The Curse of a Cursed Hand
The scream tore from her throat like something being wrung out of her very soul.
“Gweeeaaaaaaaagh!!!!!!!”
It was the sound of claws scraping across bare stone, forced through a meat grinder. Terra felt her mind and body rip apart once more. Saliva poured from her slack jaw as her eyes glazed over, and she collapsed to the floor in a twitching heap.
No more tears would come. She had already cried them all. Her face was so contorted by wave after wave of unbearable agony that it was difficult to even look at. There were no visible physical wounds beyond the obvious, yet her mind had been shredded into tattered rags by the endless, forced separations.
And inside that ruined mind, there was no room left for normal thought.
The hatred she once felt toward the hero who had done this to her, the burning rage at the abyss she had fallen into—those emotions now felt like ridiculous luxuries. All that remained was an endless, pitch-black sea of despair that swallowed every last scrap of her will to live. In that moment, trapped completely within it, there was only one thing she could think. Only one thing she could beg for.
—Kill… me…—
If she could speak, she would have thrown herself at the man’s feet and pleaded with him. The overwhelming pain had forcibly washed away every other feeling, leaving behind only one desperate, automatic urge: to apologize to the man before her with all her heart.
Cowardice. Shame. None of that mattered anymore. She no longer had the luxury or the reason to care about such trivial things. The only thing she wanted was for this endless torment to end. For that, she would gladly lick his boots, become a slave on the battlefield, offer her body, endure any horror imaginable—if only she could do it with a sincere smile.
‘Kill… me… Please… Please, just stop…!!! I… I was wrong… I’ll do anything… anything at all…!! So please… just… just stop…!!!’
Over and over, Terra poured endless waves of regret and repentance into her silent pleas. But the man standing before her—the very incarnation of her suffering—did not give her even a moment’s pause. The instant her mind began to slip away from the agony, he would stitch it back together only to tear it apart again.
All she could do was scream from the very bottom of her soul and thrash meaninglessly.
So she writhed in indescribable regret and pain, tears streaming down her face—until suddenly…
“!!!Kuh… heeegh… heeegh… heeegh…”
The man’s baptism of torment stopped.
Terra realized her forcibly sealed voice had finally been freed. With a hoarse, cracked throat that sounded like it had been dragged across broken glass, she desperately begged the man in front of her.
“P… please… s-stop… I… I… I was w-wrong… So please… just… just stop now… Kill… me…”
She poured every ounce of her being into the apology, her voice thick with desperation and earnestness.
And as he watched her broken form, the man who had once been called the hero—but who Terra now saw as a devil crawled up from the deepest pit of hell—spoke to her in a voice cold enough to freeze blood.
“Kill you? Unfortunately, I no longer have any reason to show you that kind of mercy.”
“P… please… I’m… begging you… W-we… were… comrades—kuheeeaaaagh!!!”
The scream that exploded from Terra’s mouth was pure animal agony. The vivid, physical pain was different from the mental torment she had endured until now. It left her unable to speak another word.
Looking down at her as she howled in pain, the hero spoke in a voice completely devoid of pity.
“Talking about comrades, huh? Looks like you still haven’t come to your senses. Don’t tell me you actually thought I didn’t know exactly why you were wagging your tail at me all this time?”
“!! Th… that’s…”
Terra’s voice died in her throat at his words.
The hero continued, his tone calm yet utterly terrifying.
“You played with a man’s heart and then tried to run off to the afterlife? Sorry, but that’s not going to happen. From now on, that body of yours still has a mountain of work to do.”
“Wh… what…”
His words filled her with nothing but dread and fear. Terra began to tremble uncontrollably. The hero looked down at her shaking form and calmly began to explain the fate that awaited her.
It was so horrifying that it actually forced a protest out of Terra, who had given up on everything.
“N… no…!! Th-that…! Anything but that…!”
Seeing her desperate resistance, the hero smiled as if he found it genuinely pleasing.
“Yes… I knew you’d say that. That’s exactly why I’m going to do it. To give you the absolute worst pain I can possibly inflict on you!”
His voice dripped with hideous delight. He slowly rose to his feet and raised the hand wearing the ring once more.
“N-no… please… no…”
Watching him, Terra desperately tried to move a body that could no longer even twitch a single finger. A voice soaked in pure despair tore from her throat.
“Nooooooo!! Please, just not tha—Gwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!!!”
Shackle of Control — 3% Glitch Rate
The mental seal has been permanently locked. The subject’s intellect has collapsed. Higher reasoning functions have been erased. The target has been reduced to the cognitive level of a loyal beast.
Status:FERAL PET MODE — IRREVERSIBLE
To be brutally honest… I’ve always had terrible luck with games.
I once failed to enhance an item with a 30% success rate twenty times in a row. No matter how many gacha boxes I opened, I never once pulled a so-called “rare” item. I was the living embodiment of the phrase “cursed hands.”
And right now, unfortunately, I was once again being painfully reminded of just how shitty my luck really was.
“Gweeeaaaaaaaagh!!!!!”
After screaming so many times, Terra now coughed up blood every time she made a sound. Watching her, I could only let out a bitter laugh at the realization of my own terrible fortune.
Well… if I look at it the other way, maybe this is actually good luck? If it had succeeded too easily, I might have felt disappointed in a different way.
I tried to force myself to think positively, but even that felt impossible in the current situation.
A 3% chance sounded ridiculously low, but for an enhancement roll, it really wasn’t that bad. Each attempt had low odds, but after roughly thirty tries, you had about a 60% chance of succeeding at least once.
Yet here I was, having already gone past forty attempts. Statistically, that was around a 70% chance of having succeeded by now. And still, there was no sign of success.
Wait… maybe it’s not me. Maybe this bitch is the one with terrible luck? At this point, it really should have triggered by now.
Feeling a slight surge of irritation, I poured more mana into the ring—when suddenly…
“!!!!G… gweaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!”
“Huh?”
A strange, alien sensation washed over me. At the same time, Terra, who had been convulsing on the floor, suddenly clutched her head with both hands and began thrashing wildly in agony far beyond anything she had shown before.
Watching her twist and scream in a level of torment that was on an entirely different scale, I immediately understood what had happened. A bitter smile automatically formed on my lips.
Finally succeeded on the 46th try… Yeah. I really do have the worst luck in these kinds of things.
With that thought, I quietly bid farewell to the sight of Terra—or rather, to what could no longer be called by that name. She had crossed a river that could never be uncrossed and had become nothing more than a single miserable beast.
Well then… stay trapped inside there and watch forever. Watch what kind of result your betrayal has brought about.