After Vespera cured the beastkin Kato from the curse, we gave him some time to regain consciousness so that he could tell us how he felt.
As we waited, my companion told me that the black flower tattoo was marked on their hearts, which was the reason why we couldn’t see it anywhere on their bodies.
When we realized that Kato wouldn’t wake up until the next day, we left him to rest, and I got the sleep that I was missing from the previous evening that we spent flying to the battlefield.
The following morning, we checked on Kato, and the tiger beastkin was awake, looking quite energetic.
He was able to confirm that the curse was gone, saying that he didn’t feel the same heavy feeling in his heart that he had been carrying all along.
"I just hope Zagor didn’t find out..." said Kato, elaborating on how the curse worked.
Now that he was able to talk without the demonic magic threatening him, he gave us all of the details.
All beastkin soldiers had been cursed the same way as Kato, explaining that it mainly worked as a tracker for Zagor to see how many soldiers were still alive and strategize based on that.
Of course, it wasn’t just tracking their lives but also silencing them, as they couldn’t mention anything related to the devil or the curse, or it would activate and give them a painful death.
If a person died by the curse, Zagor would notice and order to kill their families at Kalusia for betraying the devil.
However, if they died in battle, the devil would simply let it go as war casualties, and their families would receive notice of their dead relatives.
Kato told us that Zagor only valued strength and power, so if soldiers died battling for him, he would respect his word and not touch their families. Nonetheless, that didn’t mean their families were living a happy life.
Everyone in the country was enslaved as the devil had the entire population working to manufacture weapons with the goal of turning Kalusia into the biggest "war factory" in the world.
Most adults were sent to the mines unless they had a special skill that could benefit Zagor’s army, like being a blacksmith or a crafter.
He told us that some kids were also sent to the mines while the younger ones had to work at the workshop or clean the streets.
The more he told us about Zagor and Kalusia, the angrier I got, but it didn’t compare to the rage that Gina was feeling when she heard Kato speaking.
After he was done elaborating, the tiger beastkin stared at Gina, who was standing on the side of the room with a furrowed brow, clearly unsettled by his words.
"Lady... Would you happen to be a battle-maid?" Kato asked, looking at Gina, making her nod in affirmation.
Kato smiled with relief. "Then... Is the king...?" he tried asking.
"He is alive. The whole royal family is..." Gina replied as she slowly approached the man.
Kato had a few tears swelling in his eyes, expressing how happy he was to hear those news, as Zagor had told the nation that the royal family had been eradicated.
The man switched his gaze toward me and my companions and chuckled, not sarcastically, but with genuine happiness.
"The hope that we were all clinging to..." he muttered.
We asked Kato what he wanted to do since the empress said that she would give shelter to all of the Kalusia defectors, but the man said that he wanted to keep fighting for the freedom of his country.
As Gina took Kato to get some food and gear for battle, Vespera and I stayed with the other prisoners since it was their turn to get healed.
The problem was that I had never driven my hand through someone’s chest, so I was feeling nervous about messing up and actually killing the patient.
’I mean. Who’s gonna blame me for feeling nervous about driving my hand through someone’s chest like a dagger!?’ I thought.
Still, I asked Vespera to teach me properly how to do it and where and when to stop my hand since she seemed to stop it right as she reached their hearts.
My companion did it a few times to show me as she healed some of the cursed beastkins, but honestly, every time she did, it was just as traumatizing as the first one.
When I thought I was ready, I tried it on my first patient and followed her same procedure.
I sighed with a bit of nervousness, coated my hand with holy panacea, and drove it through the man’s chest, splashing a little bit of blood on me.
When I felt his heartbeat had stopped, I grazed his heart with my hand so the panacea could heal the curse, cast a very weak lightning spell to reset it, and slowly retracted my hand.
After closing the wound, the man stayed unconscious, but his heart was beating, and his breathing was steady, ending my first operation as a success.
It took us days to heal all of the beastkins that we had captured, and since more battles kept happening every day, we just kept receiving more and more patients non-stop.
Sometimes, we would have to move to another camp in the middle of the desert as the empire’s army kept advancing and driving the Kalusia army back to their borders.
During all that time, I kept sending messages to Melina explaining the situation to her. It was strange because I felt like I didn’t want to worry her, but I also felt like I wanted to talk to her.
Reinar was still researching the black pearl, but he sent me a few voice messages saying that he was making progress and working to "revert" the magic inside it.
I didn’t exactly understand what he meant since I had to see it, but he sounded confident in his words, so I just let him do his thing.
It was naive of me to think that my companions and I could end this war as soon as possible, as the realization that liberating Kalusia would take us months simply because of all the threats their citizens were under started to dawn on us.
If I flew straight to Kalusia and tried attacking Zagor at the capital, he could activate the curses on his soldiers and kill them all just to spite me, so we had to keep advancing slowly until he had no choice but to confront us.