Gangnam smelled like piss and ozone.
Not the Gangnam of K-pop videos and luxury shopping — the real one, the side streets behind the gleaming facades where delivery drivers smoked and office workers puked after company dinners. Zeke stepped out of the taxi three blocks from the cordon because the driver refused to go further. Smart man. The air already tasted wrong — metallic and heavy, like breathing through a wet wool blanket soaked in copper.
He could see the curse before he saw the victims. A bruise-colored haze hung over two city blocks, visible only to awakened eyes — a slow, churning fog of concentrated misery that pulsed with its own heartbeat. The Despair Plague. Even from three blocks away, Zeke's curse marks itched beneath his jacket, straining toward the source like dogs pulling at leashes.
*Hungry*, the Collective murmured.
"You're always hungry," Zeke muttered, and kept walking.
The cordon was standard Hunter Association work — black tape, portable barriers, agents in tactical gear keeping civilians back. Two ambulances sat idle at the perimeter, doors open, paramedics standing around with the particular uselessness of medical professionals confronting something medicine couldn't touch. Zeke had been a paramedic once. He recognized the expression — the tight jaw, the restless hands, the eyes that kept darting to the victims because looking away felt like giving up.
He flashed his Curse Division ID at the perimeter guard. The man looked at the card, looked at Zeke's face, and stepped aside without a word. Everyone knew who Zeke was. The only curse eater in the world didn't need much introduction.
Inside the cordon, it was worse.
The victims were arranged in rough rows on the sidewalk, some on stretchers, most on the ground. Forty-one — the count had climbed since the text. Men and women, mostly in office clothes, a few in casual wear. One teenager in a school uniform. They were alive, technically. Hearts beating, lungs working, autonomic systems doing their blind mechanical jobs.
But they were screaming.
Not all of them. Some screamed. Others wept — not crying, weeping, the kind of deep abdominal sobbing that sounded like a person being turned inside out. A man in a three-piece suit was curled fetal on the asphalt, clawing at his own forearms until they bled, his mouth open in a continuous moan that didn't pause for breath. A woman sat perfectly still on a stretcher, staring at nothing, tears running down both cheeks in unbroken streams while she whispered what sounded like an apology to someone who wasn't there.
The teenager was trying to bite through his own wrist. Two agents held him down. He fought them with the blind, animal strength of total psychological collapse.
This was what a Despair Plague looked like. Not sadness. Not depression. A supernatural amplification of every regret, every failure, every loss a person had ever experienced, compressed into a single unendurable moment and then sustained. The curse didn't create despair — it found what was already there and made it infinite.
"Forty-one confirmed cases. The rate of transmission has been approximately 1.3 new infections per minute for the last twenty-two minutes. We're projecting sixty-plus within the hour if containment fails."
Soo-Yeon Park stood beside the command vehicle, tablet in hand, looking at the scene with the composed expression of someone reading a quarterly report. She was thirty-two, Korean-American, and had been Zeke's handler for the Curse Division for fourteen months. Her glasses were perfectly positioned. Her suit had no wrinkles. Her voice carried the emotional warmth of a thermostat.
Zeke liked her. She never pretended things were okay.
"What's the vector?" he asked.
"Skin contact. The initial victim —" she tapped her tablet, "— Kim Dae-Jung, age forty-four, office worker, was found at 3:47 PM in the Gangnam Station subway platform. He touched a handrail. The curse was placed on the handrail itself." She looked up. "Not on a person. On infrastructure."
That was unusual. Most curse-wielders targeted individuals — specific people they wanted to suffer. Placing a curse on a public handrail was a shotgun blast. Indiscriminate. The kind of thing that either indicated a wielder with terrible aim or terrible intentions.
"A-rank?"
"A-rank confirmed. Despair-type, infectious variant. The infectious element is what elevates it — the base curse might be B-rank, but the transmission mechanism pushes it into A territory." She adjusted her glasses. "Your current saturation is 67.6%, correct?"
"Yeah."
"An A-rank consumption of this magnitude will result in an estimated increase of 2 to 2.5 percentage points. Possibly more, given the infectious nature — you'll need to consume the curse from each victim individually. The Despair Plague has fragmented into forty-one semi-independent instances connected to a central curse structure."
"So it's not one big meal. It's forty-one appetizers and a main course."
"That is a deeply inappropriate metaphor for human suffering." Soo-Yeon's expression didn't change. "But essentially accurate."
Zeke looked at the rows of victims. The man in the suit had stopped clawing his arms. Not because he'd calmed down — because his fingers were too slippery with blood to grip. The teenager had gone limp in the agents' arms, mouth still open, a sound coming out that was beyond screaming — a thin, whistling keen like steam escaping a pipe.
"The central structure," Zeke said. "Where?"
"The handrail. Gangnam Station, Platform 2, southbound. The original curse is still active. Even if you consume every instance from every victim, the handrail will continue to infect anyone who touches it."
"So I eat the root and the branches die."
"Theoretically. The fragmented instances may require individual consumption as well — curse behavior is not always predictable at A-rank." She paused. Adjusted her glasses again. "Perhaps you should address the more critical victims first. The teenager — Park Min-Soo, age sixteen — has been infected for thirty-seven minutes. Prolonged exposure to A-rank Despair has a..." Another pause. "There is a risk of permanent psychological damage after forty minutes."
Three minutes. Zeke was already moving.
He knelt beside the teenager, and the two agents holding him down looked up with identical expressions of relief and fear. Relief because help was here. Fear because they knew what help looked like.
"Let him go," Zeke said.
"Sir, he's been trying to—"
"I know. Let him go."
They released. Min-Soo immediately curled inward, arms wrapped around his head, that thin keening sound drilling into the air between them. Up close, Zeke could see the curse — a black web of Despair Plague wrapped tight around the kid's skull, digging barbed tendrils into his temples, his eyes, the base of his brain. Feeding on memories. Amplifying them. Making every bad moment the boy had ever lived into the only moment.
Zeke took Min-Soo's hand.
The curse snapped toward him like a live wire finding ground.
**[CURSE DETECTED: Despair Plague — Fragment #16 (A-Rank, Fragmented)]**
**[Type: Psychological Degradation — Amplified despair via memory manipulation]**
**[Target: Park Min-Soo, Age 16, Non-Awakened]**
**[Cure: None (Standard)]**
**[Curse Consumption: Available]**
**[Estimated Power Gain: +8 Curse Points (fragment)]**
**[WARNING: Despair-type curses carry severe psychological side effects during consumption. Emotional state will be compromised.]**
He ate.
The fragment ripped free from Min-Soo and poured into Zeke, and the world went dark.
Not physically dark. Emotionally. The Despair Plague hit his psyche like a wrecking ball wrapped in barbed wire — every failure he'd ever had, every person he'd been too late for, every curse mark on his body that represented damage he'd never heal from. The kid's memories came with it: failing an exam, his father's disappointment, a girl who'd laughed at him, his mother crying at the kitchen table over bills she couldn't pay — small tragedies magnified into apocalypses, the normal pains of being sixteen weaponized into something that made death look like mercy.
Zeke's jaw clenched until his teeth creaked. His vision blurred. For three seconds — three very long seconds — he wanted to stop. Not just stop eating curses. Stop everything. The despair was a physical weight, pressing down on his chest, his shoulders, the back of his skull, whispering that none of this mattered, that he was a man pouring water into a bucket full of holes, that every curse he ate would be replaced by two more and eventually the math would catch up and—
*Yes*, the Collective breathed. *Yes, yes, yes. You see it now, little eater. The futility. The beautiful, honest futility. Why fight? Why swallow? Let us—*
"Shut. Up."
He forced the fragment down. Digested it. Felt it integrate into his system — not as power, not as strength, but as another weight on a pile that was already crushing.
Min-Soo gasped. His eyes flew open — red-rimmed, terrified, but present. Here. Back from whatever hell the Despair Plague had built from his own memories.
"You're okay," Zeke said. His voice sounded wrong. Flat. He cleared his throat. "You're going to be fine."
The kid started crying. Normal crying. Human crying. The kind that meant the feelings were his own again.
Zeke stood up. Forty more.
The next hour was the worst of his recent life, and his recent life included a lot of competition for that title.
He moved from victim to victim, taking hands, touching foreheads, gripping shoulders — any skin contact was enough to initiate consumption. Each fragment was a slightly different flavor of misery. The man in the suit: twenty years of a career he hated, a wife who'd stopped looking at him, a son who called once a year on obligation. A woman in a nurse's uniform: three patients she hadn't saved, a sister with cancer, the particular guilt of a healer who couldn't heal what mattered. An elderly man: his wife's name, repeated, the name of someone dead, someone gone, someone who'd taken the color out of every remaining day.
Each one hit Zeke with the full emotional payload. Each one fed the Collective.
By victim twenty, his hands were shaking. The curse marks had crawled up past his shoulders, creeping toward his neck in black fractal patterns that pulsed with each consumption. His eyes flickered — brown to black and back, the shift happening faster now, staying dark longer.
By victim thirty, the shaking had spread to his whole body. He was sweating through his jacket. The Collective was no longer whispering — it was talking, full sentences, a chorus of stolen misery building toward something coherent.
*We remember this feeling, little eater. We have ten thousand versions of it. Despair is our mother tongue. Let us speak for you. Let us carry what you cannot carry. You are so tired, tired, tired...*
Zeke ate victim thirty-one. A delivery driver who missed his daughter's birth because of traffic. The memory hit him like a kidney punch, and he gagged — not from nausea, but from the sheer density of concentrated regret forcing its way down his throat.
"Morrow." Soo-Yeon was beside him. He hadn't heard her approach. "Your hands are tremoring at approximately four cycles per second. Your pupils have been fixed and dilated for the last six minutes. Perhaps you should take a brief pause before continuing."
*Perhaps you should rest* meant *rest, now.*
"Can't." He moved to thirty-two. A college student who'd found her boyfriend with her roommate three weeks ago. The Despair Plague had turned a bad breakup into a suicide-grade psychological event. "If I stop, the fragments start reattaching. Have to do them all in one sitting."
"I see." Soo-Yeon's voice carried zero infection, but her hand moved to her glasses. Adjusted them. Adjusted them again. "There are nine remaining victims and the root curse. Your estimated post-consumption saturation is—"
"Don't tell me the number."
Silence. Then: "I see."
He finished the college student. Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Thirty-five through thirty-eight, a group of office workers from the same company who'd walked through the station together, their shared despair tangling into a knot he had to tear apart with mental fingers that felt like they were made of wet paper.
Thirty-nine. Forty. Forty-one.
Zeke stood in the middle of the sidewalk surrounded by forty-one people who were crying, gasping, shaking, vomiting, or staring at the sky with the shell-shocked relief of survivors pulled from rubble. Around him, the bruise-colored haze was thinning — the fragments consumed, the local curse pressure dropping. But the haze wasn't gone. A thick tendril of it still snaked downward, through the street, toward the subway entrance.
The root. The handrail. The original curse, still pumping plague into the world.
He was in bad shape. He could feel it without the system telling him — a bone-deep wrongness, like his skeleton had been replaced with something heavier and colder. The despair from forty-one people sloshed inside him, not yet digested, forty-one different flavors of misery competing for space in a container that was already two-thirds full. His hands wouldn't stop shaking. When he blinked, he saw other people's memories — the dead wife's smile, the daughter's first steps he'd missed, the exam results, the bills, the betrayal, the cancer diagnosis, the empty bed, the phone that didn't ring.
*Delicious*, the Collective sighed. *So much sorrow, little eater. So many voices. Can you hear them all? We can. We always could. We are the choir of the consumed, and you have given us forty-one new singers.*
"Zeke Morrow." Full name. Soo-Yeon was angry. Or worried. With her, same thing. "Your physical readings are approaching thresholds that necessitate medical intervention. Your curse mark coverage has extended to your cervical region. If you proceed to consume the root curse without rest—"
"How many people have touched that handrail in the last hour?"
She stopped. Checked her tablet. "Based on station traffic data, approximately four hundred to six hundred individuals have transited Platform 2 southbound since the initial infection."
"And we don't know how many touched the rail."
"Correct. Additional victims may be manifesting across the city. Reports are already coming in from—"
"Then I can't wait."
He walked toward the subway entrance. Each step was a negotiation between his body, which wanted to lie down and not move for approximately one hundred years, and his brain, which was busy fighting off the ghosts of forty-one people's worst memories. The Collective purred inside his chest like a cat made of broken glass.
Gangnam Station was empty — evacuated. The fluorescent lights hummed their mindless hum, illuminating platform tiles and advertising posters for products nobody would buy today. The escalators were stopped. Zeke took the stairs, one hand on the wall for balance, leaving smeared handprints of sweat on the tile.
Platform 2. Southbound. The handrail was ordinary — brushed steel, bolted to the wall along the staircase leading down to the platform level. Completely normal, except for the curse.
The Despair Plague's root structure was wrapped around the handrail like a parasite — a thick, pulsing mass of black-violet energy that extended tendrils in every direction, reaching for anyone who came close. It was beautiful, in the way that deep-sea predators were beautiful — an elegance of design dedicated entirely to destruction. The curse hummed with a frequency Zeke felt in his back teeth, and as he descended the stairs toward it, the humming grew louder, more insistent, more personal.
It knew he was coming. It was afraid.
Good.
**[CURSE DETECTED: Despair Plague — Root Structure (A-Rank)]**
**[Type: Psychological Degradation — Area-effect despair with infectious transmission]**
**[Estimated Power Gain: +127 Curse Points]**
**[Estimated Saturation Increase: +1.8%]**
**[Current Saturation: 68.3%]**
**[Post-Consumption Saturation: ~70.1%]**
**[WARNING: Consuming root structure while carrying 41 undigested fragments significantly increases psychological compromise risk.]**
**[WARNING: Saturation above 70% may trigger Curse Collective phase shift.]**
Seventy percent. A nice round number. A terrible round number.
Zeke grabbed the handrail.
The root curse fought back in a way the fragments hadn't. The fragments were pieces of a whole — diluted, weakened, scattered. This was the source, the beating heart of the Despair Plague, and it had every intention of surviving. It slammed into Zeke's psyche with the force of a freight train loaded with tombstones.
He saw his mother's face the day she'd understood what curse-eating would do to him. The moment in the hospital when the doctor had explained saturation levels and life expectancy and the words "no known cure" had landed in the room like a bomb that killed hope instead of people. He saw the first curse he'd ever eaten — a D-rank spite hex, barely a snack — and how proud he'd been, how stupid, how completely ignorant of what he'd signed up for.
He saw himself at 100%.
The vision hit like a fist to the sternum. Zeke Morrow, or what used to be Zeke Morrow, standing in a field of ash that had been a city. Curse marks covering every inch of skin, eyes fully black, mouth open in a smile that belonged to ten thousand consumed hatreds wearing a human face. The Curse Entity. The thing he'd become if the percentage kept climbing.
In the vision, the Entity was laughing. And the worst part — the part that made Zeke's knees buckle on the station stairs — was that the Entity was happy. Genuinely, completely, ecstatically happy in a way Zeke hadn't been since before his first consumption. Free of the weight. Free of the responsibility. Free of caring.
*That could be you*, the Collective sang, and for the first time, it didn't sound like a threat. It sounded like a promise. *No more eating. No more carrying. No more counting. Just release, release, release. We would be so good together, little eater. We would be magnificent.*
Zeke's grip tightened on the handrail until the steel groaned under his fingers. Blood ran from his nose — a side effect of psychic overload, the brain's pressure valve blowing under the weight of too much despair channeled through too small a vessel.
He ate.
Not gently. Not carefully. He ripped the root curse off the handrail like tearing a tumor from living flesh, consumed it in one savage, desperate gulp that left him blind and deaf and drowning in other people's sorrow. The curse screamed — a sound that existed only in Zeke's mind, the death cry of a malicious thing that had been built to make humans suffer and was now being swallowed by the one human it couldn't hurt enough to stop.
The station went quiet. The bruise-colored haze evaporated. The handrail was just a handrail again.
Zeke sat down on the stairs. He didn't choose to sit — his legs simply stopped working and sitting was what happened when standing wasn't an option. Blood dripped from his nose onto his jeans. His hands had stopped shaking. That was worse, somehow. The shaking meant his body was fighting the curse effects. The stillness meant it had stopped fighting and started integrating.
**[CURSE CONSUMED: Despair Plague — Root Structure + 41 Fragments (A-Rank)]**
**[Total Power Gained: +251 Curse Points]**
**[Total Curse Points: 15,098]**
**[Saturation: 70.1%]**
**[Physical Status: Neurological stress (moderate). Psychological compromise (moderate-severe). Hepatic function reduced 4%. Adrenal system overloaded. Curse mark coverage: 71% of epidermal surface.]**
**[Curse Collective Status: Phase 2 threshold reached. Collective coherence increasing.]**
**[The Collective is pleased.]**
Footsteps on the stairs. Soo-Yeon descended with the careful precision of someone walking through a minefield, tablet in one hand, the other touching the wall for balance despite the curse being gone. Habit, or caution. With Soo-Yeon, probably both.
She stood over him, looked at the data on her tablet, and said nothing for eleven seconds. Zeke counted. It was the longest he'd ever seen her go without speaking when data was available.
"70.1%," she finally said.
"Told you not to tell me the number."
"You told me not to tell you the estimated number. This is the actual number. There is a meaningful distinction." She knelt, bringing herself to his eye level. Up close, he could see the thing she hid behind the clinical precision — a tightness around her eyes, a slight flare of the nostrils, the kind of micro-expressions that escaped even the most controlled people. "Your curse mark coverage has increased by three percent in the last ninety minutes. Your neurological readings are consistent with moderate traumatic brain injury. You are bleeding from your nose and, I suspect, from your ears."
Zeke touched his ear. His fingers came back red.
"Huh," he said.
"I see." She stood. "A medical team is on standby. I've also flagged your consumption report for priority review — an A-rank Despair Plague placed on public infrastructure is inconsistent with standard curse-wielder behavior. This appears to have been deliberately designed for maximum civilian exposure."
Something cold moved through Zeke's gut that had nothing to do with the curses. He looked up. "Someone put an A-rank on a subway handrail. On purpose."
"That is what the evidence suggests."
"That's not a curse-wielder with a grudge. That's..."
"A deliberate attack," Soo-Yeon finished. "Yes. The Curse Division is already investigating. Three similar incidents have been reported in the last month — B-rank curses on public infrastructure in Seoul, Busan, and Incheon. This is the first A-rank."
Three. Three incidents he hadn't been told about because they were B-rank, handled by conventional curse suppression teams, filed under routine and forgotten.
"Someone's escalating."
"The pattern suggests systematic testing. B-rank as proof of concept. A-rank as deployment." She adjusted her glasses. Both hands this time. "I have been asked to inform you that the Curse Division would like to schedule a briefing regarding a potential organized curse-wielding threat at your earliest convenience."
*Organized*. Not a lone wielder. Not a person with a grudge and a handrail. An organization testing weapons on subway passengers.
Zeke sat on the stairs of Gangnam Station with other people's despair settling into his bones, blood drying on his upper lip, curse marks crawling toward his jaw, and thought about a world where someone had looked at a crowded subway platform and seen a testing ground.
Forty-one people. Forty-one appetizers for whoever was cooking the main course.
"Yeah," he said. "Tell them I'll be there."
He didn't move. Couldn't, yet. The despair was still digesting, and his body needed time to process what he'd forced it to swallow. Above him, through the station ceiling, through the street, through the city, Seoul moved on — eight million people riding trains, touching handrails, walking through a world where any surface could carry a plague made of concentrated suffering.
Soo-Yeon stood beside him. She didn't offer help. Didn't suggest rest. Didn't touch his shoulder or say anything comforting. Just stood there with her tablet and her data and her glasses, and didn't leave.
The Collective settled into its new shape — bigger now, denser, fed on forty-one flavors of human despair. When it spoke, the chorus had more voices.
*We will be hungry again soon, little eater. We are always hungry. And someone out there is cooking for us.*
Somewhere in Seoul, a curse-wielder was placing the next course.
