The KTX bullet train from Seoul to Daejeon took fifty-three minutes. Zeke spent forty of them in the bathroom, gripping the stainless steel sink and breathing through a digestion cycle that felt like someone had shoved a blender into his sternum and hit puree.
The portable resonance tracker on his belt beeped every ninety seconds — Tanaka's monitoring protocol, recording the background frequency of his curse load. Each beep was a tiny digital reminder that he was a walking dataset, a science experiment that happened to also be a person. He thought about ripping it off and dropping it in the toilet. He didn't.
Soo-Yeon's updates came through his earpiece in a steady stream of controlled disaster.
"The situation has expanded since the initial report. Eleven city buses are now confirmed affected. The curse was placed on the payment terminals — passengers who tapped transit cards activated the hex upon boarding. Current victim estimate: one hundred and thirty-seven, across eleven vehicles distributed throughout Daejeon's central bus network."
"One thirty-seven," Zeke repeated to the bathroom mirror. The face looking back was a mess — dark circles, bloodshot eyes, the curse marks on his neck visible above his collar like bruises from a fight with something that didn't have hands. His split knuckles from the hospital stairwell were scabbed but not healed. He looked like a man who'd been losing arguments with the universe for about a week straight.
Accurate.
"The curse type has been identified as a Binding Hex — variant unknown. Passengers are unable to leave the affected vehicles. Doors have been physically sealed by curse energy. Windows are intact but the curse prevents breakage. The victims are contained within the buses."
"Contained."
"Correct. The hex is maintaining a perimeter effect around each vehicle. Local Hunter Association teams have established cordons but report inability to breach the curse barrier. Conventional suppression methods have been attempted on Bus Route 102 without success."
"What's the curse doing to the people inside?"
A pause. Not long. Soo-Yeon didn't do long pauses. "Reports from phone calls made by victims indicate progressive sensory deprivation. Hearing loss first, then vision dimming, then loss of tactile sensation. The curse is removing their ability to perceive the outside world while keeping them physically functional."
Sensory deprivation. One hundred and thirty-seven people, trapped in buses they couldn't leave, slowly losing the ability to see, hear, or feel. Not killing them. Not hurting them. Just... disconnecting them. Making them invisible to the world, and the world invisible to them.
*Protected*, the Collective murmured. *The protected ones are learning what it means to be unprotected. To be sealed away. To scream and not be heard. We know this feeling, little eater. Every curse we carry was once a scream that no one heard.*
Zeke splashed water on his face and left the bathroom.
---
Daejeon was organized chaos. The kind of city that ran like a machine most days — clean streets, efficient transit, the orderly pulse of a million and a half people going about their lives. Today, the machine had a curse in its gears.
The KTX dropped Zeke at Daejeon Station, where a Curse Division liaison — a young agent named Hwang who looked like he'd graduated from the Academy approximately yesterday — met him on the platform.
"Sir, the closest affected bus is Route 301, currently stopped at the Yuseong-gu terminal, four minutes by car. We have—"
"Take me there." Zeke was already walking. "And don't call me sir."
Agent Hwang drove like someone who'd been told the world was ending and had decided to take it personally. The car weaved through traffic that was already snarled by the incident — police cordons, fire trucks, ambulances staged at intervals with nothing to do. The infrastructure of emergency response, deployed in force, accomplishing precisely nothing against a threat that didn't care about sirens or uniforms.
Route 301 was a standard Daejeon city bus — blue and white, twelve meters long, parked at a forty-degree angle in the terminal bay where it had been when the curse activated. Through the windows, Zeke could see them. Twenty-three people. Sitting in their seats, standing in the aisle, frozen in the postures of a normal commute. Some had their phones out. One woman had been mid-step when the binding locked in, and she stood balanced on one foot with her arm extended toward the grab rail, motionless, a statue in a business suit.
But they weren't frozen. They were alive. Their chests moved. Their eyes blinked. A man in the front row had tears running down his face, catching the light, his mouth moving in words that produced no sound because the sensory deprivation had already taken his hearing and was working on everything else.
A local HA team leader — Captain Song, fiftyish, built like a fire hydrant, with the energy of someone who'd been dealing with a crisis beyond her capabilities for three hours and was profoundly tired of it — met Zeke at the cordon.
"We've tried barrier disruption, force dissipation, targeted awakened strikes on the curse structure. Nothing penetrates. The curse absorbs everything we throw at it and redistributes the energy into the binding effect. Hitting it harder makes it stronger."
"How many buses total?"
"Eleven confirmed. Routes 102, 201, 301, 305, 402, 407, 501, 602, 701, 802, and 910. Spread across the entire city. The furthest is in Dong-gu, twenty minutes from here."
Eleven buses. One hundred and thirty-seven people. Spread across a city of a million and a half.
Last time — Gangnam — he'd eaten forty-one fragments and a root in ninety minutes and nearly killed himself. And the Gangnam victims had been in one location. This was eleven locations, each with its own curse barrier that needed to be consumed from inside.
Zeke's hands were in his pockets. They were shaking. He kept them there.
"Look," he said to Captain Song, "I can eat these, but not all at once. Last time I tried to bulk-consume, it went bad. I need to go bus by bus, eat the curse from each one, rest between. How long until the sensory deprivation becomes permanent?"
Song looked at her tablet. "Our curse analysis team estimates four to six hours from activation for irreversible neurological damage. The first buses were affected at 2:17 PM. It's now 5:42 PM."
Three and a half hours in. Thirty minutes to two and a half hours remaining, depending on the bus.
"Which buses were hit first?"
"Routes 102 and 201, simultaneously. Then 301 and 305, approximately fifteen minutes later. The rest activated in pairs at fifteen-minute intervals."
Pairs. The wielder had staggered the activation, hitting buses in waves. Not random — strategic. The early buses were running out of time. The later ones had more margin.
"I start with 102 and 201. They're closest to the deadline. What's their location?"
"Route 102 is in Jung-gu, near the city center. Route 201 is in Seo-gu, about twelve minutes west."
Twelve minutes between them. Plus consumption time. Plus transit. The math was tight.
"Get me to 102 first. Then 201. Then back here for 301. I'll leapfrog across the city." He pulled his hands from his pockets. They were still shaking. He ignored it. "And Captain — keep your teams back from the buses I'm working on. When the barrier drops, the curse energy is going to disperse before I can eat all of it. Anyone too close might catch residual effects."
Song gave him a look that said she had questions she was too professional to ask. "Understood."
---
Bus Route 102 was stopped in the middle of an intersection in Jung-gu, blocking traffic in four directions. Inside: nineteen passengers. The curse barrier shimmered around the vehicle like heat haze — invisible to normal eyes, but to Zeke it was a wall of woven curse energy so dense it looked almost solid. The same weaving pattern he'd seen in Gangnam, on Baek's curse, on every incident connected to the mystery wielder.
But there was something extra. Woven into the barrier's structure, integrated so seamlessly that you'd miss it unless you were looking — a thread of curse energy that carried no destructive purpose. It wasn't binding, wasn't depriving, wasn't hurting. It was communicating.
Zeke pressed his palm against the bus door. The barrier crackled against his skin — hostile, defensive, the curse recognizing its natural predator. But through the static, through the interference, the message thread sang its single, clear note.
Not words. Not language. An emotion, crystallized into curse energy with a precision that bordered on impossible. The same artistry he'd seen in Baek's four-threaded nightmare, but refined. Evolved.
The emotion was simple.
Abandonment.
Pure, concentrated, weapons-grade abandonment. The feeling of calling for help and hearing nothing. Of being trapped in a room with a dying child while the phone lines went dead and the authorities filed your case under "resolved." Of being so thoroughly erased from the system's concern that you might as well not exist.
The wielder had woven their own experience into the curse. Every person on these buses was feeling what his daughter had felt. What he had felt, sitting beside her bed, watching the sealed curse eat her alive while the Suppression Unit stamped CONTAINED on the file.
*Do you understand now, little eater?* The Collective's voice was almost gentle. *This is not malice. This is a mirror. He is showing them what it feels like to be unprotected. To be sealed away. To be—*
"I understand," Zeke said through his teeth. "I still have to eat it."
He pushed through the barrier.
The sensation was like walking through a waterfall made of static electricity and grief. The barrier resisted — not with force, but with weight. Emotional weight. Every step cost him something, pulled at something inside his chest, demanded that he acknowledge the pain woven into the structure before it would let him pass.
He acknowledged it. He'd been a paramedic. He knew what it felt like to be the only person in the room who could help. And he knew what it felt like to fail.
The barrier let him through.
Inside the bus, nineteen people sat in various states of sensory collapse. Some had their hands over their ears, pressing against silence. Others had their eyes squeezed shut against a darkness that wasn't coming from outside. A woman in the back had her arms wrapped around herself, rocking, her mouth open in a scream that produced no sound — the curse had taken her hearing first, and now it was taking her sight, and she was trapped in a shrinking world with no way to know if anyone was coming.
Zeke worked methodically. Bus by bus. Passenger by passenger. He touched each person's shoulder, initiated consumption, pulled the binding hex free thread by thread — not ripping, not gulping, but unweaving. Carefully. The way you remove a bandage from a wound that hasn't finished healing.
Each consumption was smaller than the Gangnam fragments — the binding hex divided its energy across all passengers equally, so each individual load was moderate. But there were nineteen of them, and the emotional payload of abandonment hit him every single time.
By passenger twelve, his vision was tunneling. By fifteen, his ears were ringing. By nineteen, the barrier dropped and the bus doors hissed open and EMTs rushed in and Zeke walked out into the intersection and kept walking because if he stopped he'd fall down.
"Route 102 cleared," he said into his earpiece. "Nineteen consumed. Moving to 201."
"I see." Soo-Yeon. "Agent Hwang is en route to your position. Transit time to Route 201: estimated eleven minutes."
Eleven minutes. He needed thirty. He had eleven.
The car ride was a blur. Hwang drove. Zeke sat in the passenger seat with his hands on his knees, watching the cursor marks on his fingers pulse in time with his heartbeat. The resonance tracker beeped. Beeped. Beeped.
*You are handling this better than last time*, the Collective observed, and the conversational tone was wrong — too casual, too familiar, like a roommate commenting on his morning routine. *Methodical. Careful. We appreciate the care. It means each bite is savored rather than gulped. The flavor of this wielder's work is — remarkable. Structured grief. Architectural sorrow. We have never tasted craft like this.*
"Glad you're enjoying the buffet."
*We are what you feed us, little eater. And today you are feeding us something extraordinary.*
Route 201. Fourteen passengers. Same barrier, same message, same careful unweaving. Zeke's nose started bleeding at passenger eight. By twelve, his hands were shaking so badly that making physical contact required deliberate, focused effort — pressing his fingertips against a shoulder, holding still, consuming while his body tried to reject the process.
He cleared 201 in twenty-two minutes. Staggered out. Got back in Hwang's car.
Route 301. Twenty-three passengers. Route 305. Eleven. Route 402. Fifteen.
He cleared five buses in three hours. Eighty-two people freed. Fifty-five remaining across six buses. His body was a civil war — the new curses fighting for space among the old, the Collective expanding its territory with each consumption, the accumulated emotional payload of abandonment pressing against the inside of his skull like a migraine made of memories.
At Route 407 — twelve passengers — something happened during consumption that made his blood run cold.
He was unweaving the hex from passenger number six, a middle-aged bus driver who'd been on his break and happened to board the wrong bus, when the curse thread he was pulling snagged on something. A knot in the weaving. Intentional, placed precisely where a curse eater would find it during consumption.
A second message. Not the ambient emotional broadcast of abandonment — this one was directed. Personal. Meant specifically for whoever was eating the curse.
**[ANOMALOUS CURSE STRUCTURE DETECTED]**
**[Embedded directive: Recipient-specific. Activated upon consumption by curse-metabolizing entity.]**
**[Message content (emotional-linguistic hybrid): "I know you exist. I know what you are. I know you will come to eat what I build. This is not for you. Do not interfere with what comes next. The ones who failed my daughter will answer. Every one of them. You eat curses — I am not cursing innocents. I am delivering sentences. Stay out of my court."]**
Zeke stopped. The bus was quiet — six freed passengers being helped by EMTs, six still bound. The message played in his head like a recording, the wielder's intent so precisely encoded that it was almost speech.
*He knows about you*, the Collective said. Unnecessary. Obvious.
The wielder knew. Knew about curse eaters. Knew Zeke would come. Had left a message in the fifth bus, specifically timed and positioned for Zeke to find mid-consumption, at the point where he'd be too committed to stop and too tired to think clearly.
And the message wasn't a threat. It was a boundary. *Stay out of my way. I'm not after civilians. I'm after the people who let my daughter die.*
Zeke finished clearing Route 407. Then 501, 602, 701, and 802. Route 910 was last — the bus that had been hit most recently, with the most time remaining. Eight passengers. He cleared it at 9:47 PM, seven hours after boarding the KTX in Seoul.
One hundred and thirty-seven people freed. Zero fatalities. Zero permanent sensory damage — he'd beaten the deadline on every bus, some by less than twenty minutes.
He sat on the curb outside the Route 910 bus stop in Dong-gu, eastern Daejeon, under a streetlight that flickered because the universe had a sense of dramatic timing. Blood had dried on his upper lip. His jacket was soaked through with sweat. The curse marks now covered his hands completely — fingers, palms, the webbing between his digits, all black with consumed malice.
Soo-Yeon's voice: "All eleven buses confirmed cleared. One hundred and thirty-seven victims in recovery. No casualties. Morrow, your current saturation reading is—"
"Don't."
"—71.8%. I am noting this for—"
"The record. Yeah." He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Black-patterned skin against dried blood. "Soo-Yeon, there was a message in Bus 407. Embedded in the curse. Directed at me specifically."
He relayed it. The silence on the line lasted four seconds. An eternity in Soo-Yeon time.
"He knows about you," she said.
"He left a note in his curse telling me to stay out of his way. He thinks what he's doing is justice."
"Many perpetrators believe their actions are justified. That does not—"
"He said he's delivering sentences. Not cursing innocents. He specifically designed these bus curses to be non-lethal, non-permanent. He could have killed one thirty-seven people today, Soo-Yeon. He chose not to."
Silence again. Then: "I see."
"Have you gotten anywhere on the Suppression Unit records?"
"The classification restriction remains in place. However." A pause that was heavier than her usual clinical beats. "Agent Lee Jun-Sik has been investigating independently. Thirty minutes ago, he reported that one of the seven remaining Suppression Unit members — Kwon Tae-Hyun, age fifty-nine, last known residence Gwangju — was found dead in his home this morning. Official cause of death: cardiac arrest."
"Cardiac arrest."
"The responding medical team found no curse residue. However, Agent Lee noted that the body exhibited post-mortem skin discoloration inconsistent with standard cardiac death. He has requested a curse-specific autopsy." Another pause. "Morrow, if the wielder has developed a curse that mimics natural death and leaves no detectable residue, then our assumption that Baek Sung-Ho was the first targeted member may be incorrect. Kwon Tae-Hyun may have been cursed and killed before the infrastructure testing even began."
The streetlight flickered. A moth circled it, going nowhere useful.
Six remaining Suppression Unit members. A wielder who could make murder look like a bad heart. And a message woven into a bus-trap that said, with absolute clarity: *I am coming for them, and you cannot stop me, because what I am doing is right.*
Zeke pulled out his phone. Opened the contacts. Scrolled to a name he hadn't called in months.
His old paramedic partner. Now working dispatch at Seoul Emergency. A man who owed Zeke three favors and had access to municipal death records going back decades.
If the Suppression Unit was hiding something about what happened twenty years ago, the official records were locked. But death records were different. Death records were public, eventually. And somewhere in the municipal archives, there was a death certificate for a girl named Yuna who had died of a curse that the government said was contained.
He made the call.
