The atmosphere was thick, more from unease than the ever-present traces of Originium particles that the ventilation system struggled to suppress.
Doctor Kal'tsit sat with her arms crossed, her usually impassive expression a shade grimmer than usual.
Her eyes were focused on the screen ahead, an image frozen in time:
A blurred capture from a nearby drone camera, displaying Yuta in mid-motion, katana halfway through a man's body, but with something else, a visible distortion around the blade, not dissimilar to pressure itself warping space.
Silence followed the report.
The operator they had interrogated, a self-proclaimed "sorcerer", was sedated and confined two decks below. But his words rang louder than any physical evidence:
"It's not Arts. It's not Originium. It's... fear. Hate. Regret. All the worst things we hide in our hearts, crawling out as monsters, and he's a sorcerer."
Amiya sat stiffly beside Kal'tsit, her ears twitching with each whisper that passed between the science division's operators.
Dr. Warfarin flipped through stills of the man's combat in silence.
"...He called it Cursed Energy" Closure muttered, rubbing her temples. "I ran it through all our Arts catalogs. No match. Not even a close cousin."
Silence. Kal'tsit tapped a control, changing the image.
It was a still of the captured man's chest, his heart glowing faintly with something they couldn't isolate.
But every scan confirmed it wasn't Originium.
No calcification.
No Arts residue.
Just... negative energy.
"Cursed Energy," Kal'tsit repeated the term flatly, her voice devoid of emotion.
"The timing coincides with that boy's appearance. Three years ago, we started detecting minor anomalous spiritual readings. I dismissed them. That was a mistake."
"What is it then?" Amiya asked quietly. "Another form of energy? Another side effect of Originium?"
Kal'tsit shook her head.
"No. It exists independently. It may react to Originium, but it is fundamentally different. The theory... is disturbing."
She tapped again. The screen showed a diagram overlay of a brain scan taken from the sorcerer.
The prefrontal cortex was spiked with unusual neural activity. Another tap revealed emotional response charts, peaks of fear, guilt, anger.
"Negative emotion" Kal'tsit said. "This... 'Cursed Energy' is generated by the soul itself. Not through science. Not through circuits or constructs. It's... almost spiritual."
Warfarin crossed her arms, frowning. "And this Yuta... he uses it naturally. Not just that, he amplifies it. Like an emitter."
"He radiates it" Closure added.
"He's got enough pressure in his presence to trigger our Originium sensors. The squad that went near his house? They thought it was a Catastrophe forming. It wasn't."
Kal'tsit continued, her voice now low.
"His arrival didn't just bring a man. It brought a concept."
She turned to the screen one last time, Yuta, standing alone, blood dripping from his blade, eyes cold and distant.
"The concept of curses."
...
Location: Deck B2, Isolation Chamber 6
Subject: "Graymark" — Male, 30s, anomalous combatant, self-identified "Sorcerer"
Status: Detained. Observed. Interrogated.
"Heartbeat stable. Brain activity active, but consistent."
Silence pulsed through the isolation chamber, its interior awash with sterile white light, its walls layered with Originium-reinforced plating, and observation panels fitted with Arts-nullifying circuits.
Rhodes Island had designed this room to hold dangerous Casters and Sarkaz warlocks.
It should have been secure.
And yet...
He just sat there, legs crossed, head tilted back against the wall. A faint smile on his lips.
"You really think this box can hold someone who remembers where the door is?" he murmured softly.
No one heard it.
Deck A1 – Cursed Energy Research Briefing
Kal'tsit moved across the digital interface slowly, her voice as sharp as always.
"Cursed Energy does not adhere to Originium laws. It exists in tandem with it but is not dependent on the mineral for manifestation. We've confirmed that even Originium-dead zones do not suppress its flow."
Closure scratched her head. "So no grounding? No damping fields?"
"No," Kal'tsit answered. "We're dealing with an emotional construct. The rules aren't physical. They're conceptual. This makes containment exceptionally difficult."
"Sounds like a new science," Warfarin muttered, glancing at the monitors. "A spiritual one."
Amiya stepped closer to the table. "He said they trained for years to control it, that this all started when he appeared. Yuta."
Kal'tsit nodded. "He's the catalyst. Or the vector. And from what we've gathered... these sorcerers are just the beginning."
Before they could speak further, an alarm shrieked through the floor beneath them.
ALERT. Isolation Breach. Deck B2. Subject escaped.
Deck B2 – Just Minutes Earlier
Operator Guard Seven had stepped away for a moment, just long enough to grab a data pad. Inside the chamber, Graymark lifted his right hand, eyes distant.
"...Load."
His body twisted unnaturally for a second, a strange warping of space that felt like reality coughed, and then he was gone.
The air crackled faintly. No explosion. No shimmer of Arts.
Just... absence.
Outside the cell, near the elevator shaft, the air bent again, and Graymark appeared, crouched, grinning.
His fingers were already wrapping around a shocked operator's throat before they could scream.
"You don't lock up someone who already knows the exit" he whispered.
With a pulse of cursed energy reinforcement, he leapt, vanishing into the shadows of the maintenance ducts.
[Interior – Rhodes Island Detention Wing – Midnight]
A cold hum filled the holding chamber, dim light barely revealing the dark stone of the walls. Graymark sat hunched on a low bench within his high-security cell.
The reinforced Originium alloy walls around him were carved with suppression runes, designed to neutralize Arts, though not cursed energy.
They hadn't caught that yet.
Idiots.
A faint glimmer passed through his dark, sunken eyes as he stared at the wall. His lips barely moved.
"Save."
His cursed energy surged for only an instant, a sharp, precise pulse.
Nothing changed outwardly.
But Graymark had just anchored himself to this exact moment, in this exact position, standing barefoot on the floor, with one hand behind his back and his reserves untouched.
A single checkpoint, no more, no less.
[Two Hours Later]
A power fluctuation hit the Rhodes Island base, standard generator cycling.
For five seconds, the automated barriers on the hallway dampened.
Just enough.
Graymark stood.
His cell remained locked.
One guard outside, back turned, barely awake.
He calmly cracked his neck and walked toward the cell door, then, without warning, slammed his head into the wall.
Blood sprayed. His body slumped.
Alarms screamed. The guard rushed in.
Too late.
"Load."
The blood, the wound, the limp body, gone.
Graymark rewound himself two hours earlier, to that untouched state.
He appeared outside the open cell, in the exact position he'd saved: standing with one hand behind his back.
The checkpoint had been saved after they first opened the cell to check on him earlier that night.
The cell was now open. His body was fully intact.
The guard inside, utterly stunned, was already turning...
Graymark didn't hesitate.
A flick of his fingers, and cursed energy erupted in the shape of a jagged spear from beneath his coat. The guard collapsed, throat pierced.
His eye twitched. Blood dripped from his nose. He wiped it off casually.
Checkpoint burned. One use. Done. But it worked.
No multiple nets. No resets.
Just one precisely timed, goddamn save point.
[Interior – Upper Halls – Moments Later]
Rhodes Island personnel scrambled as alarms triggered across the surveillance floor.
"Prisoner Graymark—missing from cell B-3!"
"How?! His power was suppressed!"
"No, not suppressed," a researcher hissed, face pale. "He's not using Originium Arts. He's using something else. Something we don't understand."
[Exterior – Mountainside Forest – Hours Later]
Graymark stumbled through thick underbrush, panting. He had used one checkpoint. It had taken days of planning to find the perfect moment.
His body felt like it was ringing. His inner ear bled. His cursed energy was fluctuating wildly.
His technique punished overuse.
He collapsed against a tree and laughed.
Not in joy. In exhaustion.
In awe of what he had done.
In fear of what might come next.
Because someone like him, with a single "Save Point", had just outwitted Rhodes Island's entire security system.
[Rhodes Island Briefing Room – Next Morning]
Silence.
A blackboard.
A new term written across it in chalk:
Cursed Energy
Amidst the research team, Amiya stared at the surveillance footage of Graymark vanishing.
Not teleporting.
Rewinding.
"He wasn't warping. He was returning to a place he'd already been" she murmured. "Like loading a saved file..."
A stunned operator beside her whispered:
"He broke reality with a checkpoint."
...
The wind whispered across the plains, dry and laced with dust.
Gray clouds drifted slowly overhead, casting long shadows that crawled across the uneven hills of Terra's wilderness.
Yuta walked in silence.
His coat was tattered at the edges, the color faded with age and ash.
Beside him floated Rika, half-transparent, a figure of eerie beauty.
Her form shimmered faintly under the sallow sun, drifting beside him like a guardian ghost.
She said nothing for now, just trailed behind him, arms loosely wrapped around her knees in the air, chin resting on them as she watched the blood slowly drip from the edge of his sword.
It was still warm.
Graymark had put up a good fight.
A clever one.
But clever only bought seconds when your opponent had already killed smarter men.
Yuta halted by a jagged stone jutting from the dirt.
He tilted the blade, letting the blood pool at the fuller of the steel.
Then he lowered it, letting it run down the curve like ink on glass.
Rika shifted in the air and floated to the side, her legs uncurling lazily as she reached down and touched the blade with two fingers.
The cursed energy in the blood pulsed once, like a faint heartbeat.
She opened her mouth.
Teeth, too sharp for a girl her size, bit gently into the blade's edge, and she drank.
Not just the blood, but the echo of the technique within it.
A flicker of nausea passed through Yuta, not pain, just the strange lurch that came when his body was about to be rewritten again.
He exhaled slowly, lowering the katana.
Rika leaned back, licking her fingers. "That one was weird" she said.
Yuta didn't answer.
He could already feel it.
Nestled under the surface of his soul, within the layer of cursed energy that defined his inner technique, a new function had appeared.
Unfamiliar. Slippery.
A point that could be set.
His fingers twitched.
He flexed them experimentally, cursed energy flowing to his palm.
The instinct came naturally, the shape of the cursed technique already filing itself into his muscle memory.
Save.
Load.
No flare. No flourish.
Just a cold certainty. A mechanic now belonging to him.
He turned to Rika. "You sure you got all of it?"
Rika grinned. "Mhm. It's weird though. Like... he was cheating."
Yuta sheathed his blade with a dull click.
"Then I'll cheat harder" he murmured.
And they kept walking.