Moving forward through the Varzen Forest was like walking through a conscious nightmare. Each step seemed to take me deeper into a place that was not meant for humans.

The tall, dry trees closed in like columns of a natural prison. Their branches, bent and intertwined, formed a kind of ceiling that kept the darkness constant.

Rosella was walking silently beside me, only the sound of her boots mingling with mine. I noticed how she kept her eyes constantly moving, her right hand resting on the hilt of her sword, ready to react to any strange movement. She was talented.

After a while, the trunks and roots began to disappear, the uneven dirt ground began to turn into stone slabs covered with lichen, and as we advanced, the contours of walls built of gray bricks appeared, broken, partially swallowed by dead vegetation.

"Was this... a fort?" Rosella asked, surprised, when she saw the building in front of us.

"Yes, it was."

Like every small village in the medieval era, this one seemed to have had a population that thought itself superior—whether military or noble.

However, I replied, the fallen gate of rusty iron, the cracks opened by roots that had infiltrated over the years, and the fact that the roof no longer existed, it seemed that feeling superior was not enough for the people who lived inside this fort. Rosella touched one of the walls, her fingertips sliding across the damp, cold brick.

"And you want to go inside this place that's falling apart?" she asked.

"The entrance to the boss room on the first floor is in the basement here. We have no choice. But we shouldn't expect to make it to the basement unscathed. There will definitely be another ambush."

She turned her face to me, raising an eyebrow. "How do you know?"

"It's just a hunch."

Of course it wasn't. I knew exactly where we were, I knew exactly what kind of curse afflicted this place and the origin of it all. However, I couldn't tell her that, in my world, that forest, the Tower of Babel, and even she were just descriptions in a novel. All I had left was to justify it with vague words like "intuition."

We entered through what remained of the fort's main gate. The interior was as dark as the rest of the region. The air smelled of rust, dust, and old blood. As soon as we stepped inside, the shrill sound of iron against stone echoed.

CLANG!

The iron gate crashed down behind us, closing off our escape route. The noise echoed through the interior of the fort, so loud that it seemed to scream the obvious truth: there was no turning back.

"Just as you said..." Rosella murmured.

"I should have bet with you, so I could have won at least a coin for being right."

And, as if my warning were an inevitable prophecy, they appeared. Two, four, eight... soon more than a dozen people emerged from the shadows of the fort, both below and above where the archers stood. They all walked stiffly, like poorly manipulated puppets. They were men and women, some wearing remnants of armor, others wearing ordinary Climber clothing, but they all had one thing in common: their eyes shone an intense green, the same green as the eyes of crows and the masks of the bush creatures.

The expression on Rosella's face hardened in shock. "Humans...?"

"Not anymore. They are shells, puppets of the curse."

Then the ground shook. Heavy footsteps echoed, accompanied by the creaking of metal. From the rubble on the opposite side emerged an imposing figure. A large knight, dressed in gleaming golden armor, but broken in several places. With each movement, the armor creaked as if it were about to fall apart. The helmet hid any human features, but the eyes, two green slits, glowed.

Silence hung heavy for a moment, until a slow, sharp, drawn-out voice, almost as if it were difficult to articulate each word, came out of the knight's mouth.

"H-how dare you... enter... my... domain...!?"

That was the curse itself speaking through that man. It did not sound wise or majestic. On the contrary, the thin tone did not match the childish, almost petulant "Avatar" behind the threat.

"And you were... arrogant... I... do not... like... arrogance."

Rosella, who had seemed tense since entering this place, arched her eyebrows in disbelief. Her mouth opened slightly, as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"Is that... the Curse of Varzen?" she whispered to me, almost indignantly. "Something so feared... speaking like that?"

That was the style of the curse: powerful and intelligent, yes, but without the composure or wisdom that its reputation suggested. The mere fact that a curse had consciousness was frightening, but it was difficult to take a knight possessed by a curse seriously when he had the voice and personality of a spoiled child. It seemed pathetic.

"Ar-ro-gan-cy..." repeated the golden knight, banging his rusty blade against the floor, producing a crash that made the walls shake. "It will be pu-n-ished... by me... se-vere-ly."

Rosella snorted softly, disappointed. "Frankly... I expected something different."

I put a hand in front of my mouth to try to stifle my laughter a little, but it was useless.

"Y-y-you are... la-ughing... at... me?... Servants... a-tta-ck..."

The servants around me obeyed immediately, but the result was... unexpected. The archers pulled their strings with shaky movements, like poorly adjusted puppets. The arrows cut through the air aimlessly, some hitting the walls, others falling to the ground before even reaching halfway between us. Not one even grazed us.

Rosella's eyes widened for a moment, and then she burst into sincere, loud, almost mocking laughter.

"This... this is ridiculous!" she said, laughing so hard she had to rest her hand on her knee. "Is this the dreaded curse of the first floor? I was really worried!"

Her laughter was like salt in the golden knight's wounds.

"S-s-shut... your... MOUTH!"

The cursed knight roared, shattering the air like glass with his own voice. And then he advanced toward us with his sword raised.

When the sword came down on Rosella, I had the distinct impression that the blade was splitting the air itself in two. But in the blink of an eye, the knight flew backward.

I don't know if it was the blade of her sword, her fist, or just the brute strength that Rosella carried in her body thanks to Aura Manipulation. What I do know is that she didn't even seem to move when the knight was thrown back through the air as if he were made of paper. The golden armor crashed into the bricks at the back, cracking the wall and raising a cloud of dust.

The entire fort shook as Rosella stood upright, her expression cold as ice. The laughter was gone, replaced by a look that bordered on contempt.

I, on the other hand, needed a few seconds to process what had just happened.

The knight was slow to get up, groaning, each metal plate creaking like broken bones. When he finally raised his head, the curse seemed... confused. That mask of childish arrogance gave way to an awkward silence, as if the creature couldn't comprehend the reality it had just witnessed.

"Im... im-pos-si-ble..."

And for the first time, I realized that the fear was not only in us, but within the curse itself.

"You're scary," I said to Rosella.

Rosella looked away from me and her cheeks flushed. "I... just reacted on instinct. I didn't even realize what I was doing."

I shook my head slowly with a wry smile. "Yeah... but you ended up scaring him." I pointed ahead, and she followed my gesture with her gaze.

The golden knight, who minutes ago had roared that he would punish us, was now literally running in fear toward the depths of the fort. As he moved away, the archers and warriors under his control began to fall, one by one, collapsing like puppets without strings. Some groaned softly, others simply collapsed to the ground, freed from the influence of the curse and also dead.

Rosella's eyes widened in disbelief. "He... he's running away!? No, I won't accept that. We're going after him right now!"

She took a step forward, but before she could advance, I held her firmly by the shoulder.

"Calm down. That knight wasn't the real enemy. He was just an avatar. A puppet."

"An avatar?

Are you saying that the true body of the curse is still out there?"

"Not just out there... He is the boss we came to face. The true body of the Curse of Varzen."

Rosella frowned, shaking her head as if I had said something heretical. "No... impossible. The diagrams I studied, the notes about the boss on the first floor... It was a hideous, plant-like thing, a giant eye stuck in a nest of roots. How can it be the same creature?"

"Exactly. That appearance you described is the true form of the curse. It disguises itself, creates avatars, and possesses others, but the true body is that abomination you described."

Rosella was silent for a few seconds. "So... if we defeat this boss, will the curse end?"

I took a deep breath. "No. It has been killed several times, but The Curse of Varzen is an inevitable being. It is reborn. Always. We can win the battle, but never the war. It is part of the nature of the Tower of Babel."

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