I Awakened A Divine Curse

That development… that flicker of hope… it was snatched from his hands almost as quickly as it had sparked to life. Again. And again. Each time more brutal than the last.

The deaths—there were so many. And the Sentinel showed no hint of mercy. At some point, Auren realized they followed a pattern. Each time he managed to get back on his feet, to gather his breath and resolve, the Sentinel would end him again.

Cruelly. Methodically. As if trying to find the precise moment he'd stop getting up altogether.

Auren, for all his torment, found himself wondering the same thing.

Through all the pain, all the deaths that rewound like a cursed loop, he clung to one goal.

Get to the throne.

Clashing head-on with the creature was suicidal. He'd tried it—more than once. Each attempt earned him another gruesome, bone-shattering death. He wouldn't recommend it.

Running didn't help either. Even as his body sharpened—stronger, faster, more responsive—the Sentinel simply stripped those gains from him like a god denying fire to mortals.

The Polypheme was just too fast. Unfairly so. If Auren ran ten meters, the knight had already covered a hundred. Every effort to reach the dais ended the same way—undone, broken, wasted. He found himself trapped in a cycle of repetition, swallowed by a maddening kind of death. Not just painful—but frustrating. So very frustrating.

But there was one sliver of progress. One small, growing edge.

Observation.

The Polypheme's swordsmanship—it began to reveal itself.

It wasn't a style that gloried in quick kills. No, Auren didn't believe the Sentinel struck to slay swiftly. And while that may have sounded absurd given how often he'd died under that blade, the realization held weight.

The Polypheme's sword didn't seek to finish the fight with its blow. It sought to end the strike itself. That distinction… it explained the monstrous finality behind each cut.

Even though the Sentinel moved with terrifying speed, its style wasn't built on flourish or deception. There were no needless twirls, no showmanship in its flow. Whether grand or minute, nothing about the motion was wasted.

It was direct.

If Auren had to define it, he'd call the style one of inevitability. Every strike was an omen, a prophecy of ruin. It didn't matter what came before—it only mattered how it ended.

No art. No dance.

Only judgment.

And the reason Auren kept falling to that judgment so quickly was simple. He wasn't even close to the Sentinel's level. The gap between them was astronomical.

The Polypheme was a Catastrophic Wretched.

While Auren… well, he called himself a Minor Nascent.

If that was even a thing. He had coined the term himself, an attempt to explain the oddity that he was. An anomaly. A contradiction.

Someone who could grow as both Cursed and Blessed.

A paradox made flesh.

So, while Auren would never recommend clashing with the Sentinel head-on—sometimes that was the only choice he had.

Even in the face of relentless deaths, he had to move. Somehow. He couldn't afford to stay trapped at the same plateau of failure, circling the same outcome. Stagnation was worse than death.

To push forward, he leaned on the only two things still within his control—his observation and his desperation.

And his futile attempts to reach the throne.

Futile—until they weren't anymore.

He ran. And ran. And died. And died again.

Every time he ran, the death that followed was somehow... gentler. A mercy, when weighed against what awaited him if he dared to fight.

"Mercy" was a strange word to use in this context—but it applied, if only as a grim comparison.

Take, for instance, the time he sprinted forward, and the Sentinel blurred past him in a flash. At first, Auren blinked—stunned that it hadn't struck him.

Until he realized he was still running.

…Without legs.

The horror dawned mid-stride, too late for him to correct or scream. He collapsed. His bone scraping glass. Blood smearing his trail.

Still, he didn't stop.

He crawled.

Dragging what remained of himself towards the dais. Scraping elbows. Tearing fingernails. Breathing through clenched teeth.

Behind him, the Sentinel walked slowly. No rush. Its blade dragged across the glass, scraping a hollow, tormenting screech that gnawed into Auren's skull like something alive. That sound hurt more than the torn muscle screaming from his shredded stumps.

And then, out of what could only be called dark benevolence, the Polypheme brought its sword down into Auren's back—and twisted.

That was mercy. At least, compared to the deaths that came when he tried to fight it.

Those ended in seconds—but every second was brimstone. Fire and fractures. Shattered ribs, twisted necks, crushed lungs—he remembered them all. Vividly.

Still, the record was improving.

He wasn't lasting long—but longer.

Three seconds became four. Then five.

Auren could feel it. Inch by inch. Breath by breath. He was getting better.

The pain didn't lessen. Not in the slightest. But he was starting to understand it.

He and death were becoming familiar. Not in the dreadful, looming way it once was.

No—death was starting to feel like...

An old friend.

One who listened. Who watched silently. Who waited.

And sometimes, when Auren looked back into that darkness after dying, he whispered things to it.

Things no one else could hear.

And the darkness whispered back.

There were two things that gained the most from his deaths.

The first—was Auren himself.

His body was adapting. Hardening. But more importantly, his skills—they were sharpening, growing with a quiet persistence. Each failure didn't just cost him pain. It bought him precision.

The second—was his understanding of swordsmanship.

Not just the Sentinel's devastating style, but his own.

Auren practiced the noble sword style of the Veyne Clan—Light of Hope.

Elegant. Refined. Laced with ceremonial reverence. There were subtle variations in its forms, elegant flourishes passed down through generations. The name itself was broad enough to encompass them all.

Light of Hope.

Auren hated the name.

He hated its idealism. The blind optimism baked into its philosophy—guiding light, unwavering courage, salvation through grace. He'd never believed in any of it.

But the techniques?

The techniques, he respected.

Even from a young—well, younger—age, he'd been trying to reform the style. Bend it. Break it. Twist its form into something that made more sense to him.

His efforts had been... painfully futile.

Futile, in fact, was putting it kindly. He had failed. Over and over again, he had failed.

But now—now—in this place where there was no escape, where death was not an ending but a rhythm, he finally began to see.

There was possibility here. A clarity forged in pain. A structure rising from the ashes of his dying steps.

He could feel the shape of something new. Something born not from hope, but from defiance. Not from grace, but from grit.

He didn't just want to change the philosophy of Light of Hope.

He wanted to replace it.

To build his own sword style.

Something truer. Something his.

And that—he loved.

That was a gift hidden in this endless spiral.

A secret treasure buried beneath the countless corpses he left behind.

[You have been slain by a Catastrophic Wretched: Polypheme of the Dark Times]