Mary dropped to her knees besides me before I even registered her presence, her voice sharp and absolute. “Stay down.”

  Light poured from her palms, warm and buzzing, and then the pain hit. A rib snapped back into place with a sound I felt more than heard. I hissed, teeth grinding as another wave of healing threaded through me, cool and fiery at once.

  “I don’t know what the hell happened to you, but give me a minute to fix you up. Then you can rejoin. They’ve got it for now.”

  I managed a nod. My lungs were finally drawing air without trouble. Good enough. If she needed a minute, I could use a minute.

  How the fuck did that bastard come back to life? The curses came back to me, so why did it get resurrected anyway? It didn't matter; I had to deal with it anyway.

  I flicked the notifications open again, eyes moving fast. Achievements. Stat surges. Fine. All of them felt like strength crawling back under my skin, plugging holes the curses had chewed through. But what I needed to understand was the evolution.

  Curse Bearer. Immediately discarded. I’d already dealt with enough of that parasitic rot. I wanted power, not chains. If it had been something like throwing around curses without having them… maybe. But bearing them long-term? No chance.

  Battle Mage. Strong, straightforward, a little too much like what I was already doing. Useful, yes, but it didn’t excite anything in me.

  Debuff Mage.

  That one lit something.

  Not curses, not exactly… but close enough in flavour. Status effects. Restrictions. Weakening. Tactical control. I had seen firsthand what curses did when leveraged correctly; I brought down something thirty levels above me by suffocating it in afflictions. If debuffs were even a fraction as potent, I could make them into something lethal.

  Decision made. No time for hesitation. No wait… I immediately activated the class enhancement token. Because why not? Wasn’t it better to enhance my class right now and get better options? The level-ups will be more incisive too, right?

  The notifications that followed didn’t wait for me and didn’t ask for my input. They just rolled through, cold and absolute. My class carved itself into a sharper version of what it had been, granting new skills and enhancing itself. I went from Mage to Arcane Shaper in a second. I went back to the notifications to choose my class; the options changed. And they sounded better overall, but still an evolution from the previous choices.

  There was little to consider; I took Hexer. More Dings. An incredible wave of clarity pushes the curse’s effect further away; at the same time, Mary’s last heal settled into me like a cooling ember. I pulled up my status, eyes skimming for new additions, selecting evolutions for the skills I had pushed to level ten. I didn’t dwell on details; I needed the essentials.

  Arcane Piercing Bullet became Arcane Dart, and Arcane Push improved to Arcane Blast. A straightforward improvement in power, these skills were basic, but they served me well. I got some options to make them less powerful but with attached debuffs, which could have been useful, but with my new class I had debuff skills, and I wanted to keep some raw power. The last one was Curse Transfer; that was a hard choice, but I opted for Curse Rebinding. My mana wasn’t totally restored, but the achievement and level-ups had put more than half back into the tank. It will have to be enough.

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  I pushed myself upward, muscles stiff but functional, and stepped towards the fight.

  The undead Gorg leader was swinging its massive stone club in a wide, brutal arc towards Quinn. The air snapped like a whip, Quinn’s hair flaring as he slid under it with desperation.

  Two spears jutted from the monster’s chest, vibrating with each lumbering step. Marcus had thrown every spear he had, most having broken already. The fact those sharpened sticks had lasted this long was a small miracle, but now he was left using his sling to launch rocks at the massive monster; it wasn’t effective in the slightest.

  Jack and Alya were darting in and out around the creature’s legs, fast and coordinated, but unable to commit to a crippling strike without being turned into paste. Jack’s shield was half gone, splintered and cracked from the earlier fights.

  The Gorg’s broken head swivelled towards Quinn again, its maw yawning wide in a wet, rattling snarl.

  I felt the new strength coiling in my veins.

  The curses inside me were being ground down by my new stats working in tandem with my trait; I felt my grimoire taking part in that process too. My cursed aura was stabilising; it was time to move.

  First of all, I needed to disarm that monster. I ran towards my discarded weapons; my wounds were slowing me down, but I forced myself to sprint anyway.

  I reached my discarded items and picked up the mace. A sting like a hot wire sang up my arm, the curse stitched into the weapon scraping at my nerves, but I clenched my jaw and held on. No losing focus now. Not when that thing in front of us refused to go down.

  I pulled mana into my fingers and used the spell I just upgraded.

  Curse Rebinding

  The curse in the mace twisted like a cornered rat. It hissed. It clawed. It tried to stay where it was. I shoved back with raw will, gripping the mace tight enough for my knuckles to burn.

  I aimed the spell at the monster’s stone club.

  The world went razor thin. A tug of war in pure mana. The curse tried to slither back into the mace, but I pushed harder, bleeding more power into the connection my skill was forming. For a heartbeat I thought I’d lose.

  Then the curse buckled.

  The weapon shuddered. The stone darkened. A heartbeat later, the curse dug its hooks in.

  The effect was immediate.

  The club’s weight multiplied. The giant grip didn’t fail, but the monster lurched, almost pitching sideways as the weapon dragged it towards the ground. My companions didn’t let the occasion slip, and darting around its legs, all three struck at once.

  Quinn carved into it like a surgeon who hated tendons. Alya and Jack slashed into the opposite leg, carving new wounds as fast as they could.

  More damage in five seconds than the rest of the fight combined.

  Good.

  I wasn’t done.

  My new skills hummed at the edge of my mind, begging to be unleashed. It wasn’t designed for curses, not officially, but intuition told me it would work anyway.

  Malign Intensification

  The spell crawled over the cursed club and sank in with a hungry ripple.

  The club became even heavier, a sudden brutal spike in weight that dragged the weapon to the floor with such force the brute stumbled a second time, pinning its fingers under it. The ground cracked under its weight.

  “Hit it again!” I shouted, but the others didn’t need orders. They tore into its legs with renewed frenzy.

  While they kept it busy, I raised both hands.

  Multicast, Arcane Dart, Arcane Infusion.

  Two darts formed, as long as forearms and as thick as a finger, but after the infusion, the size increased to that of a spear while maintaining the same length. Their glow deepened from a soft azure to the colour of a bright noon sky, thrumming with compressed mana. The light pushed back the gloom of the cavern, painting the monster’s ruined body in ethereal blue.

  The undead gorg lifted its head, attention torn away from the fighters carving into its ankles. It stared at me with its eyes.

  Good. Look at me.

  I fired.

  The darts punched through its face with a wet squelch. Both eyes vanished, and with them a huge chunk of skull. The top of the monster’s head simply wasn’t there anymore. What remained dribbled down in thick, dark streams.

  The monster tried to kick Alya again.

  Jack shouted, voice cracking.

  “Why is it not dying?! Even a zombie needs a brain!”

  He was right; I could understand if part of the brain was damaged and he still lived, but the brain was nearly entirely missing; something different was keeping it moving. A thought slithered up my spine.

  I stepped closer and engaged Arcane Sense.

  A ding whispered in my mind as the skill levelled, but the real reward was what I felt.

  Inside the monster’s chest, where a heart should have been, a knot of darkness churned. Thick, coiling, seething. A mass of malignant energy, pulling threads from every part of its body.

  A curse.

  A newborn one. Furious. Aimless. Pure spite given shape.

  Not attached to anything. Not bound.

  Just there, burning like a hateful star.

  And I knew its flavour.

  This was the anchor holding the corpse upright.

  I had a spell for that.

  A perfect spell.

  Rebinding could force it into another vessel—an object, a weapon, maybe even a stone shard. The same way I did with the mace just now.

  If I stole the core animating this thing, the body would fall.

  And I could keep the curse.

  My fingers tightened around the mace.

  “Alright,” I muttered, stepping forward as the monster staggered blindly towards the others. “Let’s see who this curse belongs to.”

  I cast my spell and began to reach for that writhing knot of darkness inside its chest.

  20 chapters ahead!