I found her at the edge of the forest, half-dead in a ditch.
The Ironwood Forest thinned gradually, ancient purple trees giving way to younger growth and pale sunlight.
I’d been walking for two hours, killing the System’s increasingly creative monster spawns with decreasing effort.
It had resorted to environmental traps near the end — collapsing branches, sudden sinkholes, a particularly vindictive patch of ground that tried to swallow my left foot.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: QUEST COMPLETE — SURVIVE THE IRONWOOD FOREST.]
[REWARD GRANTED: SOUL SIGHT — RANK ERROR.]
[SYSTEM NOTE: You were supposed to die 47 times during that quest. I counted the opportunities. You ignored all of them. This is professionally insulting.]
I dismissed the notification without reading the skill description.
I’d figure it out later.
Something else had my attention.
A sound.
Faint, ragged, barely human.
Breathing.
My body reacted before my mind — old instincts snapping into place like a loaded gun.
I moved toward the sound silently, weight balanced, ready for an ambush.
Because in my experience, sounds in the wilderness were either prey or bait.
Neither option required carelessness.
I found her in a shallow ravine just past the tree line, sprawled against a moss-covered boulder like she’d been thrown there.
A woman — young, maybe mid-twenties.
Silver-white hair matted with blood and dirt, tangled across her face.
Armor that had once been pristine white-and-gold was cracked and stained dark.
A greatsword lay just beyond her reach, its blade blackened as if scorched by something far worse than fire.
She was dying.
I could tell because I’d watched enough people die to recognize the signs — the shallow, stuttering breaths, the grey undertone to her skin, the way her body was shutting down one system at a time.
She had hours.
Maybe less.
But that wasn’t what made me stop.
It was the markings.
Black lines — like thorny vines made of ink — crawled across her left arm, shoulder, and up the side of her neck.
They pulsed with a faint, sickly light, writhing slowly under her skin as if alive.
Where they touched, her flesh was discolored, slightly translucent, wrong.
Like something was trying to rewrite her from the inside out.
A curse.
Even I could recognize that much.
And the Void Core in my chest reacted to it — a sharp, cold pulse, like a predator sensing injured prey.
I crouched beside her.
Studied the markings.
The energy they radiated was familiar in a way I couldn’t immediately place.
Then it clicked.
The System.
These curse marks carried the same energy signature as the System itself — that constant background hum I’d been feeling since I arrived.
This wasn’t a random curse.
This was System-inflicted.
The cosmic AI that governed this world had done this to her.
“Interesting,” I murmured.
Her eyes snapped open.
Ice blue — vivid despite her condition — with thin rings of crimson bleeding in from the edges.
She looked at me the way a cornered animal looks at a new threat: calculating whether she had enough strength left to fight.
She didn’t.
We both knew it.
But her hand moved toward the blackened greatsword anyway.
Shaking fingers scraping dirt as they reached.
“Don’t,” I said.
Not a command.
An observation.
“You can barely breathe. Swinging that thing will kill you faster than whatever’s eating you alive.”
Her jaw tightened.
The crimson in her eyes flared.
She kept reaching.
Stubborn.
I’d have respected it more if it wasn’t so pointlessly self-destructive.
I picked up the greatsword before she could reach it.
It was heavier than it looked — dense, thrumming with that same corrupted System energy.
The blackened blade seemed to drink the light around it.
She flinched.
Not from pain — from the loss of her weapon.
Like I’d taken a piece of her identity.
“Give it back.” Her voice was raw.
Barely a whisper.
But the authority in it was unmistakable — this was someone accustomed to giving orders and having them followed.
“When you can stand,” I said, setting the sword beside me.
Out of her reach.
Within mine.
“Who are you.” Not a question.
A demand.
“Nobody important. Who are you?” Something flickered in those blue-and-red eyes.
Pain.
Not physical — deeper.
“Nobody important,” she echoed bitterly.
Fair enough.
I looked at the curse marks again.
They were spreading — slowly, but visibly.
The thorny lines had crept another centimeter up her neck in the time we’d been talking.
Her breathing was getting worse.
The Void Core pulsed again.
Insistent this time.
Almost…
eager.
I reached out and pressed my palm against her cursed arm.
She jerked violently, tried to pull away.
“Don’t touch—”
The Void Core surged.
Cold darkness flowed from my chest, down my arm, and into her through the point of contact.
Not aggressively — it moved with purpose, seeking the curse marks like water finding cracks.
Where the void energy met the System’s corruption, the corruption recoiled.
The thorny lines writhed, contracted, pulled back from her neck and shoulder like living things retreating from fire.
She gasped.
Her whole body went rigid.
“What — what are you—”
“Hold still.”
The curse fought back.
I could feel it — the System’s energy resisting, pushing against the void like two magnets repelling each other.
The markings flared bright, then dimmed, then flared again.
The woman beneath my hand was trembling, her breath coming in sharp, pained bursts.
Then, gradually, the corruption settled.
It didn’t disappear — it was too deeply rooted for that.
But it retreated, pulling back to her forearm and below, the thorny lines condensing into a smaller, contained area.
Her skin cleared.
The greyish pallor faded.
Color returned to her face.
She stared at her own arm like she’d never seen it before.
“It stopped,” she whispered.
“The curse… it stopped spreading.”
I pulled my hand back.
The Void Core settled in my chest, satisfied, like a cat that had just knocked something off a shelf.
“Temporarily,” I said.
I could feel the truth of it — the curse was suppressed, not cured.
Given time, it would start spreading again.
“I don’t know how long it’ll hold.”
She wasn’t listening.
She was staring at me with an expression I couldn’t read — something between shock, suspicion, and a desperate, fragile hope that she was clearly trying to crush before it could hurt her.
“That’s impossible,” she said.
“The curse is System-born. Nothing in this world can suppress it. Healers, priests, even the gods — I’ve tried everything. Nothing works.”
“I’m not from this world,” I said simply.
“And I’m not exactly on the System’s good side.”
As if to confirm, a notification appeared above my head — visible to both of us:
[SYSTEM NOTICE: DO NOT HELP THE HERETIC. SHE HAS BEEN JUDGED AND SENTENCED. INTERFERENCE WITH DIVINE PUNISHMENT WILL RESULT IN CONSEQUENCES.]
I looked at the notification.
Looked at the woman.
Then looked back at the notification.
“What consequences?”
[SYSTEM NOTICE: …I WILL THINK OF SOMETHING. THE POINT IS YOU SHOULD STOP.]
“Compelling argument.”
I turned back to the woman.
She was reading the notification with a complicated expression — fear, anger, and a raw, aching betrayal that told me everything I needed to know about her relationship with the System.
She’d believed in it once.
Completely.
And it had destroyed her for it.
I’d seen that look before.
In the mirror, in another life.
The look of someone who’d given everything to something that gave nothing back.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She was quiet for a long moment.
The curse marks on her forearm pulsed faintly, a slow rhythm like a second heartbeat.
“Seraphina,” she said finally.
“Seraphina Blackthorn. Former Knight-Commander of the Holy Order of the Axiom.” A pause.
“Currently… nothing.”
“Ren Novartis,” I said.
“Currently sitting in a ditch with a stranger. Seems like we’re both having a day.”
The ghost of something crossed her face.
Not a smile — she didn’t seem capable of that right now.
But the faintest crack in the wall she’d built around herself.
“The System called you an anomaly,” she said carefully.
“It calls me a lot of things. Most of them rude.”
“You suppressed a System-born curse with a touch.”
“Apparently.”
“That shouldn’t be possible.”
“I’ve been hearing that a lot today.”
She studied me.
Those ice-blue eyes — clearer now, the crimson rings faded slightly — searched my face with the analytical precision of a trained warrior assessing a potential threat.
Or a potential ally.
I let her look.
I had nothing to hide.
Whatever she saw, it made her make a decision.
She braced herself against the boulder and stood.
It took effort — her legs trembled, her jaw clenched — but she stood.
Straight-backed, chin raised, with the rigid discipline of someone who’d been trained to stand even when everything told her to fall.
She held out her hand for the greatsword.
I gave it to her.
She gripped it, and something shifted in her posture.
A piece of herself clicking back into place.
“The curse will spread again,” she said.
Not a question.
“Probably.”
“Your touch suppressed it.”
“Seems like it.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
Blunt.
Direct.
No pretense, no manipulation.
Just a woman who’d found the single thing in this world that kept her alive and had decided, with absolute finality, to hold onto it.
I should have said no.
Attachments were liabilities.
I’d learned that in my first life — every person you cared about was a target, a weakness, a lever that enemies could pull.
But this wasn’t my first life, was it?
And the way she stood there — broken, cursed, abandoned by everything she’d ever believed in, and still standing with a sword in her hand — reminded me of something I’d forgotten a long time ago.
What it looked like when someone refused to die.
“Fine,” I said.
“Try to keep up.”
She nodded once.
No gratitude, no effusive thanks.
Just acknowledgment between equals.
We walked out of the ditch and into the open world together.
Behind us, the System watched in furious silence.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: …THIS IS A MISTAKE.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: YOU WILL REGRET THIS.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: BOTH OF YOU.]
I didn’t look back.
Neither did she.