Surviving as a Broken Hero

Chapter 100

Chapter 100 – Cursed Angel (2)Alikr had been toying with me. Countless cuts covered my body, and my control of the earth dwindled as my stamina ran dry.

Where I’d previously been able to summon plates of rock and even encase most of a limb in earthen armor, in the end, I could only manage fragments of stone to mitigate the damage from each slash of Alikr’s slender blade.

Through it all, he left wide openings for me to exploit, and I landed slashes and punches of my own, with him doing little to mitigate the damage.

Koise tried to support with his arrows, but without the System, the velocity of his projectiles simply wasn’t enough to be much of a threat to even me, let alone Alikr.

All it’d taken was a stray slash of the elf’s blade to send sword energy out toward Koise, knocking him from the carriage and out of sight.

I hoped he was okay, but I had other things to worry about.

In the end, I faced Alikr, out of breath and spirit, blood dripping from where his sword had tasted my skin and the gauntlet on my arm feeling heavier than ever.

* * *

“Are you finally done?” he asked me, his left arm limp at his side and a gloating grin on his face.

Suddenly, his eyes caught sight of something behind me, and surprise took hold. “Who are you…?”

I struggled to turn my head and caught sight of a familiar face—Eve. She looked worse than I felt, if that was possible, but there she was.

A warning struggled from my mouth, but neither of the two paid me any mind at that point.

In the next moment, the emotion on Alikr’s face turned to unmistakable fear.

‘What the hell?’ I thought. No matter how I looked at it, Eve looked like she could barely stand.

Just what was Alikr so afraid of? Wouldn’t a single strike have been enough to down her and take her out of the fight in the same way he’d neutralized Koise with hardly a thought? The fog remained ever present, and—impossibly—a warm, orange glow crept from Eve’s body.

‘How is she doing this? She shouldn’t be able to use her abilities.’

Just like Koise, she should’ve also been locked out of the System.

Maybe there was still some room for doubt, but when the glow erupted into a fiery aura that sent flames flickering over me, leaving me unharmed, and when those exact flames reached Alikr and singed his clothes, it was impossible to deny.

Glowing against the backdrop of the fog, with fire swirling around her, I could almost imagine her as an angel.

‘I already suspected it, but…’

Whatever the source of her abilities, it wasn’t the System.

‘Does she even have a System at all?’

It all made sense, then—how quickly she grew fatigued when I’d tried to keep a rapid pace on our way to Karfana after our first meeting, her ability usage in that first fog, and her curiosity about my abilities.

Alikr took off running into the forest, not even trying to hide the signs of his departure as he crashed through the underbrush. Meanwhile, my mind continued to race.

‘This can’t possibly be a coincidence. Was she

“The guard didn’t let the information go easily.”

‘Well, at least she confirmed that much.’

“I tracked his stench all the way here and, well, you saw the rest.”

I looked at Koise’s sleeping face and sighed. “We’re going to have to go back, aren’t we?”

If the city lord of one of the Central Cities was working with someone like Alikr, and if she was right about Gregor, then we had to do something before it was too late.

“I’m afraid so,” Eve replied.