“Curses can do that?”
“Yes, it’s much like medicine—it can give incredible power as well as great suffering, just as an herb can be made into both a restorative and a poison.”
“That makes sense. This might be a little tricky, then...” Well, there went my plan. I could’ve broken the curse already if my punch had sent him down for the count. Now it looked like I wouldn’t be able to knock him out if I held back too much; I’d just have to hit him harder. But if I wasn’t careful and misjudged the amount of force, I could inadvertently kill him.
Accident or not, murder was a serious crime. Plenty of witnesses could vouch for it being self-defense, so I doubt I’d be convicted, but... Legality aside, could I really bear the guilt of knowing I killed a man?
When I’d first fought a monster, I’d still hesitated to kill it despite the fact that it had been, by all appearances, a completely inhuman beast. Now, I was fighting a person who looked just the same as me. How could I bring myself to take his life?
I hesitated for a moment, which did not go unnoticed.
“Graaagh!” He bent his knees and leaned into a grappling stance, then charged at me like a beast intent on taking down its prey.
“Ah!” I attempted to dodge to the side and parry as he struck, but he pushed past. Did the curse boost his stamina as well? He’d been running wild this whole time, but he showed no signs of exhaustion.
“Sorry,” I said as I raised my right hand with my fingers extended straight up. I was apologizing for what I was about to do. Whipping around behind the man, I swung my hand at the base of his neck—a knife hand strike, in other words—and hit him hard.
The man gasped loudly, breath leaving his lungs. His low stance meant his weight was now distributed toward the front, and as a result he pitched forward and rolled across the ground, skidding along its surface.
Still with my knife hand strike at the ready, I watched him closely. He showed absolutely no signs of getting back to his feet, though. It looked like I’d successfully knocked him out. Breathing a deep sigh of relief, I gingerly approached him and rolled him onto his back. His chest was rising and falling faintly, but noticeably.
“He’s still breathing. Whew, I didn’t kill him...”
I’d planned on increasing the force of my attacks little by little, but thankfully, I’d only had to do that once—the second attack had been enough to take him down.
“Dear one, you’d best break the curse right away. This one is far stronger than what we saw yesterday. He will surely perish if he’s left untreated for long,” said Cult.
“All right. I’m still a little shaky on my control when it comes to curse breaking...so I’ll have to brute-force it.” I placed my right hand on the man’s chest, right over his heart.
Cult had mentioned earlier that his heart had become a wellspring for a powerful curse or something like that. In other words, I only needed to destroy that wellspring. It sounded simple in theory, and I had full confidence in the amount of godcraft energy I could draw on to overwhelm the curse.
Single-mindedly focusing on the task at hand, I released my power at full blast. In a flash, my surroundings were bathed in a radiant, golden glow. Even I couldn’t keep my eyes open—I’d never used godcraft at such intensity before.
But it sounded like it worked.
“Gaaahhh!” The man writhed on the ground and screamed in pain as I removed the curse by force. According to Cult, this reaction was a sign of the curse itself resisting. The affliction sent pain signals to the body and dug its metaphorical claws into the flesh to avoid being removed.
In other words, though the curse’s victim would be in immense pain, you had to keep trying to break the spell. Stopping would be doing exactly what the curse wanted.
Still, the man’s cries couldn’t help but move my heart. I felt terribly sorry for him, but I continued releasing godcraft power into him without letting up even once. The healing continued for a minute, then three minutes, then five...
Eventually, his cries of pain died down; after the fifth minute, they had completely stopped. Taking that to be a sign the curse was gone, I stopped releasing power.
I sighed after a long moment, satisfied. “He looks peaceful. I’ve successfully broken the curse.” After the last glimmer of light disappeared, the man’s pallid face returned to a normal, ruddy color. I didn’t know whether he’d been in good health before the curse, but at least he looked relatively normal now. There were no issues with his breathing either.
“Good work, Huey! It took some real force, but you broke the curse perfectly!” Fouré flipped me a thumbs-up, but I just couldn’t feel the same way.
“I wish it didn’t have to be like this, though. If only I could control godcraft as well as you could, Fouré...” I sighed.
She laughed, though it was more soothing than in humor. “You’ve only just begun to learn to break curses, so it’s understandable. It requires the extremely delicate manipulation of godcraft, and your perception also needs to be at a level where it can even detect the location of a curse in a person’s body. Just being able to break the curse, even a little brutally, is still an amazing feat in itself.”
“Okay,” I said, unsure if I was convinced. “At any rate, I’m not done here yet.”
I glanced up from the man, looking forward. There, several people lay on the ground, injured during the man’s rampage. The curse seemed to have passed to them, though it was weaker than it had been in its source. Regardless, leaving them without providing aid would surely put their lives in danger.
“I think I have just barely enough energy left to cure them too.” I got to my feet and, smiling in resignation, headed toward the people collapsed on the ground. Turns out today was another busy day full of havoc.
I shrugged to no one in particular, releasing all the tension the situation had built up in my body. Little did I realize that the true chaos was soon to come.