Yurui The Cursed One

The battered girl limps through the desert.

Every step drives pain through her legs. Sand works its way into her torn shoes, grinding against the skin beneath, but she keeps moving. If she stops, she’ll have to face her thoughts, and she isn’t ready for that.

“Fuck you,” she mutters, her voice barely louder than the wind. “Fuck them. Fuck everyone.”

The words taste bitter in her mouth as she thinks of her mother and her friend.

Especially her friend.

“Fuck them,” she mutters again.

“I’m done.”

Her hands curl into fists.

“I’m done taking shit from everyone.”

Never again.

She will never let someone order her around again. Never trust another smiling face or believe another promise. Never wait obediently while someone else decides her fate for her.

Let the consequences come.

For once, they can be someone else’s problem.

A small smile pulls at the corner of her split lip.

“Thank you, Violet. You were the reality check I needed. It reminded me that people could not be trusted. All of you are nothing more but a walking, talking, shitting piles of filth.”

The girl walks in silence, her fists clenched tight, her gaze set firmly on distant glimmering lights of Miracle City.

Miracle City never sleeps. It bustles at every hour of the day, no quieter at midnight than it is at noon.

Even this late, crowds flood between the towers and elevated rails beneath enormous screens that paint the pavement in shifting colors. Music leaks from storefronts. Advertisements call down from the buildings. Trains scream overhead while thousands of voices blur into one endless, suffocating noise.

Ivy keeps his head lowered and pushes through the crowd.

His hood hides most of his face, and a scarf covers the rest. Despite the warm night and the sweat running down his back, he’s wearing three of clothing thick enough to obscure the shape of his body.

People stare at him as they pass him by.

Or perhaps they do not.

Sometimes he can no longer tell.

A woman glances in his direction, and his stomach tightens.

She knows.

Of course she knows.

How could she not?

He turns away before she can get a better look at his face. The crowd closes around him, bodies pressing against his shoulders, his arms, his back. Someone drives an elbow into his ribs and keeps moving without so much as an apology. Another person shoves past hard enough to make him stumble.

Too many people.

Too much noise.

Too much skin.

His phone vibrates in his hand.

The address is still there.

Angel Street 54.23.

He has checked it so many times since entering the district that he has lost count, but the numbers in his head refuse to change.

54.23

They are really here.

After all these years…

Just imagining himself finally standing face-to-face with the people who ruined him is enough to send his heart pounding. Excitement coils tightly in his chest, almost indistinguishable from rage.

A man barrels through the crowd and slams directly into him.

Ivy loses his footing. His phone slips from his hand and strikes the pavement. “Watch where you’re

—”

He lowers his hand and reaches for the phone.

Someone steps on his fingers.

A sharp crunch cuts through the noise. Pain flashes up his arm as his hand is crushed against the phone, its screen splintering beneath his palm. The person responsible does not stop. They do not even glance down before disappearing into the crowd.

Ivy remains crouched in the middle of the street, staring at his mangled hand while shoes pass inches from his face. People stream around him as though he is nothing more than another obstacle in their path. Blood wells between his fingers, dark and thick, then drips onto the shattered phone.

Smoke curls from the broken screen.

Another drop falls, and a tiny flame flickers to life.

Someone clips his shoulder with a shopping bag hard enough to jolt him forward.

“Move, freak.”

The word rises above the surrounding noise.

Freak.

It cuts through him like a blade, reopening a wound that never truly healed. Perhaps the stranger did not actually say it. The street is loud enough to swallow half a sentence, and it could have been anything.

It does not matter.

Ivy rises slowly, his injured hand trembling at his side.

People continue pushing past him. None of them care that he is bleeding. None care that his phone is burning at his feet. They move around him with irritated looks, as though his existence is an inconvenience they should not have to tolerate.

His injured hand begins to shake.

No.

Not here.

He needs to remain calm.

The people at the bar matter. These people do not. They are strangers. Irritating, careless, filthy strangers, but strangers nonetheless.

One of them bumps him again.

His arm whips forward.

Blood scatters across the crowd.

For a heartbeat, nothing happens.

A man in a gray jacket glances down at the dark spots staining his sleeve. Beside him, a woman wipes a drop from her cheek and stares at the smear left across her fingertips.

Then their skin begins to smoke.

The woman’s scream rises above the crowd as fire races across her face.

The man’s jacket ignites a second later. He thrashes wildly and crashes into the people around him, spreading the flames to their clothes. Someone screams for water, and that is all it takes for the crowd to break into panic.

Within seconds, the entire street goes crazy.

Bodies slam into one another as the crowd tries to flee in every direction at once. Burning people stagger blindly through them, clutching at strangers who recoil too late. The fire spreads from coat to coat, hair to hair, skin to skin.

Ivy does not move as the screaming swells around him. For one satisfying moment, he lets himself enjoy it—then the mass of people finally breaks and scatters in every direction.

People disappear into side streets and storefronts, leaving discarded bags, shoes, and burning scraps of clothing behind. Somewhere in the distance, an alarm begins to wail.

Ivy looks at the empty pavement.

Finally.

Some peace and quiet.

He bends down and picks up what remains of his phone. The casing has partially melted against the ground.

The address is no longer visible, but it does not matter. He has checked it enough times to know it by heart.

The bar stands near the city center, wedged between a private clinic and a jewelry store guarded by two stone-skinned men in black suits. A small golden emblem is stamped into the dark glass beside the entrance, but there is no name above the door.

Angel Street 54.23.

Ivy stops across the street and stares at it.

His injured hand is still bleeding, so he presses it against the inside of his coat while smoke drifts between the buildings behind him. They are inside. They have to be.

The information had come from people with no reason left to lie, not after he had done so much to earn their trust. Still, he had been disappointed before. The organization had fed him countless names over the years, each one supposedly connected to the institute. Security guards. Couriers. Technicians whose only real crime had been working in the wrong building.

Grunts.

He had killed them anyway.

Tonight was supposed to be different. The names on the list belonged to people he remembered—people whose faces still haunted him every time he closed his eyes.

Ivy crosses the street.

Warm air rolls over him as he pushes open the door. Music pulses through the floor, deep enough to vibrate in his bones, while well-dressed men and women crowd around tables beneath chandeliers made from suspended glass feathers.

Everyone inside looks like they where having a good time.

That alone is enough to make Ivy hate them.

A server gives his clothing a doubtful glance but does not stop him. Perhaps the staff have grown accustomed to unusual guests gathering around the private tables near the front. Or perhaps they are paid well enough not to ask questions.

Ivy sees the woman in white almost immediately, and his body goes rigid.

She sits with one leg crossed over the other, laughing over the rim of a crystal glass. Her suit is immaculate, streaked with gold, and the hair framing her face has gone almost entirely white.

She has aged.

Not enough to make her unrecognizable.

For a moment, Ivy is no longer looking at the woman seated across the bar. He sees her as she was years ago, leaning over him beneath surgical lights while he screamed around the tube forced down his throat.

Temperature remains stable.

Her voice had been calm. Almost bored.

Increase the iron concentration.

His knees threaten to give beneath him.

Six others sit around her, all of them former senior staff from the Medical Institute. Supervisors. Researchers. People who had watched his body split, burn, and reform until there was barely anything human left beneath his skin. One of them had held his jaw shut while they cut into his gums. Another had complained when Ivy’s blood ruined his shoes.

Now they sit together drinking, laughing, celebrating as though none of it had ever happened.

Ivy’s hands close into fists. The wounded one splits open further, and blood runs between his knuckles before dripping onto the polished floor.

He came here for this.

Every filthy assignment. Every person he frightened, maimed, or killed. Every time he swallowed his hatred and obeyed people he despised because they promised him another name, another location, another step closer to the institute.

It had all been for this moment.

He told himself he was not their dog. Dogs obeyed without understanding why. Ivy understood perfectly. He needed access- targets, names, records, the kind of information Miracle Inc buried beneath security clearances and erased identities, so he had no choice but to accept the chain around his throat.

He had done things that sickened him.

But he was not evil.

Not really.

Evil killed without purpose. Ivy was preventing future victims. Making sure no one else woke beneath those lights and discovered that their body no longer belonged to them.

That was different.

It had to be.

The woman in white lifts her glass, and her gaze drifts lazily across the room until it settles on him. At first, there is only mild irritation in her expression.

Then she notices the blood.

Her smile fades.

Ivy watches recognition spread across her face. Her eyes widen. Her lips part.

“No,” she whispers.

One of the men beside her glances over. “What?”

She surges to her feet so quickly that her chair crashes to the floor. Conversations falter around them, and a security guard immediately starts across the room.

The woman never takes her eyes off Ivy.

“Security.”

The guard quickens his pace.

Ivy remains perfectly still.

“Sir,” the man calls as he approaches. “I’m going to need you to—”

“Don’t touch his blood!” the woman shouts.

The guard hesitates.

Too late.

Ivy flicks his injured hand. A thin arc of blood crosses the space between them and strikes the guard beneath the eye.

The man flinches. His skin blackens almost instantly, and he manages half a scream before fire erupts across his face.

For several seconds, the music continues.

People stare as the guard staggers backward, clawing at his burning skin. A man in a red suit lunges from his seat and overturns the table beside him, sending glasses shattering across the floor. The room erupts into motion.

“Everyone, transform!” the woman in white screams.

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