Surviving as a Broken Hero

She glanced over to check the paladin’s reaction, expecting him to wretch again.

Instead—in the flicker of the hundreds of candles lining the temple and the painstakingly lit chandelier casting a radius of firelight over the interior where inky blackness waited just outside the radii of the candles—she saw the spiderweb of corruption over his face, his nose, and the side of his head.

Wooden pews spread the length of the temple from the entrance, split by a blue carpet splotched with red and brown down the center aisle.

Dark silhouettes populated the pews. Hunched figures spread over the seating in a haphazard congregation of the dead. Elves were seated and huddled with their families in worship where death had caught them unaware.

A raised stage at the far end of the temple with a wooden pulpit decorated the sparse stage where a preacher would bless the masses.

She put her hand on the paladin’s back, her three fingers resting against the cold steel of his armor.

She gently pushed him forward; it was time for him to do his job so that she could do hers.

He took a first, faltering step onto the frayed carpet before gathering some measure of fortitude and taking long strides towards the pulpit, pointedly averting his gaze from the bodies in their deathly reverie.

He arrived at the pulpit before she did, his long and purposeful strides carrying him with a speed that she could only match if she ran.

The warmth of the candles fluttered at her senses.

The paladin leaped onto the stage and stopped, staring at that which she could not see from her angle.

She heaved herself onto the stage and arrived just in time to see him squat down, armor clanking in the silence and shifting over itself, speaking soft words to an elf curled in the hollow at the base of the pulpit.

‘A mortal could not have survived for such a time in this place of the damned. The new demons would have dined on its flesh and spread its bones over the city long ago,’ the woman frowned as she came to her conclusion and kept the warmth ready to call at a moment’s notice.

The man, a younger elf with dark hair and orange eyes like the fading sun, sniffled and shied away from the paladin.

It didn’t take a paladin to recognize the unholy influence before them. It hung around the elf, a smothering aura similar to the sensation of submerging oneself in water—where the senses became muted and far away.

It wouldn’t be the first time she had to burn a fellow elf, and it likely wouldn’t be the last.

She recalled what she knew of the things called ‘higher demons’.

‘They favor the weak, the things that hide just outside of reality and dine on the bitter nightmares and sweet fears of mortals. They whisper sweet nothings to us in dreams and promise us adventure and excitement—to make our fantasies come true. Most are too strong and can ignore the whispers; the unawakened were natural gateways to Them, and this man likely harbors one.’

She prepared herself. Whatever it was, she had yet to find an evil her fire couldn’t burn.

She reached out a hand and the paladin swatted it down, aware of what she had resigned herself to. “The Light can still reach him. Step away.”

“He’s beyond reach now, a higher demon in an elf’s skin. There is no kin here.”

The paladin leaned towards the elf and extended his hand. “Let me try.”

‘It’s no use. This elf stands at the center of the corruption.’

An inanimate, nonthinking artifact might have been cleansable, but the demons were beings who consumed souls and corrupted all they touched.

Even if it were possible to evict the demon from the elf without resorting to lethal methods, the elf’s mind would be long gone.

“Are you here to save me?” The elf spoke.

His voice was quiet yet clear. There was no inflection of fear in his tone, only curiosity.

“Yes. I’m here to save you. What’s your name?”

The elf’s orange gaze lingered on the paladin, unblinking. “Alecci.”

“Alright, Alecci. I just need you to reach out to me. Everything will be ok.”

‘This paladin is mad.’

She knew she should have just ended it all there, damn it all. Instead, some morbid curiosity overpowered her reason, and she allowed herself to watch with bated breath.

Alecci reached out to the paladin. The paladin enveloped the elf’s frail hand in his and goaded him out from under the pulpit.

The Light spread from a concentrated spot on the paladin’s back and grew to cover his entire armor.

“Everything’s going to be back to normal soon. It’s alright.”

The paladin drew the elf closer and wrapped him in a firm hug, and shadows undulated in the corners of the temple.

The paladin’s luminescence behind the pulpit cast a deep wedge of lightlessness over the temple’s entrance and central pathway.

Faint candlelight no longer touched the surface of the floor, and the figures on the pews shifted as the balance of the church changed. Darkness flooded the temple past the pulpit, leaving only their black outlines.

The elf woman’s instincts finally overruled her curiosity. “Let the man go!”

Her voice was lost to the deafening aura of silence hanging around the man.

She couldn’t get to the weak-looking elf without hurting the holy warrior.

The paladin attempted to pull back then, likely sensing the wrongness growing in the air rather than fading in the presence of his Light.

The elf man’s frail hands stuck to his chestplate and his feet remained planted in place with an unnatural weight.

The paladin struggled and abandoned his gentleness, batting at the elf’s face and hands with such frenetic motion as to make properly aiming at the attacker impossible.

The abyss residing over the church crashed upon the two of them and flowed through the man into the paladin.

Dim outlines of figures rose in the pews. The shadowy figures on the pews jerked forward and crawled over each other in their masses towards them while a wisp of Light expelled itself from the paladin’s body and flitted towards the temple’s roof before being snuffed by the waiting void.

Then, the frail-looking elf’s body fell limp, and the paladin stood from his squatting position, the aura of wrongness amplified, physically weighing the ‘Cursed’ elf woman down, and the paladin turned to her.

An inky green rot pulsated over his exposed skin. His eyes glowed orange, and he bared his glistening white teeth at her.

True demons delighted in the hopelessness of others. It would let her suffocate in her despair before dining on her flesh at the peak of her emotion.

She pulled as hard as she could. The hundreds of flickering motes of radiance snuffed out, and streaks of fire flashed toward her.

Warmth enveloped her, from sweating, to light-headedness, to flaking dry skin in a moment.

She pulled harder. The undead spilling over the edges of the stage towards her slowed, and frost formed over the temple.

Motes of ice sparkling in the last streaks of firelight…

She let the unbearable heat burning the tissues of her skin leak just enough to keep herself from cooking altogether while she pulled it just enough to keep it near her in a bubble of fiery, glowing warmth.

The demon wearing the paladin’s body took a step back and continued to watch.

The first of the lesser demons reached her—it ignited and burned in her bubble.

The true demon raised a hand towards her, and the air around it swirled.

She could no longer contain it and pushed outward as violently as she could.

The direction didn’t matter; the fire would take it all.

Blue fire erupted outward and enveloped the world.

She glimpsed the shadows rushing towards the demon before the fire overtook it.

When the wooden stage gave out beneath her, she continued her push even whilst she fell until her temperature returned to normal, and she began to take from her own body again.

The surging fire died just as suddenly as it had erupted.

The heat and intensity had been such that the temple’s stones crumbled and exploded outwards into the city.

All that remained was a blackened circle of earth and the ruined stone walls of the church, reaching only a few bricks high at their best.

The ground was cool to the touch. She gathered herself and stood on unsteady legs that felt like they had just run the entirety of the village.

The demon lay not far ahead of her. Its armor was absent, wholly melted into its skin and bones in dull stretches of smooth metal and seared tissue.

The sweet scent of roasted meat wafted from it; sinewy patches of its charred muscle and boiling fat dripped to the floor when it stood to regard her.

Flimsy tendrils of night flickered through its ghoulish form and began slowly reconstructing the thing’s body.

A thought flashed through her mind. A brief consideration of what she should do.

She clenched the three good fingers on her left hand before extending her fist out towards the thing.

Darkness danced in the faint light of the muted sun and swept towards her.

“It’s over. You’ll find your skills useless here,” the demon said, watching her still.

The swirling darkness was a result of a skill it had just cast unique to high-level demons, «Silence of the Damned», that prohibited skill usage below a certain level. A certain level that it was positive no Awakener had reached.

The elf woman ignored it.

She watched her arm and marveled one last time at the feel of it before she pulled everything it was. Skin froze rigid and blue; it didn’t even hurt.

The heat surged over her and threatened to overwhelm her.

She let it all out and channeled it through the good flesh just below the elbow.

Her frozen limb exploded outwards into shards of ice trailed by an all-consuming flame that caught and devoured the last remnants of her forearm.

She allowed it to linger near her skin for a brief moment when it erupted, cauterizing her arm before she pushed it harder toward the demon until it became a wave of white fire.

The demon hardly had time to widen its eyes and let out a final scream of surprise.

It realized, in its dying moment, that it had never felt the presence of the System from the woman, the unmistakable stench of it.

There were no screams or final words; the demon had naught the time for that, only the deafening crackle of fire and bright white incandescence.

She lowered the destroyed limb. The demon was no more. Not even the dull shine of any of its embedded armor survived.

She knew it was over then when the dark fog over the city vanished as if it had never existed. If any other undead roamed the village, they would be no more than the regular dead at that moment.

A gleaming metal in the debris caught her eye briefly; the hilt of the paladin’s sword shone in the full day’s luminescence.