Honestly, looking at the black smoke clinging to my blade, I felt like a total fraud.
This legendary awakening felt more like my veins being filled with battery acid. The "power" leaking out of me barely flickered.
The Entity woman—the Weaver—tilted her head. She watched the oily mist hiss against the air with a look of pure boredom. Why would she be scared? I looked like a dying kid clutching a heavy stick.
"Is that it?" she cooed, her violet eyes flashing with amusement. "You're burning your own soul for... soot?"
Anyway, explaining the mechanics of a hard-counter takes too long, and my vision was already swimming.
Entropic mana is trash for actual damage, but it has one property the game devs hid in the deep lore: it nulls "active" magic on contact. It acts as a cosmic eraser, even if the eraser is currently killing the person holding it.
The Bell-Ringer lunged first. He swung that staff with a speed that made my stomach drop.
"Die, little glitch!" he shrieked.
I gave up on blocking. I lacked the strength to meet his force head-on. Instead, I waited for the frame—that tiny, half-second window where his porcelain mask leaned forward.
Ghost Step.
My legs screamed as I forced the flicker. I failed to hit three steps; I barely managed one.
But it worked. I slipped under the arc of the staff, feeling the cold wind of the silver bells shave the hair off the back of my neck.
As I slid past, I dragged the edge of Kael's sword across the Bell-Ringer's thigh.
I only nicked the fabric of his shadow-cloak. It was a shallow cut, but the moment the black soot touched him, his momentum vanished.
The magical "push" behind his speed died instantly. He stumbled, his staff hitting the dirt with a dull thud instead of a magical explosion.
"W-what?" he stammered, his yellow eye wide with sudden confusion. "My mana... I can't feel the flow!"
"Shut up and stay down," I wheezed. Thick, dark blood dripped from my nose onto the grass.
The Weaver refused to let me celebrate.
She moved like a twitching blur, her hands glowing with a violent, concentrated purple light. She aimed for my heart, wanting to regress my entire existence back to nothing.
"Foolish boy!" she hissed, appearing right in front of my face.
She was too fast. My energy had bottomed out into a hollow, aching blackness. I couldn't dodge. I lacked the time to even lift the sword for a parry.
So, I did something incredibly stupid.
I let go of the hilt with one hand and reached out, grabbing her glowing wrist with my bare, soot-stained fingers.
The pain surpassed anything I'd ever felt. It felt like my hand was being crushed and aged a thousand years in a single heartbeat. My skin wrinkled, my bones became brittle, and the scream died in my throat because I lacked the air to let it out.
But the Entropic mana did its job.
The violet light on her hand sputtered and died like a blown-out candle. The "Slumber" and "Regression" magic she relied on failed to survive the touch of the void.
She froze, her spider-like face twisting in shock. For the first time, she looked vulnerable.
"You... you're hurting yourself just to touch me? how idiot you could be" she whispered, disgusted.
"Obviously," I croaked, my teeth stained red.
With my other hand, I swung Kael's sword in a desperate, clumsy arc. I aimed to take her head off, but I lacked the raw strength to finish the job. Instead, the blade slammed into her shoulder, the Entropic rot seeping into her skin.
She let out a piercing, non-human shriek as the black smoke ate into her violet essence.
She flew backward and crashed into the ruins of the wagon, her form flickering like a glitchy television screen.
I collapsed to one knee, the heavy sword falling from my hands. I was spent. My life was hanging by a thread, and the blood loss turned the world into a dark, blurry mess.
Anyway, the curse was broken.
The Bell-Ringer struggled to get his mana back, and the Weaver hissed in the wreckage, but the heavy "Slumber" aura vanished.
Behind me, I heard a sharp, metallic shink.
The sound of a sword being drawn from a sheath. A real sword.
"Move, Leo," a cold, familiar voice commanded.
I tumbled to the side just as a streak of pure, silver light cut through the darkness.
Kael was awake.
And he looked absolutely furious. He lacked even a single scratch, and his mana burned like a sun compared to my smoky embers.
In one fluid motion, Kael appeared in front of the Bell-Ringer. He didn't say anything. He delivered a strike so fast the air itself seemed to crack.
The porcelain mask shattered into a thousand pieces, and the
"Man with the Bells" vanished into a cloud of grey dust before he could even scream.
Kael turned his gaze toward the Weaver. She tried to scramble away, her violet light trying to reignite, but Kael was already on her.
"You really shouldn't have interrupted this journey," Kael began, his voice dropping into a dangerous, quiet rumble. "We are in a serious situation. It would be quite the tragedy if my young lady died simply because creatures like you got in the way. How shameful that would be. Honestly, if I had the time, I'd make your end as ugly as possible. I have to, anyway—either I succeed, or the Duke ensures I meet a fate far worse than yours."
He stepped on her wrist, pinning her to the splintered wood. "So, I'll ask once. Who the hell are you, and what do you want?"
The Weaver didn't just sit there. She spat a glob of violet ichor at his boots, a mocking, jagged smile stretching across her face even as tears of rage welled in her eyes.
"What do I care about your 'young lady'?" she shrieked, the sound vibrating with a raw, agonizing history.
"Don't act like you've forgotten my kind! You destroyed everything—my home, my people! You act like my hunger is a sin, but what about what you did? General... Kael, son of Gerritt. I wish I could kill that girl myself. Maybe then you'd understand. I want to watch you suffer in pain for eternity! I hate you! I HATE YOU! just die already!"
She dissolved into a frantic, broken laugh that sounded more like a sob. The drama of her hatred was heavy, a weight of old blood and burnt villages that seemed to hang in the air.
Kael's expression didn't soften. He looked at her with the cold, detached eyes of a man who had long ago traded his soul for a paycheck.
"I don't actually care what happens to the girl's soul," Kael said, his tone flat and chillingly professional.
"My contract is for protection and loyalty, nothing more. If she dies, I die. I'm going to save her because I value my own life above anything else whatsoever. As for your question... honestly, I don't know who the hell you are. You aren't even recognizable. Why should you be?"
He leaned in closer, his blade hovering over her throat.
"I've been in countless wars. Asking me to recognize one face among the thousands I've cut down is disrespectful. I don't want my own idols to see me as some bloody monster, and frankly, I hate myself enough already. So, you're wasting your—"
"Shut it!" she screamed, her voice cracking.
Her mocking smile stayed fixed even as the tears fell.
"You don't even have a heart to speak of! I can't believe a monster like you is trying to act innocent all of a sudd—"
She pointed a trembling, clawed finger at his chest, her eyes wide with a final, desperate accusation.
Shink.
Kael didn't let her finish. With a single, blurring motion, he silenced her. Her head rolled into the frost, her violet eyes finally going dark.
Silence returned to the woods. The horses, finally free from the curse, let out long, shaky breaths.
Kael stood there for a moment, staring at the empty space where her voice had been, before wiping his blade on a piece of discarded silk.
"Anyway," he muttered to the wind.
"She talked too much."
I lay on my back, staring up at the moon. My chest felt like it was being crushed by a mountain, and the black soot slowly faded from my skin, leaving behind raw, painful burns.
But the physical pain was nothing compared to the ringing in my ears.
"I don't actually care what happens to the girl's soul."
Did he really just say that? Right in front of me? I felt a surge of cold, sharp anger.
"Leo! A-are you okay? Can you hear me?"
Liora ran over and knelt in the dirt, her voice trembling. She looked terrified, her hands hovering over my bleeding face, but I didn't answer her. I couldn't. My eyes were locked on Kael.
He stood a few paces away, his back to us, wiping the Weaver's blood off his blade as if he had just finished a boring chore. He looked like a hero from a distance, but up close, he was just a hollow shell.
"How dare you say that!" I barked, the words scratching my throat. I forced myself to sit up, ignoring the way my vision blurred.
"She's your young lady! How can you be so heartless? You should at least act like you care to save her for a better reason than just your own skin!"
Kael didn't turn around. He stayed perfectly still, silhouetted against the moon.
"I would rather die for the truth than live my whole life for a lie," he said, his voice flat and empty.
"And if you're thinking about reporting this to the Duke... don't bother. Neither would he care."
The realization hit me harder than the Bell-Ringer's staff.
My stomach turned. In this entire, godforsaken kingdom, I was the only one who actually gave a damn about Alisa. To everyone else, she was just a boss to be slain or a problem to be managed.
Liora gasped beside me. She was shaking, her eyes wide with a new kind of horror.
No way... I could see the thoughts racing behind her eyes. Are these two really the disciples of the Duke of the North? Is there really no one good left?
I looked at Liora and saw her face pale, her breath coming in shallow hitches. I had to fix this. If she snapped now, we were all dead.
"Are you okay, Liora? What happened?" I asked, my voice softening.
She flinched when I called her name, her small hands clutching her cloak. "I-I'm fine... yes..."
I forced a smile onto my face—the kind of fake, reassuring smile you give someone when the house is on fire but you don't want them to scream.
"Don't be scared. Everything is fine for now," I lied. "Mr. Big Guy over there is so strong he'll protect us from now on. Am I right, Kael?"
My smile vanished the second the words left my mouth.
Kael finally moved. He didn't answer. Instead, he gripped his sword and began walking toward Liora.
The air turned cold again. Liora froze, her eyes pinned on the sharp silver of his blade.
She was terrified, her body shaking so hard I could hear her teeth chattering. Tears welled up in her eyes, trapped there by sheer, paralyzing fear.
Kael didn't stop. He looked at her not as a child, but as a loose end.
"Kael, what are you doing?" I snapped, trying to find the strength to stand. "Back off!" what could this guy actually want??