Yurui The Cursed One

My legs give out, and I hit the tiles hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs.

Pain blooms in my throat, then races through the rest of me.

My shoulders. My arms. My stomach. My legs.

Arisa’s claws carve thin, precise lines across my entire body, moving so fast that I cannot tell where one wound ends and the next begins. By the time I force my arm forward, pain has already hollowed the strength out of it.

I swing anyway.

Calling it a punch would be generous. My arm merely flaps toward her face. Arisa catches my hand before it gets anywhere near her.

For half a second, she only stares at my fist. Then her expression twists, and her free hand lashes across my face.

Pain bursts through my entire head. My body jerks beneath her, the back of my head striking the tiles as the classroom dissolves into a red blur.

Dark shapes swim through what remains of my vision. Arisa stands somewhere above me, little more than a smear of golden fur and movement. I can hear her breathing. I can smell my own blood spilling down my cheeks.

She was already tearing me apart when I could see.

Now I am nearly blind.

This should be the point where I stay down. Where I curl into myself, beg her to stop, and hope she leaves enough of me behind for Miss Maevis to put back together.

Instead, I press my palms against the floor.

My arms shake violently as I force myself off the ground. Pain tears through every part of me, but I manage to drag one foot beneath my body and push.

Slowly, unsteadily, I rise.

I decided I would never kneel again.

Arisa is going to have to tear my legs off if she wants to keep me down.

Her claws sink into my shoulder before I can finish pulling myself upright. She drags them down across my chest, shredding my uniform and opening the flesh beneath it.

A scream claws its way up my throat, but I bite it back as a faint warmth begins to gather deep inside my chest.

It rises from behind my ribs, buried so deep inside me that I almost mistake it for blood. It grows hotter as Arisa tears her claws free, spreading through my chest like an ember waking beneath a bed of ash.

“My sister was the only important person I ever had!” she screams. Her voice cracks so violently that, for a moment, she sounds younger than either of us. “She took care of me all these years. All on her own!”

I could say the same about my mother, except mine is dead now, and that stupid sister of yours is the reason why.

My jaw tightens, stirring the blood already pooled inside my mouth.

“Heh.”

The sound slips out before I can stop it.

Arisa goes still. “What?”

“Good for you.”

The words come out with another weak laugh, though I am not sure what is so funny. Maybe it is the way she talks about her sister as if being loved by someone makes everything so simple.

My mother loved me too. She worked until her hands shook, ate less whenever there was not enough food, and sometimes came home so exhausted that she fell asleep with her shoes still on.

And then she signed me over to Miracle Inc.

Neither of those things erases the other. Everything she had done for me was real, and so was the moment she handed me over to the highest bidder. She could ruin my life and still be the person I wanted beside me when everything went wrong.

And now she was gone.

Desks scrape somewhere beyond Arisa as frightened whispers move through the classroom. They know about her sister, so they can understand why she is angry. They can pity her. Maybe some of them can even imagine what it would feel like to lose someone that way.

But hey, guess who had to watch her own mother die right in front of her only a few hours ago?

Not that any of them would care. Miss Arisa is upset, and as far as these scumbags are concerned, that is the greatest tragedy in the world.

Another laugh breaks out of me, louder and uglier than the first.

“Fuck you,” I whisper, contempt bleeding into my voice.

Arisa’s breathing stops.

“And fuck your stupid sister.”

For one suspended second, she does not move.

Then her scream rips through the classroom, and she hurls herself at me.

The impact drives me backward. Her claws punch through my stomach before I can brace, sinking so deep that her knuckles slam against my torn uniform. My body jerks around her hand, waiting for the pain to arrive.

It never does.

Warmth gathers inside the wound instead.

It spreads outward from beneath her claws, thick and strangely gentle, filling my abdomen before curling around my spine. The agony that has consumed every part of me begins to recede beneath it. My knees weaken, not from the injury, but from the sudden, overwhelming relief.

Oh.

So this is what dying feels like.

I always thought it would hurt more.

Arisa snarls and twists her claws deeper, tearing something inside me.

The warmth only grows further, deeper.

“Shouldn’t someone stop them?” A boy whispers from somewhere off to my left. His voice trembles, but he does not attempt to come closer. “The dirty girl’s going to die.”

The dirty girl.

That is all I have ever been to them. They do not know my name, where I came from, or what happened to me before I walked into this room. They have watched Arisa tear me apart, and all they could care about was filth on my clothes.

“Nah,” someone else says. “You don’t want to get near Risa right now.”

A pause.

“And Roach deserves it. If she dies, she dies.”

Something inside me gives way.

It is not bone or flesh. It is the part of me that has spent years accepting this as the natural order of things.

My fingers close around Arisa’s wrist. There is barely any strength behind them, and she does not even seem to notice.

I should never have had to live like this.

The thought comes with such sudden clarity that it frightens me. I should have had a warm bed. Enough food to stop counting every mouthful. A home somewhere above the stink of the slums, where no one could buy me, command me, or decide how much suffering I was supposed to endure.

I deserve to live.

More than any of them ever believed I did.

Arisa tears her claws from my stomach and drives her foot into the open wound.

The impact lifts me from the floor. I strike the wall hard enough to crack the plaster, and something hot and heavy spills from my abdomen.

Gasps break across the classroom.

I lower my eyes.

A dark length of intestine hangs through the shredded remains of my uniform.

No one comes closer. No one tries to stop her. They only stare, the same way they stared while the giant centipede tore through the roof. The same way they watched whenever Yashiro ordered me to sit, stand, crawl, obey.

Watching is the one thing everyone at Miracle Academy seems naturally blessed at.

The warmth inside me catches fire.

My spine bows away from the wall as pressure swells beneath my skin. At first, it feels like something crawling through me.

No.

Not crawling.

Growing.

My ribs spread apart with a series of sickening cracks. The sound comes from inside me, deep enough that I feel each one reverberating through my teeth. Black material pushes from the wound in my stomach, flowing over exposed flesh in twitching strands. It wraps around my abdomen, drags the spilling organs back inside, and seals them beneath a layer of dark, glistening armor.

The growth races across my chest, down my arms, and over my legs. It is not hard like metal. The dark material flexes with every movement, tightening over muscle and bending around my joints like a second layer of skin.

Arisa retreats a step, her claws lowering as her gaze follows me upward.

Then my bones begin to lengthen.

The room seems to shrink as my legs stretch beneath me, and my shoulders climb higher. My arms extend until my fingertips hang almost level with my knees.

Pain detonates through my thighs. The muscle tears apart inside them, unable to keep pace with the bones forcing themselves longer, and something snaps near my hip. My right leg folds beneath me, but before I can hit the floor, fresh tissue knots around the break and wrenches me upright again.

My body cannot keep up with its own growth, but the changes continue anyway, stretching bone and knitting flesh as quickly as they break.

Armor climbs my throat and seals around the lower half of my face before spreading over my scalp in overlapping plates. Pressure swells above my temples until two short horns punch through with a pair of sharp, strangely satisfying pops.

Then something shifts beneath the flesh along my left side.

I go rigid as a bulge moves under my ribs, stretching the skin outward. Bone grinds against bone inside me, followed by a wet tearing sound.

Fingers break through first.

A hand follows, slick with blood, then a wrist and forearm wrapped in fresh black armor. The rest unfolds from my side in a violent rush, wrenching itself into place until an entire new arm hangs beneath my left one.

Arisa recoils, her claws lowering as she stares at it.

I do the same.

The new hand opens, closes, then flexes each finger as though it has always belonged there.

Wait.

What the fuck?

Panic surges through me, but my brain, apparently having endured enough for one day, responds with remarkable calm.

Cool.

Extra arm.

More pressure builds along my forearms. Long, curved growths force their way through the armor one after another, folding back against my limbs like the legs of some enormous centipede.

My heartbeat accelerates until the blows begin to blur together. The new flesh is hungry, dragging blood toward itself faster than my body can replenish it.

Darkness throbs at the edges of my damaged vision. Thought gives way to instinct until only three things remain: the threat in front of me, the blood on the floor, and the need to move.

My body reacts before the words fully form. Three hands curl into fists while the hooked growths along my arms spread outward.

Arisa has to tilt her head back to look at me now.

I try to smile, but the armor locked around my jaw turns it into a stiff, painful snarl.

“My turn now.”

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