Yurui The Cursed One

Arisa’s screaming grows faint while Sophie has stopped crying altogether. Someone pounds against the classroom door, but the sound sinks beneath the pulse hammering inside my skull. My attention stays fixed on Yashiro’s face, still waiting for that composure to finally break.

“I know there’s something underneath all that composure,” I whisper. “Let’s see what it takes to drag it out.”

The voice that leaves my mouth sounds nothing like the one I heard in my thoughts. It is deeper, distorted, and completely unfamiliar, as though another creature was parroting my words.

Yashiro’s eyes widen.

There. At last, her composure cracks–only slightly at first, just a small tremor at the corner of her mouth, then a sudden flare of panic in her eyes.

I squeeze harder, and whatever restraint she has left collapses. She thrashes against the wall, clawing desperately at my wrist. That placid mask finally begins to crack as she realizes her blessing is not going to save her this time.

Yashiro is visibly terrified, and the sight of it makes my heart thump harder.

I loosen my grip just enough to let her breathe. Her chest jerks against the wall as she drags air through her constricted throat.

Heat crawls beneath my skin.

This is wrong. Deeply, horribly wrong.

And it feels better than almost anything I have ever experienced.

All these years, I wondered what it would take to make that perfect little mask finally slip. Turns out all I had to do was press her a little.

“Yurui!”

Something slams into my side.

The classroom spins as I am torn away from Yashiro and hurled through two desks. I strike the wall beside the windows. The impact shatters the glass behind me, spraying my armor with dozens of glittering fragments.

Kika drops between us, spreading her wings to shield Yashiro from me. She catches her as her knees buckle, then whirls around, antennae twitching with barely contained fury.

“That’s enough, you psychopath!”

Yashiro hangs limply in Kika’s arms, coughing as she drags thin, ragged breaths into her lungs. Kika lowers herself beside the wall and holds her with such care that, for a moment, I can only stare with jealousy.

I hate how badly I want to know what it feels like to be held that way.

Keeping one arm firm around Yashiro’s waist, Kika folds a pale wing around them. Its broad, veined surface closes over Yashiro until I can no longer see her.

“Stay away from her, you freak.”

The word reaches me through the haze.

Freak.

After what I did to Arisa and Sophie, Kika still looks at me with the same contempt, as though I am still someone she can spit on without consequence.

I look past her.

Leon and Kamila kneel beside Sophie, both of them sobbing. Across the classroom, half a dozen students crowd around Arisa while someone holds a blood-soaked jacket against the ruin of her arm.

Everywhere I look, people are reaching for each other, working together as a group. Must be fucking nice to have friends. I’d like to work together with the group too. I'm more of a planner than a fighter anyway, I always have been. It would be pretty fun to pull up with my squad, beat down all the baddies, and then disappear into the night as if nothing ever happened.

Instead…

Arisa disappears beneath a cluster of classmates. Leon and Kamila stay pressed close to Sophie. Kika holds Yashiro against her chest with both arms, gripping her as though someone might tear her away at any moment.

The scene brings bitter memories surging back to the surface.

My mother had no crowd helping her. No friends rushing to her side.

She only had me.

And I still failed her.

“Give her back.”

Kika stares at me as though I have finally lost my mind.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Yashiro.”

My voice emerges lower than before, no longer out of sync with my inner voice.

“Give her back.”

Kika’s arm tightens around her. She leans away, pulling Yashiro farther behind the shelter of her wing.

“Have you lost your mind—”

Before she could finish whatever she was saying, I lunged at her.

Kika should be faster than me.

Well, she would be, if she were not trapped between the wall and a heap of overturned desks, still on her knees with one arm locked around Yashiro. Her wings twitch behind her, unable to spread in the narrow space.

She throws herself sideways, but the overturned desks and scattered chairs leave her nowhere to go. Her wings flare, beating frantically as she forces herself upward.

I lunge after her and seize the base of her left wing, dragging her back down before she can take flight.

Kika screams.

For half a second, the sound cuts through the fog inside my head. Then the murk closes over me again.

I brace myself against the broken tiles and clamp my third hand around the back of her skull, holding her in place while both of my other hands close around the wing. I pull until something crunches inside it.

Pale scales burst into the air in a glittering cloud. The broad membrane stretches taut beneath my grip, its dark veins swelling as the fleshy joint at Kika’s back bends farther than it was ever meant to.

Kika releases Yashiro and twists around, driving her fist into my face. The impact rebounds through her arm hard enough to wrench her shoulder backward.

I barely feel it.

I pull again.

The skin around the base of her wing splits open with a wet tearing sound, the flesh peeling away from her back along an uneven, ragged line.

Kika’s scream intensifies, and the classroom erupts into a mess of terrified shouting. Students shove past one another, some fleeing for the door while others stand frozen in horror. Their screams fade beneath the pressure building inside my skull.

A heavy compression gathers inside my arm. Beneath the armor, the bones lengthen and the muscle stretches around them, sending pain tearing across my chest and down my side. The transformation does not slow. It does not care that it hurts. It only knows that I need more strength. More reach.

My arm extends first. Then the rest of me begins to grow.

The floor seems to drop beneath my feet. For one disorienting moment, I think Kika and everything around her are falling away from me. Then the hanging lights descend past my face, and I realize the room is not sinking.

I am getting taller.

Deep, grinding cracks roll through both legs as they stretch beneath me. The floor drops farther away, and a crushing pressure gathers inside my hip until something forces its way out beside my left leg.

A new foot slams into the tiles.

Oh, fuck.

The unfamiliar limb folds immediately, pitching my weight sideways, then snaps straight with enough force to split the floor beneath it. My balance lurches in three directions at once.

I keep rising.

The hanging lights disappear behind me one by one noticeably dimming the whole room in the process.

The ceiling slams into my shoulders before I even had the time to realize how large I have become. Plaster explodes around me as the ridges along my spine grind into it, carving through the surface while my body continues to grow.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I release Kika and fold forward, almost doubling over to fit inside the room. My shoulders scrape the ceiling whenever I breathe. The extra leg scrapes and twists beneath me, struggling to find a place to settle.

My mind struggles to accept what is happening to me.

I try to make myself smaller.

My body responds by growing even more.

I don’t know what else I expected. That is how my life works. No matter what I do or where I go, everything ends the same way—completely fucked, usually in some weird and bat-shit crazy manner I never could have imagined in a million years.

Pressure gathers beneath my right shoulder. I turn my head as something soft and heavy forces its way through the armor beside my neck. Dark hair spills across my shoulder, followed by a face.

My face.

For one disorienting moment, it is like staring into a mirror—except the reflection is pressed against my cheek. It sits atop a short, twisted neck protruding from my shoulder, its head tilted alongside mine. Its eyes open and immediately roll toward me.

Then its mouth stretches into a smile far wider than mine should be capable of. It watches me through eyes identical to my own, looking as though it has been having the time of its life.

No.

No, no, no—

I watched in quiet horror as a slender wrist pushed past my breast plate.

A stick-thin arm bursts from the center of my chest and strikes the floor between my legs. Its thin, armored fingers stretch wide across the cracked tiles.

The extra arm from before folds at two separate joints and plants its hand against the ceiling, bracing my weight against the cracked concrete above.

“Help!”

The word bursts out of me, ragged with desperation.

Or one of me. I couldn’t really tell anymore.

“Somebody, please!”

Nobody comes closer.

The students who remain have gathered at the far end of the classroom, as distant from me as the walls will allow. They stare up in silence, eyes wide with terror. Even Kika has stopped moving. She crouches over Yashiro with one half-ripped-off wing hanging at her side, her face emptied by shock.

Something crawls beneath the armor along my collarbone.

I feel every part of it—the skull forcing its way through muscle, teeth grinding against bone, strands of hair dragging across my skin. I know I should not look, but my eyes drop toward my chest anyway.

My own face is emerging from the center of it.

At least, that is what it resembles at first. As the rest forces its way into view, the likeness twists into something grotesque. One eye sits lower than the other, half-buried beneath a ridge of armor. The other bulges from its socket, twitching beneath a lid that cannot fully close. Its nose has been crushed sideways into one cheek, while the jaw hangs so crooked beneath it that the teeth no longer meet.

Its mouth works soundlessly, one side opening and closing while the other remains slack, as though half its face is paralyzed.

The smiling head was terrifying. this one is just plain disgusting.

Then its wandering eye rolls upward and finds mine.

“H-h-hwe-lp,” it mouths, struggling through the word one broken syllable at a time.

I go completely numb.

My stomach convulses, and vomit spills from my mouth, splashing across the face protruding from my chest. It tries to turn away, but there is nowhere for it to go. Bile runs over its forehead and pours between its crooked lips.

The taste floods my mouth at once—warm, sour vomit washing over my tongue and seeping between my teeth.

Except my lips are sealed.

The sensation is coming from the mouth in my chest.

This is a living hell. Quite literally.

The head pressed against my cheek bursts into manic laughter, its grin widening with every broken cackle. I feel each one vibrating through my skull as though the laughter is coming from my own throat.

Then, somewhere deeper inside my chest, something else begins to grow.

“Make it stop,” I whisper with a shaky voice.

To my horror, the disfigured face beneath my collarbone whispers back.

“P-p-plea-se,”

“K-k-ki-il-l m-mee-e”

The classroom door slams open.

“That’s enough.”

Miss Maevis’s voice cuts through the room.

I could feel tears running down my cheeks as I turned my face to look at her, only to quickly realize that she was standing behind me.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

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