Chapter 35

Chapter 35 – Déjà vu (2)

It felt smaller than a coliseum, yet somehow more sealed off, more oppressive. Unlike the rest of the village, the space around the arena bore the clear traces of repeated purification. Priests must have come here often, working the perimeter until the stone and ground carried the residue of their rites.

Maybe they had purified it even right before the calamity struck. Along the walls, purification stones still glimmered with a steady white light.

“…Now that we’re closer, my skin stings,” Neo muttered, his face twisting as if the air itself offended him. “If they purified it this much and the aura still hasn’t weakened at all…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but the implication was enough. Something horrific lived underneath what the priests had managed to suppress.

Gabriel laid a hand against one of the arena’s columns, feeling the vibration in the stone.

“I think we need to see the inside,” he said calmly. “Keeping it pressed down from the outside clearly wasn’t enough.”

Neo’s eyes sharpened.

“It wouldn’t matter even if Ten came.”

“Then I’ll go in alone,” Gabriel replied.

Neo startled and grabbed for him at once, stopping him with a jerk.

“Hey. Are you insane, trying to die? Don’t talk nonsense, get over here. This isn’t something we can handle.”

There was a reason the priests had only worked the outside. The moment someone stepped inside, the damage could become far worse. That was why they had suppressed it instead of confronting it. And no matter how skilled a holy knight might be, he didn’t carry more holy power than a priest.

Charging in alone was no different from suicide.

Gabriel let Neo’s hand fall away without resisting. He didn’t argue, not here, not now. It wasn’t as if he needed Neo’s permission.

If anything, the thought came unbidden, cold and practical.

Would the aura of a demon god be weaker than that curse?

He didn’t need to break the convenient brainwashing he had laid down. There was no reason to create complications. If he had to go in, he could do it when no one was watching.

Still, the inside needed to be checked.

And then, at the edge of his vision, a familiar figure appeared.

Erin.

She was approaching the arena. The moment she spotted Neo and Gabriel, she walked straight toward them.

“Commander,” Neo said quickly, relief flickering through his tension, “we felt a cursed aura from here. But it doesn’t look like we can get inside.”

Erin listened without changing expression, her gaze sweeping the surroundings. Even now, she treated Gabriel as though he were invisible, as though he were no more than a shadow at Neo’s side.

“I’ll go in,” she said.

Neo stiffened. “That seems too dangerous. Even the priests couldn’t enter, so they only purified the outer edge.”

“I’m better than those priests,” Erin replied, almost casually, as if she were stating a fact about the weather. “So I’ll be fine.”

She motioned Neo back with a small flick of her hand.

“Well,” Neo said, forcing a thin smile, “it’s not that I don’t trust you, Commander.”

“I’ll be right back.”

Erin moved to step into the arena. Gabriel reacted before he thought, blocking her path.

“Please,” he said, the word scraping out of him, too close to pleading to be dignified. “Let me go instead.”

Erin brushed his hand away as if he were nothing.

Normally she would have said something. Didn’t I tell you not to cross the line? Or, Don’t get the wrong idea. Something sharp, something that would at least acknowledge him.

But Erin didn’t say a single word.

She simply walked into the arena.

The instant she crossed the threshold, pain lanced across her skin. Erin’s gaze dropped. Under the weight of the curse, her flesh was melting and regrowing in a sickening cycle, like the body was trying to heal from a wound that never stopped reopening.

At this level, the others wouldn’t even have bones left to gather.

She took another step deeper.

The air thickened, stagnant and foul, so dense it stole breath. Erin clamped a hand over her mouth.

The arena was drenched in stains that wouldn’t wash away. Blood everywhere. It would have been easier to find a place without it than with it. The scene was savage beyond reason, as if cruelty itself had soaked into the stone.

Still covering her nose and mouth, Erin scanned the ground, and something caught against her boot. She looked down.

A human skull.

And once she saw that, she began to see them everywhere. Dozens. No, hundreds, rolling across the floor in grotesque abundance.

They were all too small to be adult skulls.

No.

Among the curses said to have come down from the East, one of the most infamous was called gudok.

And among its variants, the one that used humans, indok, was the strongest and most brutal of all. Even in Erin’s narrow field of view, there were already dozens of skulls.

That means the “materials” were at least in the hundreds.

But something about it was wrong in a different way.

The place didn’t feel unfamiliar.

Rusty axes, daggers, swords lay scattered throughout, and as Erin’s foot nudged them, she had the sudden, unbidden sensation of screams swelling around her. Boys and girls, killing one another to survive, their cries echoing in the corners of her skull like an old memory that didn’t belong to her.

Then Erin jolted, as if she’d felt something smear across her hand.

Because in her hand, she was holding a dagger.

As though it had been placed there.

Her fingers, slick with blood that wasn’t hers, tightened around the handle as the blade threatened to slide free.

The déjà vu struck so hard it turned her stomach.

Erin took a step back.

Another.

She wanted to run.

The Erin she knew herself to be would have ignored it all and burned the place down without hesitation. That was what she always did. Purge, destroy, move forward.

But this was different.

The village meant nothing to her, and yet she felt as though she had lived here for a long time. The sensation crawled under her skin, intimate and violating.

Confusion thickened into panic.

A feeling like she was herself and not herself at once. Like the existence of Erin Ferr was being denied from the inside out.

Fear spread through her, swallowing reason.

She stepped back again and tripped over something.

Bones.

Her vision lurched, and suddenly she was watching herself shove a dagger into a boy’s throat. The sensation of bone and muscle tearing was so vivid it turned her blood to ice.

In the middle of that worst kind of déjà vu, Erin twisted her head and saw, at the highest point, a single ornate chair. As if someone had sat there watching this slaughter.

What was this place?

Why was it made?

Her heart hammered, as though a solid wall inside her had cracked, and then cracked wider, the fissure splitting into something she couldn’t contain.

She tried to move, to flee, but it felt like someone had seized her.

Why did you kill me?

I hate you.

Save me.

Voices poured into her, resentment seeped into her bones. The dead who had not been killed by her were calling her murderer anyway, pointing at her with phantom fingers.

…Had she really not killed them?

She found herself doubting even that.

“Little one.”

The voice was familiar. It filled her ear like a hand wrapping around her mind. The boys and girls vanished at once, as if swept away, and a man’s hand blocked her vision, cutting off the horror.

“That’s why I told you I should go.”

The scolding tone brought her back. Erin sucked in a breath she hadn’t realized she’d lost.

It was the curse. It had disturbed her mind, loosened her grip.

Pathetic. If she’d been seen like this, she’d never be able to call herself Commander of the First Order with a straight face.

As she was forcing herself to steady her breathing, Gabriel leaned in and whispered, “Do you want this place erased?”

No matter what happened, Erin had no intention of accepting help from him.

She started to pull his hand away. But Gabriel tightened his hold and spoke quickly, urgency leaking through him.

“Just say it.”

His arm around her tightened. His breath trembled.

“Just answer me.”

Why was he doing this? Erin stayed in his arms long enough to ask, her voice low.

“…If I say I want it destroyed, can you destroy it?”

“For you,” Gabriel said, as if the words were the simplest truth in the world.

It didn’t land. It didn’t feel like anything but a hollow lure. Erin curled one corner of her mouth and laughed quietly, cruelly. The only thing he could do “for her” was die. Nothing else.

She pulled the hand from her eyes and spoke flatly.

“I told you.”

The words were cold, but his interruption had helped. Erin’s mind had snapped back into place.

She raised a magic circle in the air and set the entire space ablaze.

Even at a glance, the building was old. The curse had been here for a long time, embedded in everything. A place like this didn’t need investigation. Only annihilation.

I should’ve burned it the moment I sensed it.

People always said to do what you always did. The second you changed your habits, you invited disaster. Erin had done something she never would have done, and now she was paying for it.

The arena caught with frightening ease, flames running along every surface until there wasn’t a corner left untouched.

Erin rose slowly to her feet.

“And the part where I told you not to cross the line,” she said, her voice sharp again, steadied by anger, “don’t tell me you forgot that too.”

Gabriel remained seated, looking up at her. He looked wounded, trying not to show it, and Erin found even that repulsive.

Fire roared on every side, yet none of it touched the space around them. It was like the scene from a dream, except inverted, twisted into something bitter.

Eighteen years ago, he had been smiling, and Erin had been the one crying.

Now he looked like he might cry at any moment, and Erin didn’t even have the energy to smile. Even giving him that much felt like a waste.

Erin stared at the burning arena. Maybe it was her imagination, but she began to hear crying, as if the flames themselves were filled with suffering.

It made her stomach heave. Her face twisted with disgust.

She turned and walked out.

As if she didn’t care what Gabriel looked like behind her. As if she couldn’t be bothered to glance back even once.

She exited the arena at an unhurried pace, leaving the inferno behind.

“Commander, are you all right?” Neo asked immediately, stepping forward.

“The curse was stronger than I expected,” Erin answered, rolling her neck as if trying to shake off exhaustion. She watched the skin on her arm visibly recover as the damage faded, then glanced up.

Neo was standing with his head turned, staring behind her.

Erin tilted her head, confused. “What are you doing?”

“Commander,” Neo said, voice strained, “your clothes… melted.”

From behind her, Gabriel draped his cloak over her shoulders.

Erin’s first instinct was to fling it to the ground, but when she looked down, she saw it. Her uniform had been eaten away in places, the fabric thinned and ruined by the cursed aura.

Normally, uniforms were protected by the holy power held within priests and holy knights, serving as a shield even against curses.

But Erin had no holy power at all.

So the uniform had protected her from nothing.

What was strange was that Gabriel’s clothing had not melted in even a single spot.