I pushed myself up, wiping blood from my forehead. My hand trembled, but the curse pushed me again, forcing me forward despite the pain.

  The scene before me was a disaster.

  At least eight bodies littered the trail, some screaming, some silent, some twitching in that way that meant as soon as they'll stop, they wouldn’t be moving again. People I’d just spent hours trying to make into a functional group… now scattered around like discarded dolls. Limbs bent wrong, unrecognizable faces, burned or too bloody to understand who they belonged to.

  The big dog-thing lay dead, thankfully, sprawled on its side with Quinn’s knife buried deep in its skull and a broken spear still lodged in its ribs. The old man it had mauled, however… he wasn’t getting up. His chest was a ruin of crushed bone.

  One of the brutes was down too, a mountain of charred wounds and punctures, magic still sizzling on its body. A young mage lay next to it, face down, unmoving.

  But the last gorg brute though...

  The bastard still stood.

  Barely.

  It was a hulking, bleeding nightmare. Bolts filled its torso like a pincushion. Spears stuck out from two different angles. Magic had scorched half its hide; the skin split and blackened. One of its eyes was destroyed. One arm hung limp, useless.

  And still it refused to die.

  It swung wildly, roaring in fury, each movement spraying blood from its wounds. A girl in leather tried to stab it, her spear glowing at the tip. She got backhanded so hard her body slammed into a tree with a crack I felt even from here.

  Two others hacked at it with shaky hands, retreating as it lumbered forward. A mage threw a bolt of light that fizzled more than it burned. A crossbowman loaded too slowly, fumbling the bolt and dropping it.

  These people were hopeless.

  And the brute smelled weakness. It charged.

  Tom intercepted it, shield raised. The impact sent him sliding back half a metre, boots digging trenches in the dirt. Jack struck its side, but the spear blade stuck in its thick muscle; the brute roared and swung, forcing him to let go and dive aside.

  If I didn’t end this now, more would die.

  The curse sent another wave of dread through my chest. MOVE!

  I sprinted towards the brute, weaving between bodies and debris.

  “Elias!” someone shouted.

  I ignored them.

  The brute lifted its good arm and grabbed the girl in leather it had thrown earlier; she’d tried crawling away. Its massive hand closed around her thigh easily.

  Her scream cut off with a horrible, wet crunch when it lifted her up and slammed her on the ground.

  The world narrowed to a point.

  I fired an arcane bullet directly into its exposed eye socket.

  The brute reeled back, leaving the woman, roaring in agony.

  I fired again. The bullet struck its face, snapping its jawbone loose.

  Tom charged in.

  It swung at him, slow and sluggish, weakened from blood loss and too many wounds.

  He ducked under the blow, sliding on loose dirt, and slammed his shield into its knee.

  The strike had probably been magical in some way, because its joint bent inward with a wet pop.

  The brute toppled to one side, roaring.

  I closed the distance, flanking it, and drove another arcane bullet point-blank into the side of its skull.

  It punched through, bone giving way, it's flesh bursting in a spray of gore.

  The brute staggered, still not dead.

  For fuck’s sake.

  I grabbed one of the embedded spears sticking out of its chest to damage it as much as I could, braced my boot against its ribs, and ripped it out.

  Hot dark blood sprayed across my arm and face.

  Before it could fall, before it could even react, Tom drove his spear through its throat, pinning it down to the ground.

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  Its roar gurgled, turned wet, then died as it slumped forward, twitching once… then going still.

  Silence crashed down in the wake of its death.

  The battlefield reeked of blood, smoke, burnt flesh, and fear.

  My breath rasped in my throat. Pain radiated through my chest. My ears still rang from using the shield.

  But the curse pushed at me, pressing, not done yet.

  People whimpered. Sobbed. Many called out for help. Someone else cried for somebody who wasn’t answering.

  I turned, scanning the wounded.

  At least five or six were dead outright. A couple were bleeding out. The girl that was slammed into the ground was somehow still alive, but barely.

  I wiped blood, mine or theirs, it didn’t matter, off my cheek and stepped towards the nearest survivor.

  Work wasn’t over.

  Not even close.

  I started shouting. “Give health potions to the wounded! Stem the blood!”

  The battlefield slowly shifted from chaos to a broken sort of order.

  Tom limped, his right leg dragging slightly, probably bruised to hell, yet he still barked commands with that old army instructor’s voice of his.

  “Anyone still standing, move! Clear a space! Don’t crowd the healers... move!”

  People stumbled around like dazed animals, some crying, some shaking, some staring at the corpses with empty eyes. Fucking useless.

  Mary, one of our only two healers, worked in grim silence at the centre of the wounded. Her hands were slick with blood to the wrist, but she kept casting, over and over. The medical doctor, the other healer, though his hands trembled from exhaustion, worked opposite her.

  They weren’t enough.

  Not for this.

  Health potions were being rationed out to the ones on death’s door. The healers triaged, choosing who to give it first and who would be left for later, if “later” ever came.

  Someone shoved a vial at me.

  “Elias... take it. You’re burnt all over.”

  I didn’t argue. I bit off the cork and swallowed it in two gulps.

  Cool relief washed through me; it tasted like herbs, but it made me feel like my burned flesh was cooling and my muscles were unclenching just a fraction. Not perfect. They were lesser potions and weren’t miraculous, but they helped.

  Good. Because the curse wouldn’t let me rest anyway.

  I was kneeling besides a man with a mangled leg, shredded meat hanging off bone, the giant dog’s bite having nearly taken it off entirely. His screams had faded to whimpers. I clamped a tourniquet above the wound and twisted a twig to apply pressure until the bleeding slowed.

  The old woman who’d asked for the break, of all people, lay further down the slope. Her leg was worse. Torn open, muscle exposed, the scent of iron thick in the air. She wouldn’t last long. Maybe a minute, maybe two, if the healers abandoned everyone else to focus on her.

  A hopeless case. Even I knew that.

  But the curse doesn’t care about hopeless.

  So I went to help.

  By the time I finished, my hands were soaked in blood, my arms trembling. Many still needed attention.

  And then I saw her again.

  The woman the brute had smashed into the tree was one of our competent fighters, one of the few who kept watch during the rest, and one of the few who didn’t scatter like livestock the moment danger appeared.

  Everyone else had left her alone.

  Of course they had.

  She lay crumpled where she’d been thrown, half-buried in leaves. They left her for dead. Her face was pale, blood matting her dark hair.

  I called her a woman, but she was mid-twenties at best, maybe. Sky-blue eyes staring up at the canopy without blinking. My distorted vision made me see everything paler, but her eyes were one of the only bright things I could see right now.

  And she was dying.

  Not instantly. Not quickly. Just… slipping.

  I crouched next to her. She couldn’t move anything except her eyes; they tracked me. Desperate. A silent plea.

  For someone else, I wouldn’t have even cared. Honestly, I don’t know why I cared about her in particular. Maybe because she had fought. She hadn’t run. She’d done her part when almost all the others didn’t.

  My curse demanded me to help anyway, so I scanned the ground. A discarded backpack, half-open. I tore through it and found, miraculously, an intact health potion and a mana potion. The stamina one had shattered, soaking the packing.

  Good enough.

  I knelt besides her, gently lifting her head.

  “Open,” I murmured.

  She did, barely.

  I poured the potion slowly, drop by drop. Some dribbled down her chin, but she swallowed most of it. She looked at me with those dazed blue eyes.

  “You’re not going to die,” I told her, forcing confidence into my voice. “I got you.”

  A lie, maybe. But she needed it. And I needed to say it.

  “Mary!” I called.

  The healer jogged over, exhausted but alert. “Yes, what...oh god.”

  “Heal her,” I said.

  Mary’s expression tightened. She looked at the girl’s body, her crushed ribs, the obvious internal bleeding, and the barely-there breathing, and I saw the flicker of resignation. She shook her head minutely.

  No chance.

  I didn’t care.

  As I was about to stand, the girl’s lips parted. A broken, rasping whisper escaped:

  “Don’t… leave me… please…”

  Her voice cracked. Tears, barely visible, gathered at the corners of her eyes.

  “I… I can’t feel anything… please…”

  My gut tightened.

  I wasn’t a good man. I didn’t do this out of kindness. I didn’t have that softness. But after the carnage, after the screams, after watching useless people survive while the few capable nearly died… I couldn’t walk away from this one.

  I met Mary’s eyes.

  “Get the doctor,” I said. “Both of you. Now.”

  She hesitated.

  “Go.”

  Mary ran to fetch him.

  I looked around for potions. “Someone get me more health potions!” I yelled to a random guy loitering nearby.

  He opened his mouth, maybe to argue, but one glance at my expression, covered in blood and soot and murder, shut him up. He sprinted off. Good choice.

  He returned with two more.

  I fed them to her as slowly and carefully as I could. Her cracked lips swallowed reflexively, but her eyes never left mine.

  The doctor arrived, panting, face pale.

  He knelt and used his healing skill three times. Light pulsed under his hands, then flickered weakly.

  I shoved the mana potion at him. “Again.”

  He drank it, trying to steady his breathing. Then he placed both hands on her ribs, eyes tight with concentration. Another pulse of healing washed over her.

  But when he leant back, his expression told the truth.

  “All her damage is internal,” he said, voice low and grim. “She had a flail chest. Lungs punctured. Possible spinal severing. We… we don’t have the tools. Or the means. The potions and skills are magical, really. From all my medical knowledge, I have no idea how they do what they do, but if they don’t work… there’s nothing else we can do.”

  The girl’s breath hitched shallowly.

  I stared at her.

  There is nothing else we can do.

  The curse twisted inside me like a barbed hook.

  Like hell there isn’t.