8. Curse Plague (5)
8. Curse Plague (5)
The man crashed backward to the floor.
"Aaargh!"
He stared up at Wonderstein, his face twisted with terror, and screamed.
He had downed several stiff drinks beforehand. The thought of facing a blade against his own skin sober had been unthinkable.
But the moment he saw the young man smiling down at him, his intoxication burned off in an instant.
He couldn't have said why, but the cursed sickness rooted in his body seemed to thrash with excitement the closer the young man drew.
And the moment the young man's hand made contact, he felt it with absolute certainty—
something vast and powerful was trying to tear his whole shoulder away.
The scream had wrenched itself from him before he could stop it, his body recoiling on its own.
Breaths ragged, he groped at the spot Wonderstein's hand had touched.
He expected to find torn flesh.
His fingers met nothing.
Nothing—not in the figurative sense. No blood, no raw meat, no shell-like growth, no sticky pulp, no tentacles, no crab-froth.
There was simply nothing where the mass had been.
The man stared down at his shoulder, disbelieving, and touched it again.
It was unmistakably his own shoulder—
the way it had looked before the Curse Plague had ever taken hold.
The monster that had lived there was gone. Only the raised scars and reddish blotches left on his skin suggested he had ever been sick.
"H-how in the world...? Ah!"
His eyes caught something twitching on the floor.
A shell bristling with jagged spines, and the lump of flesh that had worn it like a carapace.
It was the creature that had clung to his body, passing itself off as his shoulder.
The thing worked its mouth a few times as though every ounce of strength had been drained from it, then went limp.
The monster was dead.
The man gaped at the young mage.
"S-so... does this mean... am I cured?"
Grinning eagerly at someone he had just shoved away while shrieking as though the devil himself stood before him—it was deeply embarrassing.
Wonderstein only smiled back as if he hadn't noticed a thing.
"Absolutely. The Devolut affixed to your body has been successfully removed."
His smile held nothing but genuine goodwill.
The man felt something swell in his chest.
It was a feeling shared by everyone present. The villagers who had gathered around them erupted into cheers. Sobs broke out amid the clamor; reassurance and consolation passed back and forth.
Even Ivanenko and his soldiers—who had, arguably, been dragged into this—wore open relief on their faces.
They too had been worn down by wave after wave of despair. Yet here was a wandering mage who had, by some means none of them understood, actually cured someone of the Curse Plague.
What followed moved swiftly.
Wherever Wonderstein's hands touched, the deformed growths on the plague victims lost all vitality and sloughed off, and the infected areas healed, leaving only faint scars.
A few of the growths resisted—baring teeth, shrieking, spraying green ichor.
Even those collapsed the instant Wonderstein's hand reached them, their strength snuffed out.
[Ab%so4rbing_Devo&lut... succe#ss.]
The more Plague Devolut he absorbed, the more the Status Window degraded, its text now barely legible.
His body, too, ached steadily as though he were coming down with a fever.
He pressed on with the treatments regardless.
The quest-failure penalty of [Devolut -200] no longer registered. The amount of Devolut he was currently subjugating had already dwarfed that figure.
He had learned his lesson during the trial at the Rose Windmill:
he was desperately short of Devolut.
Between the Costume Room, the Skillbook, and the new Member Management ability unlocked when the troupe's fame crossed 150—
the uses for Devolut kept multiplying.
Yet the means to acquire it remained limited. The daily trickle from his members' average Affection level and the troupe's fame, plus the occasional deposits from Member Quests or sub-quests—that was all he had.
In the match against the Morning Star Circus, he'd burned through two months' worth of saved Devolut in a single week. Five more trials lay ahead, and he couldn't promise each would demand less than the Rose Windmill had.
Right now, simply laying his hands on thirty people had netted him half as much Devolut as he had earned over the last three weeks. It hurt, yes—but the Smiling Man's painkiller was helping, and the Devolut he stood to gain made the discomfort easy to endure.
*Sub Quest — Cure the Plague
: A plague has spread through the village. Save the people.
Clear Condition
: Rescue 200 plague-stricken individuals. (30/200)
Success Reward
: None.
Failure Penalty
: [Devolut -200]
Two hundred people—simple math said that was an opportunity to pocket over three thousand Devolut free of charge.
He could not afford to lose it.
"Pardon me, Magician... sir?"
Ivanenko approached him carefully. The rigid manner he'd displayed at first was gone; he now addressed Wonderstein with marked deference.
Curing thirty plague victims in rapid succession was an astonishing feat—even allowing for the fact that these cases were milder than others in the village.
"Would it be possible to treat more severe cases as well?"
"Of course."
Wonderstein nodded with a confident smile.
The faces of the villagers inside the hall brightened. A path to salvation had opened—for their families, their neighbors, their friends.
"The urgent patients are all at the village church. The local priest has been using Sacred Stakes to treat them there."
"Didn't you say earlier that the priest collapsed from overwork?"
"He did. He's no longer young—twenty patients a day was his limit."
"Understood. I'd best get moving. Ah—before that, I'd like to change clothes. Might there be something I could borrow?"
A snake was dangling from Wonderstein's jacket, dozens of teeth sunk into the fabric of his torso.
It had been the creature attached to the last patient's hand—it had lunged at him only to drop dead mid-attack, every scrap of Devolut ripped away.
Wonderstein accepted a change of clothes from Ivanenko and stepped into a side room.
Maya's gaze followed his back.
Change his clothes?
She knew his abilities. With a snap of his fingers, he could change his own attire or someone else's on the spot. Asking to borrow a shirt, needing a separate room to change—none of it added up.
Don't tell me...
An uneasy suspicion had been growing in Maya—ever since he had announced he would "cure" the disease.
Devolut was an extremely dangerous curse.
She did not doubt the Troupe Leader's ability, but she had wondered exactly how he intended to heal it.
Perhaps his genius for magical theory, combined with his power as a Madosa, would make something possible.
What he had actually shown her defied her imagination.
The moment his hand touched an afflicted area, the curse melted away like spring snow. It mirrored the effect of a Holy Church priest driving in a Sacred Stake—the deformed growths were eliminated entirely.
In some respects, his method surpassed the Church's. When a Sacred Stake pierced a growth, the host suffered alongside it as the tissue charred. Wonderstein's approach detached the growth cleanly without harming the person at all.
What was the mechanism?
An ordinary mage could have watched a hundred repetitions and found not even a sliver of a clue.
Maya, however, was the greatest prodigy in the history of the Magic Academy.
As the scene repeated before her eyes over thirty times, theories and conjectures raced through her mind, until one solid hypothesis took shape.
She approached the room Wonderstein had entered.
Through the gap in the door she saw his bare back. Lean but dense muscle corded his shoulders and spine.
The sight stirred nothing in her akin to admiration or embarrassment.
The black-and-blue bruises mottling his back stole everything else away.
They writhed as though alive, creeping outward in every direction.
So her incomplete theory had been right.
He wasn't curing or purging the Devolut. He was taking it into his own body.
Maya's pale face went whiter.
The afflicted areas had been localized, yes, but the Devolut of thirty people was inside him now. To shoulder that into his own flesh was to carry the disease himself.
Every time the dark bruises beneath his skin roiled, a tremor ran through his body. Sweat beaded cold on his back.
He was in pain.
The smile never left his face, but underneath it, he was suffering.
Maya bit her lip.
Why hadn't she noticed sooner?
Her admiration for him had blinded her to what he was actually going through. She had told herself he would figure something out—he was the Troupe Leader, after all—and left it at that.
But he had no mana. He was the chief of a wandering circus, armed with a handful of modest skills. There was no real cure for Devolut resting in his hands.
What he had just done was entirely in character: sacrificing his own body to save others.
Are you out of your mind?
Anger toward him flared in her chest—an emotion she hadn't felt since the day they had met.
Her breathing roughened.
Wonderstein's superhuman hearing caught it at once.
"Who's there?"
He straightened his clothes and turned around.
The Devolut writhing across his body was now fully concealed.
Maya hesitated behind the door, then showed her face.
Wonderstein's expression lit up the moment he saw her.
"Ah, Miss Maya. What brings you here?"
Seeing him smile at her as if nothing was wrong made her chest tighten. She barely steadied her trembling eyes.
"You're going to the church?"
"Yes. There are more people there who need help."
Help. Right.
Maya swallowed the retort she wanted to hurl at him.
If he meant to bear his pain in silence, then the proper thing was to respect his choice. He would walk his path, and she would walk hers. That was all.
That was how Maya had always lived—her way of navigating the world, her way of looking at people, her posture toward life itself.
Toward everyone except family.
That was why she had been called arrogant. Heartless. Deficient as a human being.
She had never cared about the gossip. Other people's opinions held no value for her. When even her instructors treated her that way, she had felt only a faint irritation.
But now, for the first time since she had grown up—which is to say, since the age of two—she felt the roots that had always anchored her begin to shake.
"I know."
"Hm?"
Wonderstein, on his way out after changing, stopped at her words.
She faced the teacher who smiled so gently at her and spoke.
"I know you've been absorbing the Devolut."
In her mind, the cat that had always twisted silently let out a cry for the first time.