Yurui The Cursed One

“That’s enough.”

Miss Maevis’s voice cuts through the classroom.

I search for her, but she has disappeared from sight. The head rising from my shoulder twists alongside mine, its cheek dragging against my own as both of us scan the room.

Nothing. Only cracked plaster and the ridges of my spine buried in the ceiling.

I don’t know what happened to the head at my back, either. Whatever became of it, it couldn’t have been good—the world behind me has gone completely dark.

Maybe it died. Or killed itself.

A small part of me genuinely mourns its loss. Deformed as it may have been, it was still technically part of me.

My body has completely outgrown the room. My shoulders grind against the ceiling, forcing my spine into a vicious curve, while three legs knot beneath me and one malformed arm bears my weight against the concrete. Every breath cinches the armor tighter around my ribs.

The face protruding from my chest begins to whimper again.

“P-plea-se.”

Its mouth trembles against the bile coating its lips.

“K-kill m-me.”

The smiling head perched beside mine laughs harder, the sound rattling through both our skulls and driving me insane with every shared sensation.

God, make it stop.

I’m not sure how much longer I can—

Maevis’s heels click across the broken tiles as she approaches without hurry.

The students retreat farther against the wall and clear a path for her without being told. By the time she steps beneath me, the room has fallen silent.

Then her hand settles against the extra arm braced beside my feet, her fingers barely spanning one of its knuckles.

“Try not to move.” she murmurs.

The arm convulses beneath her hand, and pain detonates through my chest.

The slender limb swells beneath her hand, its armor buckling outward as knots of flesh bloom beneath the plates. Veins rise across it in thick blue ropes. Blisters crawl over the wrist, merge, and split open one after another.

I scream.

The face in my chest screams with me.

The smiling one keeps laughing, utterly undisturbed.

Maevis drags one finger along the arm, and everything beneath it comes apart.

Bone softens first. I feel it lose its shape inside me, collapsing into something warm and granular. The muscles follow, separating into wet strands that slither beneath the armour. The hand on the floor bursts between its own plates.

Blood, pus, and clumps of pale tissue spill across the tiles.

The limb caves in on itself, shrinking into a sagging mass of flesh before sinking back through the opening in my chest as though something inside me is sucking it down.

I wrench myself away from her—or try to. My body is wedged against the ceiling, too tightly pinned to move even an inch.

There is nowhere for me to go.

“Please,” I sob. “Please, I can feel it. All of it.”

“I know.”

Maevis sounds almost pleased.

Something shifts beneath the flesh of my legs.

A cluster of razor-thin arms punches through the armor and lashes toward her.

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck—

Maevis does not look concerned. She remains exactly where she is as four of the spindly limbs seize her arms and shoulders.

The instant their fingers close around her, the thin limbs begin to swell. Flesh bulges beneath their skin as knotted growths bubble up along their length, multiplying until the arms split apart in a series of wet bursts.

Blood and shredded tissue splash across Maevis’s coat and the tiles beneath her.

I fight down the urge to vomit.

The disfigured face beneath my collarbone is not as successful.

Bile spills from its mouth, running across its chin and down its upturned forehead before dripping onto the floor. Its wandering eye squeezes shut with such obvious misery that my own begins to water.

Then the taste reaches me, hot and sour at the back of my throat.

My mouth floods with bile. I clamp it shut and force myself to swallow.

When the wandering eye opens again, it rolls toward Maevis.

“H-help.”

She looks up at it, and her smile softens into something almost tender.

Almost.

There is nothing kind in the way she studies it.

“H-h-he-l-lp-p m-meee.” It repeats

Maevis places two fingers against the armored leg braced beside her.

The flesh around my chest jolts and a neck erupts from beneath my collarbone, unfurling into a long, twisting column of flesh. The face at its end shoots toward Maevis and stops inches from hers, hanging upside down before her.

A strangled noise escapes its mouth.

Maevis’s smile softens with quiet fascination.

“There you are.”

She raises two fingers toward its forehead.

“No,” I whisper.

Its working eye fixes on her approaching hand. The pupil contracts, and its mouth begins to quiver.

“N-no. N-no, p-plea—”

Maevis presses down.

Its skull caves beneath her fingers.

Pressure blooms inside my own head. The face’s jaw drops open as its eye bulges farther from the socket, trembling wildly while the bone beneath its skin folds like wet paper.

Then the entire growth begins to collapse.

Its teeth sink into its gums. Its nose slides sideways into one cheek. The swollen eye bursts with a soft pop, and something hot pours into a mouth that is somehow also mine.

I cannot breathe. I cannot scream.

For one horrifying instant, I am trapped inside the dying face. Its terror floods through me. Its pain becomes mine. Moments ago, it had been pleading for death. Now, as its skull collapses, I feel how desperately it wants to live.

Then its thoughts vanish.

The ruined flesh slides back beneath my breastplate, leaving only a shallow groove in the armor. Something inside me falls silent with it, and as I stare at the place where its face had been, an unexpected sense of loss settles over me.

The last time I felt anything like this was when my pet hamster died.

Which is ridiculous. My mother died only hours ago, and for the most part, I could barely bring myself to feel anything. Yet losing this twisted, nameless monstrosity hurts.

Maybe because, however deformed it was, it was still part of me.

Maevis watches me.

“You killed her.”

A faint crease appears between her brows.

“Her?”

I look at her.

She stands beneath me with one hand resting against my leg, blood and pale tissue dripping from her white coat.

She does not seem to notice.

“She was part of me,” I whisper.

“Oh sweetie, she would still be had I not removed her.”

The implication sinks in with chilling clarity: without Maevis, I might have been trapped with that thing for the rest of my life.

The head beside mine stops laughing as Maevis turns toward it.

The smile pressed against my cheek twitches, and for the first time since it emerged, it stops smiling as fear creeps into its expression.

“No—wait.”

“Don’t touch her.”

Maevis presses two fingers against my leg again.

The flesh beside my neck jerks, and the second head’s short spine suddenly stretches downward. Its face drops toward Maevis until it hangs within reach, its smile gone and its eyes wide with panic.

Maevis catches it by the chin.

The second face jerks away, dragging its malformed neck against her shoulder. Its teeth snap at her fingers. She does not flinch.

“Interesting,” she murmurs.

Its mouth opens.

My mouth opens with it.

“Don’t—”

Maevis twists.

A crack tears through both our necks, and white light flashes across my vision.

The head hanging below me goes limp in her hand. Its stretched neck slackens, and the flesh begins to sag almost immediately, while clumps of hair peel from its scalp and drift toward the floor. Its features soften and collapse as the stretched neck retracts, drawing the ruined face back toward me. By the time it reaches my shoulder, what little remains of it splashes against my armor and runs down the plates in warm, fleshy clumps.

As the last of it slides down my armour, the pressure inside my skull finally lifts. The sounds of the classroom return one by one—Kika’s uneven breathing, someone crying near the windows, blood dripping steadily from Arisa’s wrist.

At last, the thoughts scraping against mine begin to fade, and I feel myself settle back into the shape of a single person.

Maevis turns her attention to the third leg.

“No more,” I say.

She closes one hand around my ankle.

Panic tightens my voice. “Please. I can make it go away.”

Maevis looks up at me. “Can you?”

I squeeze my eyes shut and reach inward, searching for whatever part of me controls the transformation. There has to be something I can loosen or pull back, some buried instinct responsible for shaping all this flesh.

I picture myself growing smaller. My spine straightening. The extra limbs retreating into me.

Nothing happens.

The pressure in my hip only grows worse. Muscles knot beneath the armour, and the third leg stamps down hard enough to splinter the tile beneath it.

Maevis glances at the fresh crack.

“That is what I thought.”

Her grip tightens.

The leg swells violently in her hand. Bone grinds against bone inside my hip before the entire limb ruptures from within, splitting through its armour in a spray of blood and shredded flesh.

I scream until my throat gives out.

After that, the pain loses all shape. Maevis works her way through every part of me that should not exist, collapsing limbs, shortening bones, and forcing the swollen mass of my body back into something that can fit inside the room.

By the time she finishes, I am lying on the classroom floor, roughly human-sized again.

At least, I think I am.

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