Alone, Quinn and I cut through the trail like a hot knife through butter. What took the group an hour yesterday took us barely fifteen minutes. Good for us. Bad for the camp. If we could move this fast, then so could the things hunting out here.

  The curse was merciful today, if such a thing could ever be called mercy. It pulsed under my skin, but lightly, almost approvingly. Purpose soothed it. Saving people, gaining power, pushing forward – my goals and its hunger finally aligned for once in their miserable coexistence.

  And I wasn’t going to let that camp bury me under their fear and hesitance. People were probably already ahead of me in level by now. And in this new world where might made right, I wouldn’t end up under anyone’s heel, not when I finally had a path towards removing this curse for good.

  While walking, Quinn kept glancing at me. Not subtly, after the fifth time I sighed.

  “Just ask,” I muttered.

  He hesitated... barely. “Why bring monsters back alive? I get killing them, but… dragging them?” He wrinkled his nose. “Why?”

  I gave him the shortened version. The ritual required them.

  He frowned. “I mean, I get it, but wouldn’t it be easier to just… go? You and me? Maybe Rhea and a couple others too… Leave the dead weight behind?”

  “No,” I said. “The fighters nearly died protecting everyone. I’m not letting them die for it.”

  Quinn didn’t buy it. The disbelief was plain on his face. “I don’t know what your real reason is,” he said quietly, “but it’s not charity.”

  My eyes sharpened before I could stop myself. People didn’t call me out like that. Most adults didn’t. And here was this fourteen-year-old kid staring at me like he could read me like an open book.

  Skill? Instinct? Or just someone who’d spent too long surviving around people who lied?

  “What makes you think that?” I asked.

  He shrugged, casual but avoiding my gaze. “Just watching you. Maybe you’re doing it for the girl.” A smirk tugged his lips. “But not for the others. The look you give them when you thought no one was watching… definitely not a nice-guy look.”

  Before I could answer, the trail split in front of us.

  Quinn froze. “Hide,” he whispered.

  He slipped into the bushes like smoke. I followed… less gracefully. Backpack, weapons, cloak, crunching leaves – stealth wasn’t my forte. Still, I ducked behind a wall of ferns and held my breath.

  Footsteps. Heavy.

  I peeked through the fronds. Two gorgs lumbered into view. One of the familiar brutes, massive, fat and strong. The other was just as tall but leaner, its left hand gripping a crudely made sword two palms wide and as long as Quinn.

  A new variant. Great.

  Quinn and I shared a look. I whispered, “Stay put. I want to try something.”

  He nodded.

  I slipped off my backpack, tightened my grip on my mace and shield, and waited.

  When the two monsters were close enough, I activated Curse Transfer, pushing my Duskvision curse towards the sword-wielder. My view went back to normal; at the same time, I shaped pale mana into a mannequin-shaped barrier between the gorgs.

  The reaction was instant.

  The sword gorg reeled back with a startled snarl, eyes going wild with the visual curse affecting it. It swung its massive blade at the barrier out of instinct or fear; it didn’t matter, shattering it in a burst of pale shards, then the blade carried through and hacked straight into the brute besides it.

  A thunderous WRAAAAH! shook the trees.

  Then they were on each other.

  The brute, angry and confused, charged first, grabbing the sword gorg by the torso and smashing it into a tree. Bark exploded. The sword gorg retaliated, slashing wildly, furious, its blade carving bloody furrows across the brute’s arms. They crashed, bit, and slammed in an animalistic, ugly brawl that tore up the forest floor.

  Finally, the brute caught the sword arm, twisted, and brought the other gorg down hard. It punched the other in the face with a massive fist. Once. Twice. Again. The ground shook with each impact until the sword variant was barely moving, face half-pulped.

  That was my cue.

  I sprinted out, dodged around a fallen branch, and cracked my mace into the brute’s skull. Arcane Push flowed from me to the mace's point of contact.

  Its head burst like a melon struck by a hammer.

  The brute collapsed, right on top of the dying sword. The pinned monster writhed weakly, raising an arm in pathetic defence.

  I kept my distance and fired arcane bullets.

  One.

  Two.

  Three...

  The last punched through its skull and scrambled the rest of its brain.

  Two dings chimed in my head.

  As my vision went back to a monochrome with a side of dread, Quinn emerged like a fox from the brush, knife in hand, eyes wide.

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  “Dude, how did you do that? That was so cool!”

  I shrugged. “Got a new skill at level five. A kind of debuff.”

  He huffed. “I got a knife-throwing skill. Now I just need poison and invisibility, then I’ll be unstoppable.”

  “At least you’re planning ahead,” I said. “More than most back in camp.”

  I unsheathed my own knife and crouched besides the corpse.

  Quinn blinked at me. “Uh… what are you doing?”

  “Ritual needs at least five hearts.”

  Understanding dawned, and then disgust. He stepped back.

  Cutting through gorg flesh was hell. Tough hide, thick muscle, ribs like iron. I ended up smashing the ribcage with my mace until the bone splintered enough to pry it open. When I finally managed to cut around all of the tissue and yank the heart out, I was covered in blood up to my forearms.

  I stared at it; it was huge. Horse-sized. Nearly spherical and looked totally wrong.

  Didn’t matter.

  I shoved it into the spare bag and went for the next.

  No monsters came despite the noise. Either their camp or nest wasn’t close, or gorgs didn’t care about each other dying. Maybe both.

  Once the second heart was bagged, I wiped my hands on the grass, grabbed my gear, and nodded to Quinn. Nearly an hour had passed since we left camp; I wanted to go back in time for the ritual.

  “Let’s move.”

  He nodded back, and we resumed our march into the forest, deeper into danger.

  Exactly where we needed to be.

  After some more time walking carefully, the side trail curved gently, almost lazily, through the sparse trees, and as we moved along it, the forest lost its quiet and gained a tension I felt first in my throat, then in the way the air seemed thicker with each step. It wasn’t long before we saw them, four gorgs, thirty metres in, just far enough that the trunks between us stood like thin ribs rather than walls. One of them, a smaller one, though that only meant “slightly less monstrous”, wore a coil of cracked bone rings around its neck and held a short staff, its tip stained with something that pulsed faintly. A mage.

  Near him stood the fighter, the one with the axe so large it looked almost ceremonial, except the edge was fresh-wet with something too dark to be sap. And two brutes were hunched over the carcass of some forest beast, a kind of badger the size of a deer, tearing into it raw, fur and flesh clinging to their mouths as they grunted through their meal.

  Quinn froze besides me, one hand drifting to a throwing knife at his belt, eyes narrowing with that electric focus they got when danger was close enough to taste. I felt the rush in my blood too, a familiar dread rising behind my ribs; the curse was telling me to go and bring back what was needed to help my people.

  “They haven’t seen us,” Quinn whispered, words barely more than a breath.

  “Yet,” I answered, studying the spaces between the trees, mapping angles, and thinking about spells and reach and timing. “Can you take down the mage?”

  “By myself?” Quinn asked.

  “With an opening strike,” I told him while nodding. “If you kill the mage and I manage to slay or at least incapacitate another, we’ll be one vs one. I know we can take one each. Especially if we leave the brutes last.”

  After a moment of quiet thinking, Quinn raised his head and looked at me with a determined expression. “I can do it, but I need to get close.”

  “Ok, let’s do it like this…” I explained my plan, and after a couple of surprisingly insightful inputs from the teen, we got into position.

  I struck first.

  Not because I was faster than Quinn, but because I needed the monsters’ eyes on me, not on the trees where Quinn was circling around. I inhaled once, summoned that thin thread of a curse in my aura, and pushed it outward.

  Curse Transfer — Weight of Remembrance.

  The gorg fighter was walking towards the brutes, with his oversized axe in his left hand, when the curse latched onto him. One heartbeat his weapon moved easily; the next it weighed as much as a small boulder. His grip slipped instantly.

  The axe thudded onto the forest floor, sinking into the soft soil and startling the other gorgs, but that was all the distraction I needed.

  I broke from behind the tree and closed the distance in three long steps. The fighter was bent over, thick fingers scrambling to reclaim his axe.

  Perfect.

  I swung my mace down like a guillotine, feeding a strong pulse of Arcane Push through the head at the last instant. The spell and the impact layered together, snapping through skull and brain as if they were overripe fruit. The fighter collapsed before he even understood he’d been attacked.

  Dead. One heartbeat. Clean.

  In the same breath, Quinn completed his long looping approach from the opposite side. He burst from the underbrush with the kind of speed that didn’t match a fourteen-year-old body, leapt up the final metre, and drove both long knives into the mage’s throat from behind. The blades opened the gorg from jaw to collarbone in a single, precise movement. The mage tried to turn, raising his staff for a clumsy counter… but Quinn had already stepped on its back and jumped away, retreating backwards in a fluid hop, leaving only a widening waterfall of blood behind.

  The mage dropped to a knee, choking wetly, then toppled face-first into the leaves.

  Two down. The kid was good.

  I exhaled sharply as the weapon-burden curse snapped back onto me, my mace growing heavier for half a second before I adjusted again. No time to complain. I grabbed the curse again and shoved it outward, this time choosing the brute closest to me; I cursed him with Hollow Echo.

  The brute snarled just as I fired three Arcane Bullets in rapid succession. The first punched straight through one of its eyes, bursting it in a spray of dark fluid. The next two hit its raised arm, tearing gouges into the dense muscle, but nowhere near life-threatening. These creatures were absurdly resilient. But not immune to pain, a roar shook the trees as he charged at me.

  From the corner of my vision I saw Quinn engaging the second brute, throwing knives flashing, slicing, retreating, and dancing in circles around the lumbering monster. Good. That meant I could focus entirely on this one without worrying about getting flanked.

  The brute was near.

  I braced, then swung my mace hard against my own shield. The impact rang through my arm, but more importantly, the curse triggered. The brute staggered mid-charge, hands flying to its ears, head jerking wildly as the magical ringing tore through its senses. Another roar marked my success.

  While it reeled, I compressed mana for another Arcane Bullet, but not the usual shape. If I couldn’t push more power past the spell’s limit, then I’d make the bullet smaller, denser, and sharper. I tapered the mana, forced the spell into a narrow point, and reduced the volume until my head buzzed from the mental strain.

  Then I released it.

  The projectile snapped forward and struck the brute dead centre between the eyes. I expected it to collapse, or at least instant unconsciousness, but instead the monster let out a guttural sound and clawed at its own face.

  What in the hell were these things made of?

  Annoyed, I hit it with an Arcane Push, blasting its arms away and slamming its head into the ground hard enough to sink it a couple of inches. The brute reeled, dazed, and that was finally enough. One last sharpened bullet to the head finished the job.

  As the beast went still, the cursed ringing slammed back into my skull.

  A deafening ringing filled my ears. Damn. Still active.

  I turned in time to see Quinn weaving around the last brute like a wasp, his small form slipping between its massive swings. Five throwing knives were already buried in the creature’s legs, and the brute leaked blood in rivulets from dozens of cuts, growing slower by the second.

  I shouted, though I couldn’t hear my own voice. “I’ll distract it! Finish him!”

  I hurled the Shield curse at the brute, and the effect was immediate. The creature’s eyes bulged, hands clamping against its ears as it bent down in agony.

  Quinn didn’t hesitate. He darted in with surgical precision and opened its throat in a clean, fluid slice, retreating just as the brute tried one last desperate grab. The wound poured blood like a ruptured barrel. Ten seconds later the brute crashed onto its side, twitching… then went still.

  Quinn approached me, breathing hard, sweat plastering a few strands of hair to his forehead, but grinning like he’d just robbed a king.

  “I got an achievement for killing the mage!” they burst out. “Plus ten to all stats! That’s absurd! I was so fast that brute couldn’t even touch me. Did you see it? Death by a thousand cuts, baby! YEAH!”

  Despite the ringing, despite the still-drying gore, I smiled back.

  Just yesterday a group like this would’ve torn through the entire camp, and people had died to stop only three of them. Now Quinn and I had wiped out four without taking a single injury.

  My new stats were already showing their worth; my lungs didn’t burn, my arms didn’t ache, and the curse’s weight felt almost manageable now. And more gains would come. My previous burns and bruises were nearly gone too. This fight netted me another level and some skill ups for arcane manipulation and bullet, and two levels for curse transfer.

  I grinned at Quinn, energy buzzing in my chest. “That was impressive; good job. Let’s harvest the hearts and scout ahead. We still need to bring some of these home with us… and I have no intention of dragging them.”

  Quinn’s smile faltered.

  His eyes narrowed slightly, wariness threading into their voice.

  “What do you mean by that?”