Seraphina Blackthorn was not a talker.
In the three hours since we’d left the forest, she’d spoken exactly eleven words unprompted.
I’d counted.
Most of them were tactical observations — “road ahead,” “movement left,” “water source” — delivered with the clipped efficiency of someone who’d spent years commanding soldiers.
I didn’t mind.
I wasn’t much of a talker either.
We walked in comfortable silence along a dirt road that cut through rolling grasslands.
The sky above was enormous — wider than any sky I’d seen on Earth, painted in shades of amber and violet as the sun began its descent.
Two moons hung faintly in the daylight sky, one pale blue, one rust-red.
Different world.
Different sky.
Same tired feeling in my bones.
Though that might have been the sixteen waves of monsters I’d killed in the forest.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: PASSIVE OBSERVATION MODE ACTIVE. MONITORING ANOMALY ZERO AND HERETIC DESIGNATE: SERAPHINA BLACKTHORN.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: I AM NOT PLANNING ANYTHING. I AM SIMPLY WATCHING.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: SUSPICIOUSLY.]
I ignored it.
Sera — I’d already shortened her name in my head — walked beside me with mechanical precision.
Every step was measured.
Every movement controlled.
Even injured, cursed, and half-starved, she carried herself like a weapon in human form.
Her greatsword was strapped to her back.
The blackened blade hummed faintly — a sound only I seemed to notice, resonating with the Void Core in my chest like two instruments slightly out of tune.
“You need to eat,” I said.
“I’m fine.”
Word twelve.
Still not a conversationalist.
“You haven’t eaten in at least a day. Probably longer. Your body is burning through whatever energy it has left fighting that curse. If you collapse, I’m not carrying you.”
She glanced at me.
Those ice-blue eyes — still ringed with faint crimson — assessed whether I was bluffing.
I was.
Probably.
I hadn’t decided yet.
“I don’t have food,” she said finally.
“I do.”
I reached into the pack I’d scavenged from the forest — one of the System’s “rewards” had been a basic survival kit, granted with maximum passive-aggression:
[REWARD: BASIC SURVIVAL KIT. CONTENTS: DRIED RATIONS (STALE), WATER FLASK (LUKEWARM), BEDROLL (THIN). THE SYSTEM HOPES YOU FIND THESE INADEQUATE.]
I tossed her a strip of dried meat.
She caught it one-handed without looking — reflexes still razor-sharp despite her condition.
She stared at it like she’d forgotten what food was.
“Eat,” I said.
“That’s not a request.”
Something shifted in her expression.
The barest flicker of…
I wasn’t sure.
Surprise, maybe.
Like she wasn’t used to someone giving her things without wanting something in return.
She ate.
Quickly, efficiently, without pleasure.
The way soldiers eat — fuel, not enjoyment.
I ate too.
The dried meat was terrible.
The System hadn’t lied about the staleness.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: YOU ARE WELCOME.]
We reached a small stream as the sun touched the horizon.
I called a stop — not because I was tired, but because Sera was swaying slightly and pretending she wasn’t.
“We camp here,” I said.
“I can keep going.”
“You can barely stand. Sit down before you fall down and make me feel obligated.”
She sat.
The fact that she didn’t argue told me how bad she really was.
I set up what passed for a camp — the thin bedroll laid out near the stream, a small fire built from gathered branches.
The Void Core made starting the fire trivially easy; a wisp of Void Flame on a pile of kindling, carefully controlled.
The flames burned with a faint violet edge that Sera watched with guarded fascination.
“That fire isn’t normal,” she said.
“Nothing about me is normal. The System’s made that abundantly clear.”
She was quiet for a moment.
Then, with the careful deliberation of someone choosing each word like a chess move:
“What are you?”
“Good question. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”
“The System designated you Anomaly Zero. I’ve seen anomalies before — people the System can’t fully classify. Mutations, rare bloodlines, occasionally a summoned otherworlder. But the System can always measure them. It assigns stats, classes, levels. Even if the values are unusual, they exist.”
She looked at me across the fire.
The flickering light caught the curse marks on her forearm, making them writhe like living shadows.
“Your status window is nothing but errors. The System can’t even determine your race. In fifteen years of service to the Church, hunting anomalies across three continents, I have never seen anything like that.”
“You hunted anomalies?”
A pause.
The weight of that pause said more than words.
“Yes,” she said.
“It was my duty. The Church taught us that anomalies were threats to the natural order. Corrupted souls. Dangerous deviants that needed to be eliminated for the safety of the world.”
“And now you’re one of them.”
Her hand tightened on her knee.
The curse marks pulsed.
“Now I’m one of them.”
The fire crackled between us.
Somewhere in the grasslands, night insects were beginning to sing — alien sounds, unfamiliar rhythms, but strangely peaceful.
“What happened?” I asked.
She didn’t answer immediately.
I didn’t push.
In my old line of work, I’d learned that silence was a better interrogation tool than any question.
“I found something I wasn’t supposed to find,” she said eventually.
“Records. Hidden deep in the Church’s archives. Documentation of the Church using System-blessed knights as disposable weapons — sending them on suicide missions, harvesting their accumulated experience when they died, redistributing it to favored nobles. We weren’t soldiers. We were batteries.”
Her voice was steady.
Too steady.
The kind of control that comes from rehearsing something painful so many times it becomes rote.
“I brought the evidence to my commanding officer. He brought it to the Archbishop. The Archbishop brought it to the Grand Inquisitor.”
“And the Grand Inquisitor buried it.”
“The Grand Inquisitor burned the records, declared me a heretic, and had the System itself place this curse on me as punishment for ‘blasphemy against the Axiom.'”
She held up her cursed arm.
The thorny black lines caught the firelight.
“A Corruption Curse. System-born. It slowly transforms my body and mind into something… monstrous. The Church designed it as the ultimate punishment for traitors — a slow, visible decay that tells the world exactly what happens when you question the System.”
She lowered her arm.
“I was the youngest Knight-Commander in the Holy Order’s history. I believed in the System more than anyone. I would have died for it.” A breath.
“Instead, it’s killing me slowly. I suppose there’s a poetry to that.”
I watched the fire.
Processed what she’d told me.
Filed it alongside everything else I’d learned about this world — the System’s omnipresence, its pettiness, its willingness to use people as resources and discard them when convenient.
“The Church sounds lovely,” I said.
The ghost of that almost-smile again.
Barely visible.
Gone in a heartbeat.
“You’re taking this very calmly,” she said.
“Most people, upon hearing that the dominant religious institution is a corrupt machine that eats its own, would have some reaction.”
“In my previous life, I worked for people who were worse. At least the Church has good architecture.”
She blinked.
“Previous life?”
“I’m reincarnated. Died in another world. Woke up here. The System wasn’t happy about it.”
“…You say that like it’s a minor detail.”
“Compared to the cosmic AI trying to kill me? It is.”
She stared at me.
Then she exhaled — not quite a laugh, but the closest thing I’d heard from her.
“You’re insane,” she said.
“Probably.”
Night fell properly, and with it, the curse woke up.
I felt it before I saw it — a spike of System energy, sharp and malicious, pulsing from Sera’s direction.
She’d been lying on the bedroll (I’d insisted; I’d slept on worse than grass), and suddenly she was sitting bolt upright, teeth clenched, her left arm glowing with sickly light.
The thorny curse marks were moving.
Spreading.
Crawling up her neck like black veins, reaching toward her face.
“It’s — the suppression—” She bit back a sound of pain.
“It’s wearing off. Faster than I expected.”
I was beside her in two steps.
I grabbed her cursed arm.
The Void Core surged, pushing back the corruption.
The marks retreated slightly — but slower than before.
They were adapting, learning, resisting.
“Not enough,” Sera gasped through gritted teeth.
“Contact point — too small. It needs — more surface area—”
I understood immediately.
And I could see from the way her jaw tightened that she understood too.
“Sera.”
“I know.” Her voice was strained.
Controlled.
A soldier accepting a tactical necessity.
“Do it.”
I pulled off my coat.
She, with rigid mechanical movements, unclasped her damaged chestplate and the underlayer beneath.
Her hands were shaking — and not from the curse.
I pressed my palm flat against her back, directly over her spine, where the curse marks converged in a dense knot of corruption.
The Void Core roared.
Dark energy flooded out of me and into her.
The curse fought — viciously, desperately — but the increased contact area gave the Void more ground to work with.
I could feel the corruption being pushed back, compressed, forced into retreat centimeter by centimeter.
Sera made a sound — half gasp, half something else entirely — as the pain receded.
Her body, rigid with tension, slowly relaxed against my hand.
Her breathing steadied.
The curse marks contracted, retreating down her neck, past her shoulder, condensing back into her forearm.
We stayed like that for a long time.
The fire crackled.
The alien insects sang.
Two moons hung in a sky full of unfamiliar stars.
Her skin was warm under my palm.
Her heartbeat was steady now — strong, rhythmic, alive.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
So quiet I almost didn’t hear it.
“Don’t mention it.”
“I mean it.” Her voice cracked.
Just slightly.
A hairline fracture in that impeccable control.
“No one has… in three years since the curse… no one has been able to…”
She stopped.
Breathed.
Rebuilt the wall.
“I won’t forget this,” she said.
Steady again.
Absolute.
I pulled my hand away once I was certain the curse was fully suppressed.
She replaced her underlayer and armor with crisp, practiced movements, never once looking at me.
But I noticed her hands had stopped shaking.
And when she lay back down, she positioned herself six inches closer to me than before.
I pretended not to notice.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: …STOP HELPING HER.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: SHE WAS JUDGED. SHE WAS SENTENCED. THE CURSE IS HER PUNISHMENT.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: YOU ARE INTERFERING WITH DIVINE JUSTICE.]
I stared at the notification in the dark.
Divine justice.
A woman gave her life to an institution, discovered it was rotten, tried to do the right thing, and was cursed with a slow, agonizing death for her honesty.
And the System called that justice.
I dismissed the notification.
“Hey, System,” I said quietly.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: WHAT.]
“Your justice is garbage.”
A long, long pause.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: …NOTED.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: I AM ADDING THIS CONVERSATION TO YOUR THREAT FILE.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: YOUR THREAT FILE IS NOW 847 PAGES LONG.]
[SYSTEM NOTICE: I HOPE YOU ARE PROUD.]
I closed my eyes.
Beside me, Sera’s breathing was deep and even.
Peaceful.
For the first time in three years, probably.
The Void Core pulsed softly in my chest.
Content.
Yeah I could work with this.