8. Curse Plague (8)
8. Curse Plague (8)
Wonderstein moved slowly.
Every time his wounded leg met the ground, a searing bolt of pain shot up through his thigh.
Still, thanks to The Smiling Man, he could keep the smile on his face.
Sir Ivanenko watched him limp and, with a touch of reverence, fell into step beside him.
"Are you all right?"
His tone had shifted to something immaculately respectful.
The man had taken a grievous wound and hadn't so much as flinched.
He had forgiven his attacker, and then healed him on top of it.
Even Ivanenko, who had always regarded clergy with cool indifference, couldn't help but be moved by Wonderstein's selflessness.
He looked at Wonderstein's blood-soaked trousers.
The bleeding had stopped, but the sheer volume he'd already lost made it seem only natural that he should collapse from shock at any moment.
Wonderstein reassured him with that smile.
"I'm fine. Let's go see to the others."
The Smiling Man's analgesic effect was strongest against persistent, cyclical pain.
The wound that had blazed like fire was now merely bearable.
Of course, The Smiling Man only dulled the pain. It couldn't mend flesh.
His Cell Regeneration was 4.0, which meant he healed dozens of times faster than an ordinary person.
Dozens of times faster, though, still wasn't instant clotting when a whole chunk of flesh had been torn out of his leg — especially with his base stats cut down to nothing, as they were now.
What had actually sealed the wound was something else.
Wonderstein lifted a fold of his concealing robe and glanced down.
The torn section of his leg.
There, a mass of pale pink muscle fibers writhed and knitted themselves together in coiling, spasmodic growth.
It looked like the lesions he'd seen on the bodies of those afflicted with the Curse Plague.
Unbound Devolut, rampaging unchecked through his somatic cells.
Covering the wound with his robe had been the right call.
If anyone had glimpsed this, they'd start asking questions about his abilities. Maya especially would have demanded to know why he couldn't control his Devolut.
"Ngh—!"
Pain becoming bearable didn't mean his body was sound.
He stepped forward without thinking and his leg buckled as the muscle gave out, sending him lurching sideways.
A small hand steadied him. Maya's.
"Please be careful..."
"Thank you, Miss Maya."
Maya looked at his smiling face and remembered what had just happened.
She had never gotten so worked up in her entire life.
The ragged, shaking breaths, the cheeks burning with fury — none of it had felt like her own.
Even the emotions she felt now were an utter mess.
Worry for someone, fury at someone, affection for someone and yet, alongside it, resentment.
What was this feeling?
A tremor.
Her hand quivered.
She looked down at her palm.
Her hands had always been as pale as her hair — pale enough for the blue veins to show through.
Now, a warm flush of blood colored them.
The Troupe Leader's body was hot as a fever patient, perhaps a side effect of absorbing Devolut into his system.
Maybe that was why.
Her palm, which had been pressed against his chest moments ago, still burned.
It had been firm.
And supple.
And hot.
The flush spreading across her skin slowly paled, turning pink.
The heat climbed up her arm as if the poison was invading through her hand, spreading until it reached her heart.
The pulse was too faint to call a heartbeat, but a sensitive cat's whiskers could feel it.
-Meowmeowmeowmeow.
From some corner of her mind, Wally let out a rapid-fire mewling.
It sounded thoroughly pleased with itself.
Almost as if it was snickering at her.
A peculiarly irritating meow.
Maya shot the creature a glare.
Wally yawned hugely, then waddled off into the darkness, pretending it hadn't seen a thing.
The group soon reached the church atop the hill.
Unlike the churches of Charlotia, which raised spindly spires from their roofs, Kievite churches were crowned with rounded domes.
Before opening the chapel door, Wonderstein braced himself for a scene he recalled from the game.
People twisted into every imaginable grotesque shape, sprawled across the floor, thrashing amid puddles of blood and viscera.
The moment the door opened, however, a wholly unexpected roar met their ears.
"Waaaah!"
"I-I'm healed! I mean it, everybody's healed!"
"A m-miracle! It's a miracle!"
"Truly, everyone..."
The church brimmed with a festival's energy.
There were no patients lying on the floor waiting for death as he'd anticipated.
Instead, people were walking and chattering normally, though patches of their bodies still bore the black scorches of the affliction.
"Ah, Sir Ivanenko!"
A soldier who had been chatting and laughing with a villager spotted them and rushed over.
Ivanenko, who had been staring at the scene inside the church in bafflement, forced his expression back to solemnity.
"What is the meaning of this?"
"A m-miracle! A miracle, sir!"
"Explain yourself."
"Well, you see, sir. That nun who went in a while ago..."
"A nun?"
The soldier nodded, excitement getting the better of him.
"Yes, sir. While you were at the hall, another visitor arrived. A young nun. She said she was here to see the church's priest, so I showed her in. I thought maybe she could heal one or two people, if we were lucky. But then..."
The soldier fought to keep his expression straight.
"She's already used over thirty Sacred Stakes."
"What?"
"And they seem more effective and faster-acting than the stakes the Father used."
"Well, I'll be."
Ivanenko didn't know whether to believe what he was hearing.
The village priest had once served as an auxiliary bishop at a grand cathedral.
He might not have been a specialist in heresy suppression, but curing twenty people in the terminal stages of the Curse Plague was no ordinary feat.
A young nun had done better than that?
It strained belief.
"So, where is this nun?"
"Over there, among the patients..."
As the soldier pointed, someone suddenly shot upright from the spot he indicated.
A woman in white monastic robes, not unlike Wonderstein's.
She pointed at Wonderstein and shouted.
"You! The handsome blond man!"
"You mean... me?"
She nodded and fixed him with a grim, determined glare.
"Yes! I'm talking to you! Aren't you a Madosa? What are you doing here?"
I'd like to ask you the same thing.
She looked about twenty. Her hair was pale pink, and a flashy ornament — a flower-shaped hairpin, almost comically large — was pinned into it.
The air about her was nothing like what I remembered from the games.
She was a few years younger than the version I knew, too.
But this was Valentina. No doubt about it.
***
A vast sailing ship cut through the waves, barreling through a gale.
The vessel was the flagship of the pirate captain Claw Hand, seized by the heroes during their escape from Stage 2: Pirate Island Freeport.
The party had begun at Viscountess Bergson's manor, passed through Florand, followed a trail of clues from Freeport, and at last identified the site of Wonderstein's resurrection ritual.
The ship now bore them toward an island in the middle of an archipelago. Its name was Ginen.
Thick jungle swallowed the island whole, and a dense fortress of mangroves lined its shores.
This was the main seat of the Voodoo Cult that held sway across the entire Caribbean Sea.
The ritual to resurrect Wonderstein was underway here.
Approaching it, however, looked nigh impossible.
The storm that hemmed the island in was no natural phenomenon — it had been shaped by deliberate force.
Voodoo was an order of Madosa who drew power from a host of Demon Gods.
For them, conjuring a tempest of this scale was nothing.
The thief, who'd been scanning the horizon from atop the mainmast with a spyglass, shook her head and climbed down to the deck.
She swept her rain-sodden hair back and exhaled in frustration.
A stage logo materialized.
<Stage 3: Voodoo>
BOOM.
The sky split white, and thunder shook creation.
Across the ship, the support characters who'd accompanied the journey waited in their own ways.
One huddled under a waterproof tarp, another nursed a steaming mug of cocoa, someone else smoked a pipe, someone paced with a coil of rope, someone fiddled idly with a cannon, and someone fished off the side.
Each tossed a remark her way as she passed.
Musketeer Sir Porshu: Why not just punch right through!
...
Chef Marcone: Keep a close watch on the Madosa in the party. Some of them might lean toward Voodoo.
...
Hunting Dog Mars: I hear whispers. Voices that shouldn't be there. It's the Apostles.
...
Back on the bridge, the thief toweled her wet hair and relayed what she'd seen.
The mage predicted the storm would weaken if they waited about two weeks.
The ritual was still three weeks off.
Lying low for two weeks and then moving in seemed the wisest course.
The knight seated at the center of the table, however, shook his head.
"No. We make for it now."
"Why?"
He brought up the Papal Inquisition Squad they'd encountered back in Stage 1: Florand.
Those priests and exorcists had burned with competitive fire, swearing they'd catch Wonderstein before the heroes could.
They'd reached the Voodoo stronghold first — an advantage that had backfired when they stumbled into a trap and got scattered.
"How do you know that?"
The mage's question was pointed, but the knight took it in stride.
He was used to her tone by now.
"...One of the crew just pulled a man from the sea. He's a survivor of that Inquisition squad."
The squad had been hunted across Ginen and split apart.
After the way they'd behaved in Florand, their company was grating, but they couldn't abandon people in danger.
In the end, the heroes used a risky gambit to penetrate Ginen's interior.
The island was crawling with Voodoo's manufactured monstrosities and Madosa bristling with unsettling special abilities.
The party fought through them, carving a path forward.
Along the way, they rescued the scattered Inquisition squad members and put down those who had been twisted into enemies.
What few Madosa supporters were inevitably bound to betray them met the same fate.
At last, they reached the heart of Voodoo.
Awaiting them there was the cult's Vice Cult Leader.
The 'Rabbit Witch,' Rel Rohhera.
She was a girl in a thin, fluttering dress, a scarf wrapped across her mouth, rabbit ears flicking atop her head.
Her appearance was a lie. Trusting it would be fatal.
In the prologue, no matter how many Skillbooks you'd crammed into combat skills up to that point, beating Rel Rohhera in a straight fight was impossible.
Her offense was simple.
Straight punches, palm strikes, kicks, knee drives, throws, elbow strikes — the basics.
Her defense was anything but.
She flowed around every attack the heroes threw at her, then struck back at a speed that left no room to dodge.
Power, speed, technique.
She was a perfect fighter in every dimension.
Any attack you launched, she slipped it with a counter-dodge.
Tril Trillo hadn't merely slapped an 'invulnerability' flag onto Rel Rohhera like some other games might.
No matter how creatively a player strung together attack patterns, she dismantled them using her stats alone — raw power, speed, technique.
They called it 'Perfect Mode.'
When TT3 was first revealed, the developers boasted — to the horror of many players — that they'd acquired and implemented a military-grade learning algorithm developed in South America.
Yet even this seemingly unbreachable defense had a crack.
The clock mounted on the chamber ceiling.
A careful observer would notice that the moment she entered Perfect Mode, the clock flashed blue.
Spot that and destroy the clock, and her body would jerk into a chaotic loop — rewind, fast-forward, pause — throwing her into utter disarray.
"Lutermine's Clock. A Sacred Relic of Lutermine, the Time Demon God."
Sacred Relics were a tier above ordinary magic tools — artifacts that embodied a Demon God's power.
No fighter, not even the mightiest, could realistically dismantle every attack pattern as though they'd seen them all beforehand.
She'd analyzed their strikes by using Lutermine's Clock to rewind time. The sudden accelerations when she counterattacked were the clock's doing, too.
Naturally, the game couldn't actually implement clairvoyance.
It was just a macro, catching the player's input signals and reacting.
The more you broke Lutermine's Clock, the fewer consecutive patterns she could read.
Shatter it across four phases, and she aged catastrophically on the spot; her strength and speed cratered, she lost all ability to anticipate you, and even ordinary attacks brought her down.
"I wanted... to play with that resurrected one a little longer..."
The heroes struck down the now-elderly Vice Cult Leader and stepped through the hall behind her.
But the ritual chamber stood empty.
Lutermine's Clock had also been intended to buy time.
While they were fighting the vice leader, the three-week deadline had already slipped past.
Wonderstein had been resurrected and already left the island.
In a corner of the deserted chamber, someone was still there.
The leader of the Papal Inquisition Squad had slipped into the ritual chamber while the heroes fought, but she'd failed to defeat Wonderstein and had been left chained up instead.
The party freed her from the shackles.
She thanked them.
She told them she'd been hunting the Black Magician since before TT1.
The captain of the Inquisition Squad in TT3.
She was Saint Valentina.