Chapter 3: Chapter 3

With the alarm bells clanging behind us, we rushed over to where the people who couldn’t fight did the support work.

This involved getting the young and elderly into shelters, transporting weapons and supplies to the fighters and people maintaining the protective barriers around the city, helping get the wounded out of battle and any other task they could throw at us.

Helping the wounded is important because as long as someone is still alive, any injury they have can be healed and regenerated.

Healing magic is utterly ridiculous. Better even than the thousands of tiny robots in my blood.

Thankfully, a strike from a cursed one won’t infect someone if it was brief enough. If even the slightest scratch were capable of causing infecting someone, there probably wouldn’t have been anyone left by this point. A stab wound is more likely to infect because it’s generally deeper and stays in the body longer. Of course, everyone would much rather die than become infected, which is considered to be a fate worse than death.

While the number of people who have capacities below 50 is few, the jobs we can still do in the midst of a battle are important.

I’m glad this isn’t one of those isekais where you only receive respect if you have a high level or good enough skill. As long as you’re contributing, it’s fine. It’s already a surprise that they didn’t just abandon or get rid of us once they found out how weak we are. …Maybe my trust in other people is too low when my standard is “they were nice enough to not kill us”.

The three of us went separate ways to carry out tasks as we saw fit. By this point, we all knew the things we could do and the places we should go. Everything happens so fast with these waves that it’s best for us to just go to places that look like they need help rather than asking all the time.

Even with all the chaos and running around, it’s still organized enough to figure things out on our own. They’ve been at this a long time, after all.

If something isn’t done correctly, someone will yell at everyone about it the next day. The places where people actually give out orders are along the walls. The races capable of flight would fly around inside the barrier and help in places where they were needed as well as relay orders to people in other places.

The strategy for dealing with Cursed Ones that had been devised over the years was to actually make small openings in the barriers in key places to control the number of enemies being dealt with at any one time.

But of course, the barriers that remained could still only take so much abuse before either the people or the gems powering them failed. When it comes to gems, they are simply stored with mana and placed in the prepared enchantments.

The Capacity Wall is an example of an enchantment, as it is designed to link all the embedded gems into one long chain, and then a person powers it to light up as many as they can.

After I finished rushing a few kids into the nearest shelter, I then went closer to the wall and could see a couple people already injured and struggling to get to the nearest dedicated healer.

Anyone can learn healing magic, but being actually good at it and other medical techniques means that some people are specialized in health and healing.

One of the fighters had lost a leg, one of his four arms and had a severe gash across his chest, while the other was covered in a lot of gouges, but still had all her limbs. I got in the middle of them and helped them move to the nearby medical building. Someone rushed out to help me, and once they were done with that, I chanced a look outside.

I was currently at a high enough elevation that I could see some of the fighting going on. Countless Cursed Ones were speeding through the sky while being shot with spells and arrows. In a place with the lowered barriers, I saw what was basically a horde of aliens and a horde of white aliens covered in blood and shredding each other.

I’ve seen a fair amount of blood and gore since arriving here, but that was always after the fact. What I was witnessing was extreme, and I could see people actually dying and getting killed. When one of the aliens got infected, another would try to kill them to prevent them from turning.

The Cursed Ones always went after places rich in mana, and their target was to devour the blood and flesh of the beings who possessed it; in other words, people. If someone was unlucky enough to not die from one of an attack that was more than just a quick wound, the curse would rapidly consume them. Now infected with the curse, that person was no longer a target for the Cursed Ones and targeted people just like the rest of them.

Their bodies would mutate in specific ways that always meant more efficient killing. Fangs, horns, a tail, wings and claws were always added if the person did not already have them.

The carnage was too much for me to continue looking at, so I rushed off to the nearest task. I had only looked at the scene for a few seconds, but I witnessed quite a bit.

I wonder what it says about me that I can look at something like that and then just continue on afterward? I’ve gotten used to seeing that every time there’s an attack, but it still makes me feel sick.

People with low capacities were in the safer parts of the city, charging mana gems for the barrier enchantments. It was mostly just the young and the old in the shelters, as everyone else was busy with support duties. I went to one of those places and began wheeling filled crates to the nearest walls.

Four crates later, I was sweating and out of breath. I may be in good shape now, but this was still a lot of manual labor and running around.

If only those tunnels were complete, this would be so much easier.

Some time ago, someone had proposed constructing tunnels beneath the city for transporting people and goods without exposing them. It had been approved, but the construction was slow going. The attacks were too frequent, and if people weren’t constantly training themselves and others, they wouldn’t be able to fend them off. There just wasn’t enough time to make good progress.

Additionally, with the potential for cave-ins and limited space to run and fight during attacks, it was safer to not depend on tunnels as a means of escaping. The Cursed Ones would dig to find you underground and were too destructive. Most of them had plenty of raw power, and there were several that also had magic abilities that had been innate to the species they originally were before being cursed.

I can’t wait to have a higher capacity so I can cast body enhancement spells on myself. The way the high capacity fighters are capable of moving is awe-inspiring.

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I spent the next hour running crates and helping the occasional injured person. Having seen the amount of death that happens here on a practically monthly basis really makes me wonder if constantly summoning people is a good idea. I already don’t think it is, and I feel like there’s got to be a better solution out there. I have no idea what that better solution might be, though.

It’s all just so frustrating, and it’s made even worse by the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any good solution for anything.

I caught up with Izzy, who was doing the same task that I was. Both of us were sweaty and exhausted, and this current wave of Cursed Ones was still going.

“How are you holding up?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

“Oh, just being a weakling in a magical war against cursed zombie creatures, same ol’, same ol’,” she replied.

“I feel that,” I responded. We were both so spent that we were now sharing the strain of pushing the cart. It wasn’t too much for one person who still had energy, but when spent, it was a huge effort.

Returning for another crate of charged gems, I suddenly said, “I want ice cream.”

“Me too. Where did that come from?”

“Not sure,” I shrugged. “I just need something sweet to take my mind off all this. A light, happy flavor.”

She chuckled, “And what flavor would that be?”

“I don’t know. Cotton candy, maybe? It makes for a surprisingly good ice cream flav-”

Something shattered nearby, and a cacophony of screams and growls began. We both looked up in horror at the barrier closest to us, which had been broken.

People were shouting to close the breach while Cursed Ones poured in and began attacking from the inside as well as the outside. The fighters who could fly were already on their way, but it wouldn’t be soon enough.

Without saying anything, Izzy and I both began running for the nearest building. We’d been trained to not shout unnecessarily to not draw attention to ourselves. It wouldn’t do a whole lot, but it might be just enough to spare us.

The nearest shelter was too far away, so we ended up running toward a shop. The shutters were closed and we knew there were barricades behind both them and the door. Nearly every building had some sort of defensive measure as a part of its structure, so we might make it out of this alive if we could just get in.

The shop we are running to also has a mini revolving door mechanism built into one of the walls. The Cursed Ones aren’t intelligent so they won’t notice it or know how to use it, and there is also sometimes someone on the inside, watching to make sure it’s safe to allow the use of it. But that’s only if that person didn’t make it to a shelter. A shelter is still a much safer option than this, but this much is still much better than nothing.

Izzy was just ahead of me and turned it first. There was only room for one person, and as the door rotated, I felt pain in my shoulder. I caught a brief glimpse of her face contorted in horror before the door finished turning, and we both screamed for different reasons.

I looked at my shoulder and saw white talons soaked in red, a freezing feeling spreading from them.

No… No! No no no no no! I should’ve picked another building! Fuck! This is-!

A nearby fighter manipulated a spike of something in the air and launched it at me so that I couldn’t be turned. The Cursed One that had me in its grasp bent down to take a bite out of me and got pierced by the spike in my stead.

Fuck! I don’t even get to die right!? I’m going to be one of them!? It’s getting so cold…!

The Cursed One gave a strangled cry and began fighting the one who’d attacked it, but between its injury and holding onto me, it wasn’t doing very well. It kept getting pushed farther and farther back until it was out of the barrier, which didn’t have as many Cursed Ones around it now. Many of them had been killed, and most of what remained had gone inside.

The fighter, knowing that the Cursed One carrying me was dying and that I was just a weak support, chose to target another Cursed One nearby instead of me.

He decided to stop targeting me in favor of killing the more dangerous threats to the city. A weak person like myself, even with the boost in power from the curse, will still only become a weak Cursed One.

No…

The curse had spread throughout nearly my entire body now, leaving me wracked with pain. I contorted in agony as my body began violently changing shape and my thoughts rapidly spiraled into insatiable hunger.