towering, withered tree stood next to the temple, gnarled and cracked. The land was laid bare.

Fragments of bones were piled atop each other in small mounds. It appeared that the majority of those who hadn’t been corrupted had been brought there and thoroughly consumed, to the point that the undead had sucked even the marrow from their bones.

Dark-red strokes of dried gore covered the mosaic over the temple entrance like a painter had decided to just flick a paint-covered brush at it. The smell of wet earth rose to her nostrils.

The paladin retched again at her side.

“By the Light, what reason is there to do such a thing? Why would the forces of Darkness go to such lengths?”

“Because they use us as a means to an end. They wouldn’t bother doing such if you didn’t find it disturbing in some way.”

Though the forces of ‘Darkness’ as they put it were simply things that the Elven Kingdom deemed taboo or ‘evil’, she had no arguments over labeling what she was seeing as ‘Darkness’.

She stepped from the stones onto the earth around the temple, and her boot squelched into the moist soil.

She raised her foot to look. Fresh blood dripped from her sole. She took another squelching step and walked to the temple entrance.

The paladin hesitated before stepping to follow her.

They stopped again at the doorway to the temple.

She motioned for the paladin to open it and stepped aside. He inhaled a deep breath before letting it out and reaching for the right-hand door.

It swung inward almost effortlessly.