Ruri’s life had become so quiet, sometimes she thought she’d hallucinated the past one.
In her old world, she was a professional asset (and murderer), the kind people hired when someone needed to vanish. A body cleaner. A disposal expert. She didn't talk. She didn’t ask questions.
She showed up, bleached everything red into white, and left behind the kind of silence that made police reports disappear.
Then she died. Unceremoniously. Shot in the gut during a botched job in a warehouse.
As she bled out, clutching a bottle of 1957 Saint-Émilion, she remembered thinking, So this is how it ends?
It didn’t.
She woke up in Endale, a too-perfect town she immediately recognized from a Boys’ Love novel she once read while stuck in a hideout during a week-long city lockdown.
She’d hated the book. Too saccharine. Too slow. Too many men falling all over each other for a soft-spoken bottom named Elis.
Now?
She was Ruri. A florist. A nobody. And she loved it.
---
Her shop, Petals & Posies, sat on the corner of Linden Street and Crossview. It was the kind of quaint establishment that smelled of lavender oil and old wooden shelves.
Each morning, she opened the windows to let in the sun. Midday, she drank rosebud tea and organized carnations by symbolic meaning. She never looked at her reflection too long. She never asked why her.
Life was gentle now.
Her days were filled with flower orders from lovestruck teenagers, overly dramatic apologies between boyfriends, and Elis.
Elis, the beautiful central figure of the novel, floated into her shop weekly. Always smiling. Always trailing a scent of linen and mint.
He ordered bouquets for everything, from surprise picnics to first kisses to forgiveness arrangements when one of his suitors got too possessive.
They were friends, in the loose way of small-town routines.
He talked. She listened. He gushed. She nodded. He asked for lavender and she gave him honeysuckle instead because it suited him better.
His harem, however, were barely more than familiar faces.
Pretty, yes. Overbearing, occasionally. They'd enter her shop with polite nods, pick up Elis’s orders, and say thank you with just a little too much eye contact.
She never asked questions.
They never gave names.
It was perfect.
---
Until the birds fell.
It was subtle at first. A robin crashed into her shop window one morning and slid down with a wet squeak. Then a cat lay twitching on the sidewalk across the street, foaming at the mouth. She thought it was rabies. She didn't really care though.
By the fourth day, an entire flock dropped dead mid-air. Ruri stepped out to a sidewalk littered in feathered corpses, beaks open, eyes glassy.
People started coughing.
Some wore masks.
Others went missing.
And Elis and his harem stopped coming altogether.
---
On the sixth night, the sky turned the color of rotten egg yolk. Clouds moved in jagged, unnatural streaks, and the moon hung too low, too close. Power flickered. Radios cut to static. Phones stopped working.
The next morning, someone tried to break into her shop.
It wasn't human. How did she know?
---
It came at dawn, while she was trimming white roses. She didn’t even hear it at first, just a strange wet scraping on the glass. When she looked up, she froze.
It had the shape of a man, but only barely. Its limbs were too long. Its neck too thin. Flesh mottled with black boils that pulsed like hearts. Where its mouth should’ve been, there was a jagged hole, ringed with teeth like shattered porcelain.
It didn’t speak. It shrieked.
Ruri moved on instinct.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t run.
She remembered. Her body, the body she conditioned for three years despite knowing she won't be doing that job anymore, moved.
In one motion, she grabbed the long-stem pruning shears from the counter. The blade was dulled by age, but she twisted it hard, snapped the safety, and jammed it under the creature’s chin as it lunged through the half-broken door.
Its breath smelled like sewage and iron. She didn’t flinch.
She pushed. Hard.
The blade sunk in with a squelch.
It screamed, high, wet, ear-piercing, and thrashed, but she shoved it back with her knee and drove the shears upward until it hit brain.
The thing spasmed. Twitched.
Then dropped.
Her breath came in silence.
Not a gasp. Not a panic.
Just a slow exhale, like she’d held it for three years and finally let it go.
She stood over the body, stared at the black ichor pooling on her tile floor, and felt… nothing. Not fear. Not horror.
Only clarity.
Who would know, her hands still knew how to kill.
When she looked up, Elis was standing in the doorway.
Blood ran down the side of his temple. His eyes were wide, hollow.
“Ruri…” He whispered.
She looked at him. Looked at the creature. Then back at him.
“You’re late.” Ruri said coolly.
“You forgot to pick up your order.”
Behind him, screams echoed through the streets.
The world was ending.
And all Ruri could think was: I’m going to need more bleach to clean this mess up.
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