Yurui The Cursed One

What unsettles me most is how quickly everyone starts organizing themselves. A room full of teenagers nearly eaten alive should not become orderly this soon. Terror should still linger in the air. You’d expect the kids to have mental meltdowns after what they've just been thru. Instead, order returns with frightening speed. Broken chairs are cleared from the aisles. The wounded are set against the walls.

Alfred, an ordinary-looking boy in bright orange khakis now dulled white with dust, opens the register and starts calling names in a trembling voice. Another student repeats each name aloud, and the whole thing takes on a steady, mechanical rhythm.

“Daito?”

“Here.”

“Nene?”

“Here.”

“Kika?”

A pause. Then Kika’s voice rises from behind a fallen desk. “Unfortunately.”

A few people laugh a little too loudly. Everyone is trying very hard to act civilized after nearly dying.

“Careful with her wing,” Tidy calls out as they carry Kika in a makeshift stretcher. “I said careful.”

“I am being careful.”

“You’re literally bending it backwards.”

Kika laughs weakly from the stretcher. One of her wings hangs shredded behind her like wet paper. “You know, usually people buy me dinner before manhandling me this much.”

This time, nobody laughs. Not even Yashiro. She stands near the broken windows, one hand pressed beneath her nose. Blood keeps slipping through her fingers, no matter how often she wipes it away. Her face has gone so pale that she almost looks gray.

Miss Maevis herself sits beside the ruined teacher’s desk, reading a book. Reading. As if all the blood, the completely wrecked classroom, and the wounded students around her were only a minor inconvenience. Every so often, another student approaches her with an injury. Miss Maevis barely looks up before touching the wound. Skin pulls shut. Blood retreats beneath the surface. Bone settles back into place with a soft, wet click. The student thanks her, then walks away looking grateful and faintly horrified. No one seems willing to ask what kind of person can sit and read while the room collapses around them.

Now she’s back at her desk again, or what remains of it. One corner has collapsed. The surface is split down the middle, dark fluid dried along the edge where the creature’s severed feeler struck. Miss Maevis has placed her book neatly on the least ruined section, one pale finger holding her page. She looks almost bored. Maybe that is why the room works so hard around her. Chairs are cleared. Wounds are checked. Names are called. Nobody wants to be the one standing idle when Miss Maevis looks up.

The students still on their feet organize the others by injury. Minor cuts by the windows. Broken bones near the blackboard. Severe bleeding in the cleared space beside the door. Someone tears strips from a ruined blazer for bandages. Another student tries to staunch the blood pouring from Leon’s shoulder while Leon insists, through clenched teeth, that he is “seriously fine,” despite looking like he was about to faint.

The room no longer smells like a classroom. Dust coats the back of my throat. The scent of plaster dust, blood, scorched wire, and the clean-sick sweetness that clung to Miss Maevis’s blessing lingers in the air. Nobody seems to notice that I am standing here at all. People move around me carrying bandages, broken chair legs, bottles of water scavenged from bags. I stay where I am, and somehow the flow of the room bends neatly around me.

I take a seat near the back, holding my left sleeve closed over a shallow cut, and watch them argue over who should be moved first. A boy in a green sweater keeps slipping in and out of consciousness beside a broken desk. Sophie is crying because blood has splashed across her shoes, though from the look of things, none of it is hers. Kika lies on the makeshift stretcher, her face gone pale but her eyes still sharp. Across the massive hole the centipede had punched through the floor, Kamila stands with her arms crossed, still sulking at Yashiro while Sophia hovers beside her, trying to calm her down.

I frown. What a bunch of dumbasses. They look ridiculous, like overgrown toddlers sulking because someone had taken away their favorite toy. The worst part is realizing how much of my life I have wasted being afraid of people this stupid.

Yashiro stands near the center of the room, arms folded, staring at the corpse. Its body sprawls across the classroom and drops through the hole in the floor, armored segments cracked open to show the pale meat beneath. Its legs have curled inward, stiff and useless. A few still twitch now and then, making the students nearest to it flinch.

Poor thing. For one second, I almost pity it. It had crashed through the roof, nearly killed half the class, and, for one brief, shining moment, made people like Yashiro and Kika look as helpless as everyone else. Maybe it had never wanted any of this. Maybe it had only climbed toward the sun, meaning to coil itself around the warm side of the building, and instead accidentally broken through into a classroom full of screaming children. It is a foolish thought, but for a moment, I find it oddly comforting.

Then I notice something moving inside the carcass.

At first, I think it is only another death twitch. One of the legs, maybe. Some last confused signal crawling through the nerves. After a year in this classroom, I know better than to trust the silence of a corpse. Then the movement comes again, and this time I catch where it begins. Between two cracked plates, in a torn seam of pale flesh, something small and dark pushes its way out.

I look around, and then I lean in closer, just enough to see better. A small centipede writhes free from the corpse. Well, not exactly tiny. It is only small compared to the carcass it crawled out of. Even then, from the looks of it, it is longer than my forearm. It skitters across the carcass in a glossy-black ripple, too fast for my eyes to follow, then drops onto the broken floor and stills. Its whiskers sweep carefully through the dust.

It’s alive.

My chest tightens so suddenly it hurts. A wide, idiotic-looking grin spreads across my face. Then I remember where I am and look around to see whether anyone else has noticed it. Thankfully, it appears that everyone’s too busy dealing with the aftermath of the monster's rampage.

Great. If anyone else noticed it moving through the dust, the little creature would be dead in seconds, punished for the sins of the larger one. I can somewhat relate to it. Not the getting punished for the sins of the bigger monster part. I can sympathize with the feeling of being the little guy facing the entire world.

The little centipede pauses at the edge of the torn flesh, resembling a newborn chick anxious to leave the safety of the nest. Its legs skitter nervously against the floor.

No. No, don’t come out there. Yashiro is only a few steps away.

Across the room, Miss Maevis turns a page without looking up. I am already halfway to my feet before I realize what I am doing. The chair screeches against the floor, loud enough to make me jump. Every muscle in my body tenses. I wait for heads to turn. No one looks over. To everyone else, it is just another noise in the chaos.

For once, being forgettable works in my favor.

I lower my head and move along the wall, keeping behind overturned desks and hanging strips of ceiling tile. Plaster dust grits under my shoes. Glass cracks softly. Once, my foot comes down in something wet, and I keep walking without looking. The air is thick with blood, powdered plaster, and the sharp chemical sweetness of Miss Maevis’s power. All these smells intensify as I near the corpse. No one notices me slipping closer.

I reach the corpse and crouch behind one of its shattered plates. Up close, it is almost unbearable. The smell is thick enough to cling to my tongue, and I have to press my lips together to keep from gagging. The corpse still gives off heat. Its shell is ridged and scratched beneath the dust, black layers catching the light like old lacquer. Clear fluid seeps from a split in its side, turning cloudy where it runs through the dust and plaster. Beneath one broken plate, the exposed flesh gives a single faint twitch and falls still.

The smaller centipede inches closer until its feelers brush against my knuckles. I nearly snatch my hand away, but stop myself just in time. I don’t want to scare it off.

I hate bugs. I can handle blood. Broken bones. Even corpses, apparently. But bugs? Bugs make my entire body recoil whenever I see them. Especially centipedes. Watching all those tiny legs twitching and skittering against the floor in quick little motions makes my skin crawl.

The centipede pauses. So do I.

Behind me, someone says, “We need four people to carry Riku. Carefully. Carefully, I said.”

Another voice says, “I’m not touching him. There’s blood everywhere.”

Yashiro’s reply is too quiet for me to catch, but sharp enough to silence them both.

The little centipede begins crawling toward me. I hold out my hand, my fingers shaking. Come on. Just a little more. It crawls onto my palm, its tiny legs prickling against my skin.

For a second, neither of us moves. Its legs scratch across my hand, and every part of me wants to just fling it off. Instead, I close my hand around it, careful not to press too hard.

The centipede thrashes in my hand, way stronger than I expected. Its hard, segmented body twists against my palm. Tiny hooked feet snag at my skin. Its feelers whip between my fingers. It takes everything I have not to drop it.

“Calm down,” I whisper. “Please. Please, just calm down.”

Wonderful. Now I am trying to comfort a bug the size of my forearm, and it doesn’t appear that I’m doing a very good job of it. The centipede only twists harder, fighting my hand. Somehow, this feels more humiliating than getting caught trying to escape by myself in front of the entire class.

I tuck it against my chest, hiding it between my palms and the torn front of my uniform jacket. My heart hammers against my hands. The centipede curls against my chest, its tiny legs twitching against the fabric of my jacket, and I hold it there like a baby. I don't know what came over me. I hate feeling its legs twitching against my clothes. I am disgusted by it, and yet some broken, stupid part of me wants to save it anyway.

Maybe because the thing it came from had been my knight of justice for one glorious, terrible minute, and this smaller, trembling thing was all that remained of it. Or maybe because, ridiculous as it sounds, I could relate to it a little. Being small, frightened, and surrounded by people who would hurt you without thinking twice. By the time common sense catches up to me, I am already tucking it beneath my jacket.

For the first time since the centipede turned on me, I feel hope again. It’s probably stupid to expect anything good to come from this. I cling to it anyway. Maybe the larger one had already been tainted by life. This one was different. Newborn. Trembling beneath my jacket. It had yet to learn fear, or hatred, or whatever terrible experience had made the larger one bare its teeth at us.

I had held it for only a few seconds, and already something dangerous had begun to take shape in my head. I could teach it. I could tame it. I could make it mine.

Just like earlier today, I can picture it clearly- a giant centipede tearing through the school. Only this time it doesn't turn on me. This time I'm on its back, perched at the crown of its head, and it moves exactly as I command it. Together, we cut through the blessed students one by one. For the first time in their lives, their powers fail them as the giant centipede tears through their miracles like they are nothing, and after a long, drawn-out fight, even Miss Maevis succumbs to our assault.

A faint smile creeps onto my face. I cup the centipede more gently beneath my jacket.

“I’ll get you out,” I whisper. “Just stay still.”

The school bell rings.

The shrill sound tears through the ruined room. It is the same bell we were used to hearing every single day, completely unremarkable and ordinary, but we were so immersed in dealing with the aftermath that the whole room reacts like the ceiling is coming down again. I flinch before I can stop myself. So does everyone else. A few students cry out. Alfred nearly drops the register. Even Miss Maevis awkwardly shifts in her chair, one pale finger still holding a page open in the book.

Unlucky for me, so does the thing under my jacket.

It snaps rigid against my chest. Its legs hook into the torn fabric. I tighten my hands around it on instinct, and that is a big mistake. The creature drives itself into my arm. Its body twists once, hard, and before I can loosen my grip, pain punches up my arm.

I scream.

It cuts through the classroom harder than the bell did. For one second, everything stops—the arguing, the crying, the scraping of chairs and desks. Then every face turns my way.

The centipede forces itself under my skin while dozens of eyes stare at me from across the room. I feel the head vanish first, burrowing into the soft underside of my forearm. The rest of the body follows- segment by segment, legs scraping, tearing, dragging itself deeper. The fabric of my sleeve jumps with each movement underneath. Blood spreads hot beneath the cloth. I clutch my arm and stagger back.

Someone makes a thin, strangled gasp. A moment later, a boy standing near the windows bends over and vomits.

Yashiro turns to face me. Her eyes widen as her gaze drops to my arm.

“What did you do?” Her voice barely rises above a whisper, each word forced through clenched teeth.

I look down just as the last black segment slips beneath my skin. Then it disappears, completely vanishing into my arm. For a second, I am too stunned to scream. My mouth stays open. No sound comes out. I just stand there, eyes fixed on the small, bloody puncture the centipede left behind.

Every single pair of eyes in the room is staring holes thru me. The attention cuts deeper than the pain. I attempt to look unbothered and squeeze out a smile.

“I can explain.”

Miss Maevis closes her book. The sound of it clasping shut reverberates through my skull.

“Please do,” she says, lightly tapping one finger against the desk.

There is no anger in her voice. No alarm. Only that quiet, clinical interest that makes my skin go cold.

That is when I become truly afraid.

A wave of heat blooms beneath my ribs. At first, I mistake it for panic, because what else are you supposed to feel when a monster crawls into your arm and every single person in the room stares at you as if you just killed their mother? Then the warmth spreads. It moves through my chest and shoulders, down my spine, into my hips. The pain disappears. My knees stop shaking. Even my breath comes easier. For one stupid, terrifying second, my body feels weightless.

The skin tightens around the puncture. Something hard presses up from underneath. I look down. My sleeve stretches tight over my forearm.

Then it splits.

At first, it looks like bone pushing out of my arm. Then it unfolds wider beneath the torn fabric, dark, ridged, and segmented. It is not bone.

It looks like armor.

Someone near the windows whispers, “Is that a blessing?”

No one answers right away. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch something changing in Sophia’s expression.

The heat intensifies. I can feel my bones shifting. My shoulders pull back. My spine arches. My knees buckle, then snap straight at an angle that should break something. Most surprisingly, it does not hurt. I catch myself on my hands and knees, fingers splayed against the floor, nails hardening as they scrape grooves through the polished tile. Under my uniform, more plates slide into place, overlapping one another with soft, internal clicks.

I should be screaming. Maybe I am. I cannot hear anything over the sound of my body rearranging itself.

The wound in my arm seals shut and gets covered up by emerging armor plates a second later. My breathing changes. The air sharpens until every smell separates on my tongue: dust, blood, chalk, perfume, fear. There is so much fear in the air that almost immediately it drowns out every other smell.

I raise my head. Every student in the room has drawn back, leaving a long stretch of empty floor between us. Even Yashiro has taken a couple of steps back.

I’m all too familiar with that pretty pale face by now. I have seen that tiny twitch at the corner of her mouth when she’s been irritated too many times to count. The way her face goes still when she’s furious. The way her eyes narrow right before she says something cruel enough to keep you awake for days. I have it all memorized down to the most minuscule details. And yet, I have never seen her make this expression before—her eyes widening a fraction as her mouth presses into a thin line.

Fear. Real fear.

And God help me, some ugly little part of me loves it. A part of me wants to kneel down and beg her not to make that face. A worse part of me wants to keep her face trapped in that expression forever.

A terrible thought slips through me. If becoming a monster is what it takes for people like Yashiro to finally see me- then maybe I don’t mind being one.

Before I can get any more distracted by her expression, a cold voice cuts through my thoughts like a bucket of ice water splashed down my back.

“Yurui,” Miss Maevis calls out to me, still seated behind what remains of her desk.

She says my name with the careful softness of someone approaching a dangerous animal. She rises. Slowly. Carefully. The students nearest her move aside without being told.

“Do not panic,” she says.

Always a reassuring thing to hear from someone walking toward you like you might need to be put down.

I take a step back. The floor cracks beneath my foot. I look down. My shoe has split open. Something jointed and black curls where my toes should be. My stomach turns.

A shard of glass near my foot catches part of my reflection. At first, I do not understand what I am looking at. One eye glows red in the broken glass. Dark, ridged structures climb from my shoulder to my throat, framing my jaw like the edges of some insectile mask. My mouth is the only thing that looks human.

Below my neck, black, insect-like armor has completely covered my shoulder, ridged and glossy, each plate layered over the next like the segments of a centipede’s shell. The armor is heaviest around my hips and thighs, thick plates layered over one another. Below the knees, my legs become impossibly long, the shins stretching farther than they should before tapering into sharp, glossy curves.

One side of my face is still human. The other is changing fast beneath black ridges and hard, insectile lines. My features have sharpened around it until I can barely recognize myself at all. Near the crown of my head, my hair parts around a small white horn pushing through. It is barely formed, no longer than the tip of my finger, but the sight of it hollows something out of me. Whatever is happening to me, there is no pretending that I am still human anymore.

I stare down at the broken reflection, and the creature in the glass stares back with one glowing eye. My stomach turns violently. I double over, one clawed hand scraping against the tile, and vomit onto the ruined floor.

Miss Maevis does not flinch. Her eyes move over me slowly—arms, face, claws, armor—calm and precise. With every place they stop, I feel less like a person and more like a specimen she has already begun dissecting in her head. One thing becomes very clear to me: she is most definitely not looking for a way to save me.

“Yurui,” she says, softer this time. “Describe what you feel.”

No. No, no, no. I know that tone. Quiet and soft enough to pass for kindness, if you did not know better.

“Yurui. Look at me.”

No. Every instinct in my body screams for me to run. I know exactly what Miracle Inc. does to abnormal things.

“Go away!”

My voice cracks hard enough to make it sound childish. Miss Maevis takes one careful step toward me.

“Talk to me, Yurui. Tell me what is happening.”

“Stay away from me!”

The words rip out louder than I intended. Several students flinch. Miss Maevis keeps walking toward me slowly. She reaches out carefully, palm open.

The moment her hand gets closer, something in me breaks.

I run.

I have seen what she can do with a single touch. I cannot let her put those pale fingers on me no matter what. The first step launches me farther than I intend. A desk flips beside me. Someone screams as I fly past them. I hit the classroom door shoulder-first, and it does not open so much as give way- wood splitting, metal tearing loose from the frame as I crash straight through into the hall.

Students outside scream and scramble out of my way. I do not stop. I am moving too fast to understand what I am seeing. Faces blur past. Bodies jerk out of my way. The entire hallway breaks into one massive blur before my eyes can catch hold of any of it.

My body is too fast. Too strong. Too eager to move. I slam into the wall and catch myself too late, claws dragging through the plaster as I shove away again. My ruined shoes skid across the polished floor. Cold air slices against my face.

Behind me, voices rise.

“Yurui!”

“Stop her!”

“Don’t touch her!”

“Are you insane? Don’t come anywhere near her!”

The voices chase me down the hall. I cannot even tell if Miss Maevis is one of them. Moving this fast, everything overlaps and tangles until I cannot tell one voice from another. I do not care.

The hallway blurs past me as I continue my sprint. I take the corner too fast and slam into the lockers hard enough to cave them in. My breathing sounds strange in my own ears- too rough, too deep, not entirely mine. The rush of air hits my face so hard my eyes water. For one dizzy second, it feels like riding a scooter downhill at full speed, except there are no wheels under me, no handlebars to grip, no brakes to squeeze. Nothing stands between me and all that speed except my own body.

I hit the stairwell railing by accident and bend metal inward. A boy steps into the hall carrying a first-aid kit. I swerve. Too late. My shoulder clips him and sends him spinning into the lockers. I hear his cry, the hollow bang of metal, and a heartbeat later, all of it is already behind me.

Sorry, I think. Or not. Honestly, I couldn’t care any less.

There is a window ahead. Beyond it, daylight illuminates a path. A way out.

FREEDOM!

I don’t pause to think. I jump.

As I hit the window, I remember I am on the third floor.

Too late.

Glass explodes around me. Suddenly, there is only open air beneath my body. The academy falls away behind me, all white stone, shining windows, and clean expensive lies. Below, the courtyard spreads out in neat squares of stone and grass. On the ground, like ants, students look up. With their small faces, they watch the dark thing falling toward them.

Me.

I try to scream, but air fills my lungs before I can let out a single sound. The ground rushes upward violently.

Everything goes white.

For one horrible second, I genuinely believe I died. Then air tears back into my lungs.

Alive. I’m still alive. I push myself upward slowly. My arm hangs wrong, then shifts back into place with a wet crack. The stone beneath me is cracked in a spiderweb pattern. There is blood on it. Mine, probably. Not much. Just enough to stain the stone red. My body is already pulling itself together, plates grinding back into place, joints trembling, heat moving through the damage like a thread through cloth.

A crowd has formed at the edge of the courtyard. People stare at me. Students. Teachers. Security. Random bystanders. Of course, they stare. People had always loved freak shows.

A middle-aged man in a sweat-stained white shirt lifts his phone. Somehow, that scares me more than falling three stories.

“Stay away from me!”

My voice cracks across the courtyard, raw and inhuman. The crowd breaks apart instantly. I run at the gap before it can close.

People trip over each other trying to get away. Students scatter. A girl trips and crawls backward on both hands. A teacher reaches for me. His eyes drop to my claws, and his hand stops midair. I try to avoid them, but my body is still too fast, too strong. The unlucky few who aren't fast enough yelp when I slam into them and send them flying aside. My shoulder catches a boy as I pass, and he hits the stone hard behind me.

Someone shouts for security. Another voice calls for Miss Maevis.

No. Not her. Not Miracle Inc.

Only white rooms and clean gloves await things like me there. Soft voices asking what I feel while they take me apart piece by piece, like a dead frog sprawled out on a tray.

I run. Faster now. Past the fountain. Past the gates. Past the academy guards, who act brave right up until I hit the iron bars hard enough to bend them outward.

Miracle City opens around me in polished glass, pale walls, and spotless streets. Towers rise on every side, cutting the sky into thin blue strips. Then people see me, and the city’s careful calm shatters.

My armored feet strike sparks from the pavement. Cars lurch to a stop. People jump back from the crosswalks, phones half-raised, mouths open. Perfume, coffee, rain-washed concrete—every smell hits too hard, all of these scents mixing and meshing into one nauseating smell.

Car horns blare. Hundreds of voices overlap. Shoes strike pavement. Somewhere, far away, a phone slips from someone’s hand and cracks against the concrete. I hear all of it with horrible clarity, each sound too sharp, too close, piling up inside my skull until my head spins. Everywhere I look, faces turn my way, and half of them are already reaching for their phones.

I keep running. Away from the academy. Away from Maevis. Away from Yashiro’s pretty face. Away from the city of miracles. I run until the glass towers thin behind me and the streets begin to narrow.

Ahead, the run-down gray buildings of the slums crowd together under the darkening sky, crooked and painfully familiar.

Home.

For once, I do not slow down before entering the bad part of the town. I run straight into the slums, blood drying between the plates of my armor, the centipede monster curled somewhere deep beneath my skin.

Strange to think about it. This morning I left as a human girl, and now I return as some kind of centipede-like monster. I am going to fix this. Somehow. I just have to find a way to turn back.

For the first time since the centipede entered my arm, I have enough peace and quiet to step back and think. That is when the realization hits me. What if this is permanent? What if I am stuck like this for the rest of my life? I cannot even go home like this. My breath falters, and then my heart starts hammering again.

Behind me, the distant sound of Miracle Academy’s bells carries across the city.

Class is over.

End of Arc I

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