Yurui The Cursed One

Kika catches Arisa just in time before she hits the floor.

Her wings snap wide for balance as she lowers her carefully. Kika keeps one hand behind Arisa’s neck while Judy presses the bundled jacket against what remains of her wrist. Leon is already on the phone, stumbling over the numbers on its virtual keyboard as half the room crowds closer and the other half shouts useless instructions. Judy keeps rotating her jacket around the stump as if that was going to stop the bleeding faster while Leon desperately shouts for someone to call an ambulance. Other students crowd around them, holding Arisa’s shoulders and stroking her hair as Kika keeps repeating her name.

“Arisa.”

“Stay with me.”

“Keep pressure on it!”

“Arisa, look at me.”

I stare at them.

The usual smirks and whispers are gone. But so is the panic. The students come together and organize themselves around Arisa.

Mira drops to her knees beside Arisa, brushing the hair from her face as she murmurs reassurances into her ear. Elise takes Arisa’s uninjured hand and keeps holding on even when her claws break the skin.

“Stay awake.”

“Help is coming.”

“You’re going to be okay.”

They speak to Arisa so calmly that, for a moment, I could almost mistake them for nurses.

Mira and Elise.

I have shared a classroom with them for years, and I cannot remember either of them ever speaking to me.

When I first transferred here, I thought Elise looked kind of cool. She had fully committed to the whole gothic aesthetic thing- black clothes, dark makeup, dyed hair, silver jewellery. Everything about her seemed deliberate.

Mira was different. There was nothing especially striking about her, but plain seemed to suit her.

Unlike me.

I had almost forgotten people could sound this gentle.

This morning, I watched my mother die in a car wreck, I didn’t even get to grieve properly when I walked into this room with dried blood beneath my clothes and half my body still aching, and not one of them asked if I was okay.

But the moment Arisa starts bleeding, everyone rushes to her side acting as though the whole world was on fire.

One of the boys near the front glances back at me. I do not remember his name, but the disgust on his face is unmistakable.

I meet his eyes, and he quickly looks away.

Let them hate me. At least this way I know exactly where I stand.

Sophie surges to her feet, but Kamila catches her sleeve and pulls her back before she can take a single step.

“Don’t,” Kamila says, tightening her grip on Sophie’s sleeve.

Sophie tears free.

She is pale enough that I can see the fear in her face, but she keeps coming anyway. Her stride falters once when she glances toward Arisa, then steadies as her eyes return to me.

Whatever she thinks I might do to her, it is not enough to make her stop.

“How dare you?” Her voice breaks. “How dare you do that to Miss Arisa?”

Sophie stops beside Arisa just long enough to get a good look at the bloody stump of her arm. Whatever fear she still had left in her seems to vanish at the sight of it.

She spins around and drives her foot into my shin.

Her whole body twists behind the kick, and her shoe cracks against the hardened flesh beneath my torn uniform.

The impact reaches me as little more than a dull tap.

Sophie looks down at my leg, then back up at me. The anger in her face slips for an instant.

She opens her mouth.

My hand closes over her face before she can make a sound.

For a moment, I do not understand why her face feels so small in my grip. My palm covers nearly everything from her chin to her forehead, and my fingers curl past the edges of her jaw.

This is not the hand I had at the start of the fight. It is broader now, heavier, the fingers stretched longer beneath the dark plates of armor.

Sophie goes still as the same realization reaches her.

Her breath warms the centre of my palm. Both hands close around my wrist, pulling desperately, but my grip does not shift. Her nails scrape across the dark plates covering my skin, searching uselessly for something they can catch on.

For a moment, I consider yanking her around for a bit and leaving it at that.

The thought barely has time to form before the anger surges through me, my grip tightens. I twist at the waist and hurl her across the room.

Her feet leave the floor so easily that, for an instant, she seems almost weightless. Then she slams into the wall beside the windows. Plaster erupts around her shoulders. The back of her head strikes the hard surface a fraction of a second later with a dull, heavy thud, and her body collapses beneath the shallow crater she leaves behind.

A wave of gasps breaks across the classroom.

Then everything goes quiet.

“Sophie!”

A high pitched, panicked cry breaks the silence and leaves my ears ringing.

Kamila and Leon reach for her together. Kamila drops beside her head while Leon grabs her shoulders, repeating her name so quickly that the syllables run together.

Sophie lies where she fell, her body unnaturally limp

Then she curls weakly, and a thin sound slips from her throat. Blood begins to creep down the cracked wall behind her.

I stare at my hand, waiting for the guilt to come.

Whenever I hurt someone, it usually consumes me afterward. It never matters who started it or whether they deserved what happened. Hurting another person has always felt wrong. But as I look at Sophie crumpled beneath the cracked wall, it never comes.

Instead, a grim satisfaction settles over me. Maybe now she will think twice before coming after me again.

Yashiro brings her fist down against the desk. The heavy thud cuts through the noise and pulls my attention toward her.

She is staring at me with a look I have never seen on her face before.

Her face remains almost perfectly composed, but the anger shows in the tension along her jaw, the slow breath she draws through her nose, and the slight movement of her tongue behind her teeth as she prepares to speak.

Her lips part.

My muscles tense before she makes a sound, already bracing for the moment her voice take a hold of me.

The memory of that sudden stillness is ingrained in every muscle—the way my joints locked and my breath caught as my own body turned against me. I remember being trapped in the backseat of my own mind, forced to watch my limbs obey her while I remained fully conscious and powerless to stop it.

One word from her, and I will have to endure all of it again.

I do not give her the chance.

Before a sound can leave her mouth, I launch myself across the classroom.

The floor cracks beneath my first step. My legs carry me much farther than I expect, nearly sending me past her, and I smash through the corner of a desk as I wrench myself back around.

The force of my charge carries us into the wall. Yashiro’s spine strikes first, hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling, while desks overturn and the surrounding students scramble out of our path.

The newly formed hand closes around her throat before she can force out a command. I lift her against the wall until her shoes hang several inches above the floor.

For the first time since I met her, I am the one in control.

“Shh,” I whisper. “You’ve had your turn already. You do as I say now.”

Yashiro’s eyes narrow, already searching for a way out. Even with my hand around her throat, I can see her thinking- testing the limits of my grip, weighing how much air she has left, looking for the smallest opening she can use to take hold of me again.

My fingers tighten, and something pleasantly close to excitement stirs inside me.

Yashiro always wears the same expression—that cold, effortless composure nothing ever seems able to disturb. Her gaze remains chillingly placid, so devoid of human warmth that at a glance you could mistake her for a doll.

For once, I want to see what it looks like when she loses control.

I want to be the one who finally wipes that expression from her face.

Something inside me salivates at the thought of being the one to finally crack her open- to see what is hiding beneath that perfect, doll-like face.

To find out whether there is anything human behind the facade after all.

Yashiro claws at my wrists, her nails skittering uselessly across the armor. Color spreads slowly across her face, but her eyes remain fixed on mine, cold and watchful even as her body begins to give out on her.

“Come on,” I whisper. “Show me.”

She drives a knee into my chest, then again. The blows barely register.

Her eyes begin to water. Still, her expression refuses to break.

Frustration twists into anger.

After everything she has done, she does not get to remain untouched. She does not get to look down on me while her life rests in my hands.

“Show me something !”

I slam her against the wall again.

A violent pressure builds through my shoulder.

My arm lengthens in a sudden, violent rush, bone cracking beneath the flesh. The bone drives forward through the shoulder before the surrounding muscle can stretch to contain it, tearing something deep inside my chest. The hand around Yashiro’s throat spasms shut.

Yashiro convulses in my grip. A strangled noise squeezes through her crushed throat as my fingers tighten far beyond anything I intended.

The room blurs around me until there is nothing left but pain.

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