Serenity was still trying to wrap his head around the Voice enforcing Quest terms by killing someone who had probably once been a deity when Red gasped. “You have a hole in your chest. How are you still standing?”

Serenity looked down and saw that Red was if anything understating things. A six-inch-wide section of his chest was gone; it was impossible to tell how deep it was, since the entire area was filled with moving shadows. There were points of light in the shadows that Serenity didn’t remember, but he knew he was seeing his healing in action.

He felt far, far less compromised than he had back in the tutorial when he was stabbed in the lungs. This time, he’d only lost one lung, but he was fairly confident that was where his heart was supposed to be. He felt strange, but everything still worked. In a lot of ways, it reminded him of being undead. He knew he wasn’t, but he checked his vital affinities anyway.

They were still Mana and Essence.

Serenity let out a sigh of relief. He wasn’t undead. He’d said he was an elemental in the past, and this made it clear that he’d been correct.

“I’ll be fine. I have really good healing.” Serenity wasn’t sure how easy it would be to convince Red of that, but he knew he needed to. He tried to smile, but he was certain it looked strained. “That’s why I’m still up. If you could give me a hand getting inside, I’d like to sit down. And please don’t call anyone; I’m not human, and they wouldn’t be able to help. I’ll be fine.”

Red came over and gave Serenity something to lean against as they made their way inside and to her couch. Serenity felt almost embarrassed to need the help, but he also felt disconnected from his body. He wasn’t dizzy, but it was similar. He had to think about every movement he made; none of them were automatic.

It reminded him of his Sovereign form, where he only moved as he thought about it. That was easier, though, because movement as a cloud was easier.

The weird thing was that he was in less pain than he had been; even stranger, when he sat down, he realized he wasn’t breathing. Taking a breath brought the pain right back.

Red stood next to Serenity; she didn’t seem to know what to do. Serenity wanted to give her something before she panicked and tried something she shouldn’t - whether that was the mundane act of calling an ambulance or using magic. “Why don’t you call Rissa? She’s seen me like this before.”

She might not have seen him this badly off, but she’d reassure Red anyway.

While Red pulled her phone out, Serenity concentrated on himself. He knew he would passively heal; his healing had merged into his Multiform. Could he figure out why he was still with it? The memory of the experience in the Tutorial cafeteria was still strong, and this damage was possibly worse. Why was he still conscious?

More importantly, could he speed up the healing without ending up in that bad a condition?

Serenity concentrated. Figuring out why he was in better shape than back then seemed like the place to start; he didn’t want to interfere with whatever was keeping himself upright.

It wasn’t hard to find the answer, even if it did take some time and searching. His heart wasn’t beating, because it’d been flash-cooked, which meant his blood wasn’t supplying oxygen to his body or removing waste products. Instead, the secondary crystalline network he’d noticed in the past was extremely active, carrying both mana and essence throughout his body. His still relatively full mana and essence pools were draining at an accelerated rate to keep himself running.

It really was a lot like being undead; an undead needed energy to work as well. This seemed to be Affinity-less, while an undead required a compatible Affinity, but it was similar. The fact that he seemed to be able to switch back and forth was amazing. Unless he wasn’t actually switching? If he normally depended on both, that would explain why running out of mana made him dizzy and then pass out.

Perhaps either system could work, but it seemed likely that his magical network was the true primary one. Which meant that the important node for it wasn’t his heart; his heart was almost an atavism. His magical network was clearly controlled and powered from the crystal in his brain - his core.

His circulatory system must still be doing something useful. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be additional drain on his magic.

At least he now knew what he needed to avoid tampering with.

Serenity concentrated on his forms. His armor-self was injured, but not badly; now that he was looking, he could see that it also had a magical network running through it, but it didn’t seem to have a single core. Instead, there was a central node for each piece of armor; the networks melded together at the joints, but were still somehow separate. The main node for his chest was on his back, a vertical line of crystal running more or less above his spine. It was undamaged.

His actual body, on the other hand, was even more damaged than he’d thought. Energy - magic - was flowing into him from his armor-self. Interesting but not really helpful right now.

Serenity concentrated on both of them. He knew what they were like when they were undamaged; he ought to be able to shift them there. That was what Multiform did, after all.

There was resistance; Serenity knew it was from his own knowledge that he was hurt. It was just like casting a spell; if you thought about what you wanted to change, nothing would happen because you were thinking of the present. You had to think about what you wanted, where you wanted the magic to go.

Intent was everything.

Serenity concentrated on becoming himself and his armor. The image fixed in his mind was healthy and clean, as though he’d just put the armor on.

A moment later, he felt the shift take hold. The increased drain on his mana and essence stopped, and Serenity found that he felt much better. He might be capable of functioning purely on magic, but it still didn’t seem to work perfectly for his human body.

The fact that it was a human body probably had something to do with that.

Serenity started to get up and go find Red, but there was an unexpected weight in his lap. When he looked down, he found a rough lump of charcoal. He stared at it for a moment before realizing that it must have been the mass that was too badly damaged to be recognized by his body as part of itself. Serenity wasn’t certain why his shapeshifting would have made new mass instead of reusing the dead flesh, but it certainly seemed to have done so.

A quick check of his mana reserves revealed that it was as he’d expected, but his essence reserve was quite a bit lower than when he’d checked before shifting. That must have been where the mass came from.

Serenity decided not to mention it to anyone and tucked the charred flesh into his Rift. He’d dispose of it properly later; he might even ask Ita for help. At the minimum, he’d want to cleanse any magical connection between it and himself. Simply putting it where no one knew what it was might be enough, but that wasn’t always good enough. The damage that could be done by hair or nail clippings was present but limited; blood and flesh were more powerful links, even though the charring would reduce the quality of the link.

Serenity wasn’t certain where Red had gone, but now that he felt better, he wanted to find her.

“...ambulance.” Red’s voice led Serenity up a short half-flight of stairs and around a corner. The door to the bedroom was open, and Red was seated in a recliner facing mostly away from the door. It faced a television, which was fortunately off.

The positioning made Serenity’s neck hair rise. Someone sitting there would only see things out of the corner of their eye, whether it was from the hallway or the window. Not that Red should have to worry about that.

“Red?” Serenity stepped fully into the room, then spoke when it was clear she hadn’t noticed him. “Thanks for the chance to sit down for a minute.”

“Serenity? How are you - what happened to your injury? Did you change armor?” Red seemed completely surprised by his appearance.

Serenity looked down and smiled; there were a few smudges on his armor, but they weren’t obvious. He looked as though he’d never been hurt. “I told you that I heal quickly. That includes the armor.”

Serenity could hear someone talking from the other end of the phone line. “Is that Rissa? Please tell her I’m fine.”

Red lifted the phone to the side of her head. “He says he’s fine.”

Serenity grinned imagining what Rissa’s reply might be.

The smile fell off his face as he took a better look at Red. She looked paler than he remembered. Paler than she had when she met him outside. Was she that worried about him, or was it something else?

Helios had looked at the curse and done something to it before he attacked Serenity.

Serenity switched to his mana and essence sight. She looked very different from how she’d looked when Helios was looking at her; there was no golden webwork around everything. There was only a dark red-brown haze. The haze seemed the most concentrated around a spot on the left side of her chest; if Serenity remembered his anatomy correctly, that was probably her spleen.

He could be wrong; it could be her stomach. He didn’t think it was, but he’d always paid less attention to organs that weren’t fast kills. Bleeding out wasn’t fast enough.

[Quest award invalidated by participant Helios]

[Replacement Quest Reward awarded to Serenity: Helios’s knowledge of the curse]

The world seemed to freeze, and Serenity suddenly knew.

It was technically a curse, but only in that it was invasive and unwanted. It was truly a way for something to spread and gather power; it leeched power from everyone it touched. It weakened its hosts, but didn’t try to kill them. The dead couldn’t provide power, after all.

It couldn’t spread on its own. Its own nature required a carrier. That was one of the reasons for the golden cage it had been in before Helios died; the “blessing” spread easily to each new generation.

The other main effect was to disguise the curse as a blessing of Helios, even though he wasn’t the one who placed it. Serenity knew that, because Helios had known it; he’d known how to search for the man who actually placed the blessing as a home for the curse.

Apollyon, the destroyer. A god Helios despised and feared who enjoyed pretending to be others. Especially Apollo; despite their similar names, they were enemies and Apollyon loved turning Apollo’s followers against him. He wasn’t afraid to do it to Helios, either, or anyone else that caught his fancy. This was exactly Apollyon’s style; a hidden canker eating away at the heart of everything that wouldn’t be seen until it crashed down in an unexpected shambles.

Serenity knew, as Helios had, that there were thousands of people with the curse hidden in them, giving Apollyon far more power than Helios. Helios had pulled on the string of the blessing and gathered information from it that Serenity would never have been able to, because it was in some sense “his”. He also knew that the “blessing” was completely gone now.

Serenity didn’t know how to remove the curse. He needed help, and he didn’t think it was available on Earth. He’d talk to Blaze the next time he was in a Tutorial. Maybe Blaze would have a clue.

Worse, he knew some of the people it was on, anyone he’d ever met in person who had it. There were many more who he’d know if he met them.

Rissa was not on the list. Serenity’s new knowledge told him that if it had lasted until the Wasp Dungeon, it was eradicated then and there. A species change was plenty to strip out a curse that operated on a genetic link. It was also possible that activating her Unbound bloodline had something to do with it, but Serenity didn’t think so; Helios’s knowledge seemed to indicate that the Fate issues were tied to the blessing, not the curse.

Come to think of it, he still needed to make a second Unbound Fate Essence Seed. He’d meant to, but then he’d gotten busy and simply forgotten about it.

Jacob was also not on the list. Serenity must have destroyed the portion of the curse that was in him, just as he’d thought.

Phoebe and Red had two of the stronger versions of the curse, but neither was the strongest.

There was one person who was cursed that Serenity felt especially bad about: former President Stewart. His insistence that magic wasn’t real made all too much sense when combined with the knowledge that he’d had the same curse as Jacob.