by Thomas Green
She started sawing, blood spraying and me wailing.
This was about to be the two hundred and thirty-sixth time she castrated me. After that, I would leave this illusion and enter the next one. There, my body will be good as new and Evelyn would come to torture me once more.
I lost count of how many illusions I went through. Too many. When the cell opened before me, I was a hollow husk. The man in black suit stood there with the man in the white one.
The man in black glared at the one in white. “I don’t remember telling you to stop.”
“We are way past the safe limit.” The other man stood his ground. “We have most likely caused mental damage already.”
“But we don’t have anything.”
“Which might mean there is nothing to be had.” The man in white sighed. “I understand your frustration. I feel the same. But Wukong and Loki also didn’t know anything, so maybe that’s all there is. This is the point where you either have to kill him or let him go.”
The man in black kept glowering. “You would not believe how much I desire to do that.” He turned toward the exit. “But I cannot.” He walked out of the cell. When he passed the guards, he said, “Take him back to the prison.”
One of the guards nodded and entered. I didn’t have the strength to move.
With a stern expression, the man in white removed my bindings and the guards picked me up. They carried me through the steel hallways and dropped me on a platform. They left, door closing behind them.
The platform rose, ceiling opened, and I soon lay inside a room filled with prisoners. I pressed my knees against my chest. What had I done for them to torture me?
Most prisoners passed me, but one soon came. A brown-haired man grabbed me under the shoulder and raised me to my feet. “Come,” he said.
I didn’t have the strength to refuse.
He dragged me into a blind hallway and left. I sagged by the wall, staring into nowhere. My mind refused to form thoughts.
He returned within a minute, accompanied by a woman, young, and beautiful despite her greasy, blonde hair; and a black-haired man.
The woman stepped in front of me and smiled. “I’m Girl.” She pointed at the brown-haired man. “He’s Kong.” She motioned toward the black-haired one. “And that’s Loki.” Without waiting for an answer, they all left.
What the hell did that mean?
I sat by the wall until the ceiling light turned orange. That apparently meant I had to go. I hauled myself to my feet and stumbled toward the mess hall, bracing myself by the wall.
The dark-haired man, Loki, intercepted me. He took me under the shoulder and helped me move. “I’ll take you to your cell.”
I saw no reason to resist. We floated down into a cell where four other men lay by the wall.
Loki helped me enter and placed me by the wall. “I sleep elsewhere.” He turned and headed out. As he did, he missed a step and pointed with his foot at the ground.
Scratched into the steel was a number, 1 221 115.
What the hell did that mean?
He left.
I stared at the number, but tiredness soon overcame me.
In the morning, I stretched, and eyed the number again. This felt important. Despite my hurting body, my mind was clear, and the torture felt like a half-forgotten dream. During the usual stretching, I could move without resistance or pain, so the ever-present throbbing was a phantom pain, a mere memory of my suffering in the illusions.
All right, 1 221 115. What could it mean?
I summarized what I knew. Before they took me for the interrogation, I remembered nothing about this number. Since then, the only information I received were the names… or nicknames of three people. Girl, Kong, and Loki. All of them were four letters. Lucas… six letters. Lucifer… seven.
Luke, four. The number wasn’t 1 221 115, but 12 21 11 5, the order of my name’s letters in the alphabet. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
Okay, to what were the numbers pointing?
I didn’t know. The morning siren disrupted my thoughts. I entered the elevator shaft and floated up to the detection tunnel. Before I made a step into it, I froze.
Cubes made everything in this tunnel, including the dozens of structures in its midst. I glanced at the wall and counted twelve cubes. I walked to the 12th row. Next, I counted twenty-one cubes from the wall toward the center. That cube lay under a crane-like sculpture. Eleven cubes up on the crane, and five cubes from the left. If my number was a coordinate, this cube had a meaning.
Ignoring the prisoners passing me by, I stepped to the crane, and examined the cube. A thin slit gaped above its bottom edge while the other cubes had no such opening.
Without having a better idea what to do, I touched the box. The wall caved in softly, and a sheet of toilet paper slid out through the gap.
I grabbed the paper and continued walking as if nothing had happened. When I entered the mess hall, I stepped into the breakfast queue and glanced at the paper.
A text was written in blood onto the paper: ‘Stage 1: Tell the others how to find their boxes and take another paper tomorrow.’
I hid the paper beneath my shirt and waited for my breakfast. The paper went into a toilet at the first opportunity.
Through the day, I met both Kong and Loki. I told them their numbers and what they meant, 11 15 14 7 for Kong and 12 15 11 9 for Loki. I couldn’t find Girl.
The next morning, I took the next paper. ‘Stage 2: When you remember, head toward the medical ward.’
When I remembered what, precisely?
With a shrug, I continued the morning routine, my body moving mostly by itself with my mind lost in thoughts.
Later, I was eating the breakfast cereals, like any other day. When I was eating the apple, Girl sat in front of me, her face slackened and eyes cold.
I raised an eyebrow. She needed to know where her box was. “Seven nine twelve seventeen,” I said. “From the cells, from left, up, and from left.” With that, she would find her box.
“I know.” She sighed. “Unfortunately.” She stretched out her hand, inviting me to place my palm into hers.
Without having the slightest idea what was going on, I did. Tingling passed up my arm and then vanished.
Girl disappeared, as if she never existed at all. I frowned. What girl?
I stared ahead with no idea what I thought I was looking at.
A memory splashed onto my mind, like a vision. I saw myself, tied up and gagged. Other prisoners filled the room and, in their midst, Evelyn, tied up, naked, abused, bleeding to death.
I blinked and the memory was gone. Rage exploded from my chest. Leashing the anger, I moved my hand to my collar and started the loosening the restrictions. They would pay for that. They all would pay.
The minute it took me to loosen my aether restrictions felt eternal. Once done, I reached for my aether. The power flooded my body and intoxicated my senses.
I let the rage free, removing the leash. Infinite fury exploded through me. They raped and murdered Evelyn. They will join her in hell.
I grabbed the table and whirled, tearing it from the ground. Prisoners flew through the air like rag dolls, hitting the walls, screaming. I whirled in a tornado, crushing everyone the table could reach.
The wailing prisoners ran from me. I spun and threw the table, hitting them like a bus, crushing their bodies.
I bolted forward, reaching for the nearest prisoner. With the back of my hand, I swatted his head like a rotten tomato, splashing the wall with blood and brains. They tried to run. They tried to hide.
I didn’t care.
Evelyn had to be avenged.
Blood-stained jumpsuits and deformed bodies flew around me. When the blindness left my senses, guards in black armor were swarming toward me.
They were guilty too. They were supposed to stop that from happening.
I whirled, grabbed the nearest man’s arm and tore it from the joint. Thirty guards swarmed at me. Seconds later, thirty
corpses lay behind me as I ran through the door the guards used.
A memory of the morning’s paper flashed through my mind. Head toward the medical ward. I could do that.
I dashed through the tunnels. Behind me, I caught a shimmer of light. An illusion. Through it, I caught shapes of other prisoners, no more than five.
My intuition told me they took no part in what happened to Evelyn. And so I continued. Alarms thundered through the corridors, deafening in its staccato tone.
Halfway toward the medical ward, a hastily built barricade of tables blocked the path. More guards stood behind it, holding assault rifles.
As if those could pierce my aether defenses. I charged. Gunfire roared and dozens of bullets bounced off my body, deflected by my aether armor. The main reason the supernatural world was kept separated from the mundane one was that standard weapons were terribly ineffective at wounding aether-wielders. Sure, a high-caliber weapon like a sniper rifle or large explosives would kill me instantly, but that wasn’t on the menu today.
I hit the barricade with my shoulder. Men flew through the air. I grabbed one by the leg and used him for a mace, hammering down another guard. Seconds later, corpses littered the hallway and I advanced, passing the medical ward.
The shimmering light followed me up to the Medical Ward, where they entered the treatment room while I advanced forward.
More guards blocked my path. They all died by my hand. A door closed in front of me. I struck it with my hands, my fingers passing through like a chef knife through an apple. I tore the steel plates apart as if they were thin paper sheets.
Beyond stood a man in perfect, black suit with a well-arranged beard and deep eyes, wearing a Spartan-style helmet made of pure darkness. Hades. The name popped into my mind on its own.
With a slow exhale, I restrained myself from charging him. He had no collar, meaning he posed a threat.
His brows furrowed as he saw me. “You seem oddly calm for the bloodbath you have caused.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll continue once I dispose of you.” I stepped toward him, my muscles clenched, ready to spring upon a thought.
“Why?”
I scoffed. “As if you didn’t know.” The dam holding my anger broke. I bolted forward. In a move that was but a blur, I stepped to Hades and punched his throat. My hand passed through him and he vanished.
“What are you talking about?” Hades asked, now standing ten feet behind me.
I narrowed my eyes. I was in an illusion, wasn’t I? When did he catch me? I couldn’t feel any hostile aether entering my body, so this spell had to be area-based. Most likely, this spell worked like a trap and I got caught by passing through the door. I reached out with my aether, but the collar stopped me from filling the entire hallway with my power.
To stand a chance, I had to get out of the area. I whirled and dashed through the hallway, running away from him. A door opened before me, I rushed through a corridor and then stopped in front of a broken door. The same door I destroyed when getting to him.
“There is no escape from here.” Hades appeared behind me. “So, what were you talking about?”
“They murdered Evelyn.” I stretched out my arms, forming a rotating sphere of aether in each palm.
Hades disappeared and darkness flooded the corridor, devouring the walls.
I released the spells. The blackness swallowed them as if they were nothing. I whirled to run back. The darkness surrounded me. I steeled my body with aether and ran forward, hoping to power through his spell.
The blackness devoured me. Pain exploded through my body and my consciousness abandoned me.
Amarendra 4
I STARED AT THE CARNAGE, breathless. Torn-apart bodies covered the hallways leading to the Medical Ward. The stench of death reached my nose. My stomach heaved and I nearly released my dinner onto the floor.
Hades stepped to my side. Unconscious, Lucas floated in a cloud of darkness by Hades’s side. The God of Underworld offered me a compassionate smile. “It takes decades to get used to this.” He moved his hand and darkness reached out from his shadow.
As if it was material, the blackness cleared our path, stacking the corpses by the sides.
One corpse twitched and the man coughed through the broken visor. I rushed to him. After I removed his helmet, Sora smiled tiredly, breaking the layer of dried blood that covered most of his face. More dried blood glued together his clothes. He glanced at Hades. “No offense, but you should have told us the collar restrictions could be loosened.”
I froze. The connection formed in my mind: I loosened Ares’s collar, Lucas analyzed it after the fight and then reverse-engineered the process.
Hades nodded. “Can you walk?”
“Yes.” Sora joined us on the trip to the medical ward.
The examination room lay in shambles. The RTG scanner wasn’t broken, but the supplies stored there were scattered across the room. Cold dread crept up my spine. Lucas was a distraction, serving for whatever they wanted to take from here. With a quick glance, I confirmed the welding machine stored here was missing. Why would they take that?
“We will need to search the prison,” Sora whispered.
“Later.” Hades spread the darkness through the room and cleared the path to the old tomograph that stood to the side. The darkness cloud dropped Lucas onto the machine and strapped him in.
I sat down by the computer and Sora sagged down on a chair by the wall.
“When I fought Lucas, he sputtered nonsense about Evelyn being murdered,” Hades said and stepped to me. “Scan his brain for damage”
I started the tomograph and we both watched the scan. As the picture of Lucas’s brain showed, I saw no major deformation. For a more precise test, I would need an MRI, but the prison wasn’t equipped with that. “Nothing.”
“Then how did this happen?”
“The memory extraction we did was risky to begin with,” I whispered. “It is possible the false images we fed blended with his memories, making him delusional.”
“We need to kill him,” Sora remarked.
Slowly, Hades nodded. “I will try to arrange that.” He drew a phone from his pocket, typed out a number and switched the sound to the speaker.
The person he called picked up during the first beep. “What is it?” a sharp, female voice asked from the phone. I didn’t recognize it, but both Sora and Hades tensed.
Hades cleared his throat. “Lady Lucielle, pardon the intrusion—”
“Get to the point,” she snapped.
Hades shook his head with a silent sigh. Sweat covered his brow and his skin paled a tone. “We have encountered a problem with Lucifer.”
“Be specific.”
“He went on a rampage, during which he killed over four hundred prisoners.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
“I stopped him as fast as I could.”
“Not fast enough, apparently.” Lucielle clicked her tongue. “By your latest report, the Male Ward has about three hundred and seventy-eight prisoners. There’s no way he could have killed over four hundred of them. What aren’t you telling me?”
Hades gulped. “We’ve had a plumbing problem that forced us to merge the prisons. But everything is under—”
“You’re getting played.” While we couldn’t see her glowering, the voice alone made goose bumps cover my back. “Get things under control. If Lucas is making trouble, pacify him, but do not damage him.”
We stared at the phone in a silent second. “May I ask why? I don’t see how it matters since he’s imprisoned for life and—” Hades whispered but got interrupted, again.
“He’s imprisoned to learn he needs to work for me and, he can’t repay me for the caused loss if he’s dead or incapacitated, can he? Get the factory in order or I’ll replace you.” Lucielle hung up.
We kept staring at the phone. In retrospect, Lucas’s ability to cause mayhem and destruction was indeed extremely valuable in the supernatural world. There was never a
lack for facilities to destroy or mages to kill. In a twisted sense, his ability to disrupt this prison and go on a nearly unstoppable rampage was the best self-promotion he could have done in Lucielle’s eyes.
Sora slashed apart the silence. “So, about the statue…”
Hades snapped back into reality, eyes refocusing. “The materials will arrive within a week. In the meantime, I will put the Upper Prison in order. To tackle the crisis, I will loosen your collars. You will search the prison and find what they took from here. Also, every time Lucielle told me to get things in order, she immediately sent an unannounced inspection. Prepare everything for us to pass that.”
I motioned toward Lucas. “What about him? Can’t you stop him from loosening the collar restrictions?”
Hades shook his head, hands clenching into fists. “The collars are state of art machinery made by men who died millennia ago. I could try to tamper with it, but there would be a significant risk involved since there may be unintended consequences, like him being able to completely remove the collar. Hence, I’ll loosen your collars and the collars of anyone you deem necessary. Until we stabilize the situation, throw Lucas into extraction.”
“That could cause further mental damage,” I pointed out.
“Noted.” Hades sighed. “We must pass the inspection, then we have to build the apology statue and only then we can kill him.”
“And if Lucielle plans to use Lucas later, she has surely placed some magical tracking on him,” Sora said. “She would know instantly if he died.” He kicked the wall in frustration.
Hades nodded and stepped to me. “Sit still, Amarendra.”
I did.
He ran his fingers over my collar, loosening my restrictions. Calm power filled my veins, embraced my organs, and steeled my muscles. My mind cleared and senses sharpened.
It was like awakening from a strange dream. So, this was what it meant to be a demigod? Since I was shackled moments after devouring Vishnu’s soul crystal, I had never known.
Hades walked to Sora and did the same. “I will send others to clean up the bodies,” Hades said. “Since Lucas wiped out the old guard’s chain of command, you two are now the new captains, sharing the responsibility.”
