Broken

Chapter 64

Despite the pain and cold I was in, laying there on the edge of an icefloe, I couldn't help but feel relief as the headless corpse of Agatha fell to the ground at Kuro's feet. What I wasn't overly happy about was the fact that the head appeared to be rolling towards me. Yet, even trying to move sent pain ricocheting though my arm and chest, alerting me that I may have some cracked ribs or internal damage to go along with my clearly broken arm.

The disgusting head rolled to a stop less than a meter from my face. However, I found myself wishing that was all that had happened. Yet that's never been my kind of luck. As both the body next to Kuro, and the head before my own face began to dissolve into a kind of black snow, it opened it's black eyes, and a grotesque scowl contorted the dead face.

"You may have slain me, Climber, but I have left you with the mark of the Frozen Throne." The banshee stated in a haunting, and very inhuman voice. "It will not be long before Mother gains yet another daughter to replace me."

With that ominous announcement, the banshee faded from existence.

[ You have defeated <Agatha, Third Princess of the Frozen throne>. Your achievement has been recorded.]

[You are currently under the <Curse of the Frozen Throne>. Time until death: 6:21:48:54. Requirements met to lift the curse: 1/4]

[You have leveled up!]

[You have leveled up!]

[You have leveled up!]

"Aoife, how bad are you hurt?" Kuro asks, hurrying past the dark dust that had once been Agatha.

"I can't say I'm great." I grunted as the magic swordsmen knelt in the snow next to me. Actually, I have had worse... Still, who would have though that a being so scrawny and- literally an undead- could hit like a damn truck. I thought she was a mage type, but her physical capabilities had been no joke either.

Things moved rather hectically after the death of Agatha. The guild had gotten separated across the expanse of the lake, and everyone was bone-tired, or grievously injured. With our healers out of commission for a while, we were in god awful shape.

Eventually, everyone managed to gather at the portal once again. I was elated to find that everyone in the main strike force had come out in one piece. The twins were so tired that they had fallen asleep the second they'd stopped moving, Argus was still unconscious after his dunking in the lake- he got fished out by Bryce and Carson- and Nick had to have an ice shard removed from his abdomen. 

As for the B-team... well, they hadn't gotten off as lucky. Their members had gotten far more injured than the main strike force, and two of them had died. We managed to recover one of the bodies, but the other had been lost to the depths of the black lake. A lake which was currently freezing over once again. It was doubtful that we would be able to recover the corpse before we closed the instance, and it would be foolish to risk the lives of other raiders just to recover a body in any case.

Either way, A-team or B-team, they were all members of Chaos, and the guild as a whole mourned it's losses. But any type of funeral or memorial would have to wait. Such was the life of a raider. Chaos was still in the middle of a raid, and that stopped for almost nothing. Right now the guild's main priority was to finish clearing the instance.

To do that, we needed to get the wounded back into fighting condition. And that is where my first new problem showed itself.

All the healers that were brought into the instance were tapped out, so the injured guildmembers needed to leave the instance temporarily in order to get treatment. Yet, when I tried to join the members leaving through the portal, I was met with a system message.