Curses and Will Chapter 18: Chapter 2: The Shield That Answered

Read chapter 18 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Twelve bodies went down in the span of a few seconds. Some cut clean in half, others missing what they needed to keep standing. Blood moved in waves across the floor. The fighting became something closer to a tide than a battle. My right arm screamed with every motion, like it had been pulled loose from its socket and was only continuing to function out of stubbornness. I gripped the sword tighter anyway and swung again. The ones who tried to run didn't get far. My blade caught them the way a scythe catches wheat, indifferent to the direction they'd chosen to face. By the time it was finished, the walls had taken on a color I'd carry with me for a long time. My coat, once black, had gone entirely red. My shirt clung to my skin, stiff with drying blood that wasn't mine. My boots crossed bodies on the way out of the room, and I didn't trust myself to look down and count how many. My arm hung useless at my side, likely broken in more than one place. But underneath the physical pain, something else ached worse. Not guilt exactly. Something deeper than that, something that felt almost like relief disguised as suffering. A reminder that despite everything my hands had just done, I still felt the weight of it. And that pain, strange as it sounds, felt like proof I hadn't fully lost myself yet. I stepped out of the blood-soaked inn, stumbling past the last of the bodies I'd left scattered in the doorway. Morning light hit me outside, blinding after the dim corridor, the kind of bright that belongs to a world that hadn't noticed anything had changed. But I had changed. I was soaked through with blood that belonged to other people, my coat stiff with it, my shirt clinging like a second skin. Every step down the cobbled slope felt like dragging a body that wasn't entirely mine anymore through a town that had no place prepared for it. Then the silence hit. Not the comfortable kind. A watchful, condemning quiet that settled over the street the moment people noticed me. Villagers lined the road, bystanders drawn by whatever sounds had carried from the inn. All of them staring. None of them speaking, not directly to me anyway. Their eyes did enough talking on their own. Whispers moved through the crowd, low but not nearly low enough. "That's the one. The monster." "He's cursed, just like that girl traveling with him." "They're saying he killed over fifty people in there." No one mentioned the traffickers. No one brought up the girls who'd been chained in that side room, eyes covered, wrists bound raw. No one seemed interested in acknowledging that the blood covering me had come from people who'd earned considerably worse than what they'd gotten. They saw only what was easiest to see. A cursed thing that had dared to fight against the rot they themselves had spent years pretending not to notice. My legs went heavy under me. My knees started to shake. My arm hung useless, the bone likely cracked clean through. Something in my chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the physical damage, like the accumulated weight of every injustice I'd ever witnessed had finally settled somewhere permanent inside me. Then the first rock hit. Sharp, jagged, catching the side of my head hard enough that my vision blurred for a second. Blood started running warm down my temple. Then another. And another. Ten, then twenty, then more than I could keep count of. I didn't run. I didn't scream. I just stood there, frozen, the way a man stands when he's already accepted that whatever's coming is coming regardless of what he does next. The voice from the sword surfaced again, cold and patient as ever. What is in this cursed world that you wish to protect? For one terrible moment, I believed it. These people looked at me not as someone who'd just risked everything to save strangers, but as the villain of their own story. They were protecting their silence, not any kind of justice. They condemned the blade and never once asked what had forced it into motion. I wen