"Why were you following me?"
The moment the words left her lips, the air froze solid.
It wasn't just a chill—it was as if an invisible blade had been drawn and thrust straight through my throat, pinning me in place.
Breathing became difficult.
"I-I wasn't following you..."
My voice came out weak..
"Really?"
Her tone was flat. Not angry. Not even irritated. Just... bored. Annoyed. As if dealing with a human was beneath her.
"Because it looks exactly like you were."
A smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth. Not playful. Triumphant. 'I caught you,' it said.
"...Alright. Fine. You caught me." I forced the words out, scrambling for any excuse. "So what if I was? What can I say—you attracted me!"
Idiot. Absolute idiot.
The thought screamed in my head the moment the words left my mouth.
"Attracted?"
Her confusion seemed genuine. Her pink eyes narrowed slightly, as if trying to parse a particularly nonsensical sentence.
"Yes. Attracted. I was attracted by you. That's why I was following you."
The silence that followed was absolute. The kind of silence that has weight. That presses down on your shoulders.
She didn't respond. Just stared. Her gaze traveled from my face down to my uniform, then back up. Assessing. Dismissing.
"What is the point of saying all of this?"
Her question was clean. Surgical. It cut straight to the bone, leaving no room for my clumsy bluster.
"...Huh? No point. But... isn't it good? To meet someone from your own kind in a place like this?"
I was flailing. Drowning.
"..."
"So you were lonely..."
Her voice changed.
It was still flat. But now it was laced with something venomous. Something sharp and cold that felt like a physical pressure against my skin. Like a blade being slowly, deliberately pressed against my throat.
"I see."
She took a single, deliberate step forward.
The air around us didn't just grow heavy—it changed. The atmosphere thickened, coiling around me like a serpent. The playful breeze from moments ago vanished, replaced by a dead, oppressive stillness.
Silence.
It was a silence that screamed. A silence that carved her stance into the space between us more clearly than any words could.
"You are mistaken," she said, her voice low and commanding, each word a drop of ice, "if you think that gives you the right to follow me."
Her pink eyes held mine. There was no warmth in them. No curiosity. Just a piercing, glacial cold that saw straight through every pathetic layer of my excuse.
"So I would appreciate it if you stopped."
Her tone was final. A verdict. The blade at my throat pressed down, not enough to draw blood, but enough to promise it.
A cold shiver—a primal, warning chill—raced down my spine.
My breath hitched in my throat, catching on the invisible edge she held against me. I couldn't speak. Couldn't think. The feeling was unmistakable: rejection. Total and absolute.
But why did it sting so much? Why did this feel like more than just being told off by a classmate?
She wasn't even looking at me anymore. Her gaze had shifted slightly, as if I'd already faded from her world. The wind picked up again, rustling leaves somewhere in the distance, but to me, the world had gone utterly, deafeningly silent.
It was a silence I knew. A hollow, echoing silence that spoke of unbreachable barriers. Of distance that couldn't be crossed.
I'm being rejected.
The realization was a cold stone in my gut.
She's rejecting me.
My hands, hanging uselessly at my sides, clenched into fists so tight my knuckles went white. I looked down, my gaze falling to the polished toes of her shoes, and the small, fluffy spirit that still sat obediently beside them, watching me with its empty dark eyes.
The only sounds were the distant wind and the ragged, too-loud sound of my own breathing.
'I'm... such an idiot.'
The self-recrimination was immediate and vicious.
'Why? Why did I say that? Why did I go about it this way?!'
It was like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over my head. A shock that left me numb and stupid.
I didn't want to say another word. I didn't have another word. All that echoed in my skull was the certainty of my own failure. I had messed up. Colossally.
But that was too simple. Too clean.
I hadn't just messed up. I had taken a fragile, possible connection—two people who could see the same hidden world—and I had shattered it. I had built the barrier between us myself, with my own clumsy, desperate hands. I had pushed her away and made us strangers again.
Frustration, hot and sharp. Hurt, cold and deep. They churned in my chest, a familiar, toxic brew. It was the same feeling that always found me. The feeling of loss. Of loneliness. Of insurmountable distance.
'Damn it!'
I squeezed my eyes shut tight, as if I could block out the scene, her cold face, my own humiliation.
I tried to breathe. To steady the frantic hammering of my heart. But my lungs wouldn't cooperate. My breath came in short, shaky gasps. I was frozen. Paralyzed. I couldn't run. Couldn't speak to dispel the terrible tension. I was pinned there, completely stricken, helpless against the tide of my own stupid, self-inflicted hurt.
A sharp, tight pain clenched in my chest. Guilt. Shame. They twisted together, a knife in my gut.
...I was wrong.
So completely, undeniably wrong.
***
The field was too quiet after she left. The only sound was the blood pounding in my ears, a frantic rhythm of my own stupidity.
Attracted? Idiot. Absolute, worthless idiot.
The hollow feeling in my chest was back, an old familiar friend. I'd tried to fill it with words, and just made it bigger. Now it was a void, sucking the warmth from my skin even under the afternoon sun.
A wet, clicking sound cut through the silence.
I turned. Thirty yards away, the air shimmered like heat haze over a sewer grate. Then it coalesced. Flesh built itself from cursed energy—a twisted, lumpy body on all fours, skin the color of a week-old bruise. One yellow, slit-pupiled eye swiveled in a head shaped like a crushed crow's skull. A Grade 4. Low-level. Mindless. Hungry.
Drawn to the leaking mess of my emotions. Perfect.
It charged. No roar, just the sound of its claws ripping up grass and dirt.
My heart tried to climb out of my throat. A week. I'd only known about any of this—cursed energy, techniques, this whole nightmare—for a week. A month of fumbling in the dark, trying to feel the power in my blood. The Ten Shadows… I'd only managed to summon the faintest outline of a dog once, and it had vanished in a puff of smoke, giving me a migraine that lasted a day.
But the other thing… the lightning in my veins… that one was harder to ignore.
I brought my hands up, not in a proper sign, but in a panic. I forced my cursed energy out, not with control, but with a shove. I focused on the damp air, on the sweat cooling on my own skin.
[Heavenly Disaster: Yin Lightning.]
The theory was simple. Use cursed energy to bind my lightning to the moisture in the air, slow it down, freeze it. Create electrified ice.
The reality was a mess.
The air in front of my palms frosted over with a sharp crackle, a jagged pane of ice forming mid-air. Yellow lightning snarled inside it like a trapped animal. But I'd put too much of myself into it. The moisture in my own palm screamed—a sharp, burning cold followed by a jolt of voltage that shot up my arm. I yelled, my teeth clamping down on my tongue.
The ice-shard shot forward, wobbling wildly. It didn't fly straight; it lurched.
The curse was fast. It ducked under the clumsy projectile. The electrified ice sailed past and exploded against a rock, sending shards and sizzling sparks everywhere.
The curse didn't slow. It was on me.
I threw myself sideways. A black claw whistled past my face, close enough to feel the displaced air. I hit the ground hard, the breath knocked out of me. It spun, its one eye locking onto me, and lunged again, mouth gaping wide, rows of needle-teeth dripping something foul.
Panic. Pure, undiluted panic.
I didn't think. I slapped my hands on the ground, pouring cursed energy into the earth, into the morning dew still clinging to the soil.
FWOOM.
A spike of ice erupted from the dirt between me and the curse—a frantic, jagged wall. Lightning webbed through it, chaotic and bright.
The curse slammed into it headfirst. There was a sizzling crunch, and it recoiled with a shriek, part of its face now blackened and smoking. But the ice spike shattered from the impact. Shards of electrified frost rained down on me. One sliced my cheek. Another stabbed into my thigh, and the lightning inside it discharged with a painful zap that made my leg seize up.
"Gah—!"
This was suicide. Using this technique was like trying to disarm a bomb while getting punched in the face. Every creation was a potential self-inflicted wound.
The curse shook its head, the burnt flesh on its face peeling. It was hurt, but now it was pissed. It moved more carefully, circling, that single eye blazing with malice.
I pushed myself up, my leg screaming in protest. I was panting, cursed energy already feeling thin, frayed. The hollow feeling in my chest was gone, burned away by raw, animal fear.
I had one other option. The one that gave me migraines.
Focusing through the pain, I clasped my hands in the ram sign—the little I'd gleaned from frantic, secret research. I didn't try for a powerful shikigami. I just begged, pouring my desperation into the shadow at my feet.
[Ten Shadows Technique: Partial Summon.]
My shadow writhed. From it, two smaller pools of darkness seeped out, pulling themselves into shape. Not the full Divine Dogs. Just their heads and forelegs, materializing from the chest up, like they were swimming up from a black lake. Their forms were wavering, translucent. They let out low, distorted growls, more echo than sound.
The curse hesitated, sensing new prey.
"Get it!" I gasped.
The shadow-dogs lunged, moving with phantom speed. They sank teeth of solid darkness into the curse's hind legs. It howled, thrashing. One dog-shade was kicked and dissolved back into shadow. The other held on for a second longer before fading away.
The cost hit me instantly. A vice of pain clamped around my skull. My vision swam, black spots dancing. My control, tenuous at best, snapped.
The curse, bleeding black sludge from its legs, saw its opening. It ignored the fading shadows and came straight for me, a final, desperate charge.
I was out of time. Out of options. Out of clever ideas.
All I had left was anger. At myself. At this thing. At this whole cursed world.
I didn't try to shape the lightning. I didn't try to form ice. I just reached into that volatile, terrifying power inside me and ripped it out, aiming it at the moisture clinging to the curse's own foul body.
A raw, ragged scream tore from my throat as I poured everything into a single, unfocused command.
[Yin Lightning: Direct Ignition.]
There was no finesse. No technique.
The curse's wet skin, its mucous-covered eye, the saliva on its teeth—it all froze in an instant with a sickening series of pops. A shell of rime encased its front half. And then the lightning trapped within, with no direction, no control, simply released.
CRACK-BOOM!
It wasn't an explosion of ice. It was an explosion of the curse itself. Frozen flesh and electrified viscera erupted outward in a cloud of black mist and pink frost.
The backlash hit me like a truck. The moisture in the air around me flash-froze and discharged. A thousand tiny needles of ice and static peppered my skin. I was thrown backwards, landing in a heap, every nerve ending shrieking.
Silence.
A cold, gentle rain of cursed residue and fine, sparkling ice dust settled over the field.
I lay there, unable to move. My body was a map of pain—burns from my own lightning, cuts from my own ice, a deep ache in my skull from the shadows, and the fresh, throbbing agony of the fall. I smelled ozone, burnt meat, and my own sweat.
I'd won.
I'd used two of the most powerful techniques a sorcerer could dream of, and I'd nearly killed myself to take out a single, low-grade curse.
Slowly, I rolled onto my side. The scorched, frozen wreckage of the spirit was already dissolving.
The hollow feeling wasn't just back. It had grown teeth. It gnawed at the edges of the pain.
I'd survived. But the victory was as pathetic as my earlier words. I was just a kid swinging a live wire in the dark, shocking himself more than anything else.
She was gone. The field was empty. I was alone with the proof of my own dangerous, clumsy worthlessness.
With a groan that came from deep in my battered chest, I began the slow, painful process of getting to my feet.
a/n: Did not mean to release this myb. will start working on the next 10-20 chapters tmmr will get 5 or so out next week, just tired myb for accidentally releasing