Lam woke in darkness, submerged in a liquid that felt more viscous than water. He clawed at the smooth, curved walls surrounding him, thrusting himself upwards, his mouth impacting the ceiling of container he was trapped within. Panic-stricken, it took all of his will to not breath in the liquid in hyperventilating paroxysm, his drowning phobia threatening to overwhelm him. After what felt to Lam like hours, but was actually perhaps ten seconds, a mechanical, clanking sound resounded through the liquid, the walls vibrating beneath his hands. The level of liquid in the cylinder started to recede, a slight suction pulled at his feet. Lam took frantic, gasping breaths as soon as his mouth was uncovered. Lam sank with the draining fluid until his bare feet reached the cold, grated floor his container. He leaned his forehead against the wall facing him, trying to calm his sputtering breathing, when that wall suddenly slid open, sending him sprawling towards the floor. He was barely able to catch himself on his elbows before face-planting into the rough stone floor.
Before Lam could start to get up, a huge hand grabbed him by the back of his neck and hoisted him up. Lam grabbed at the hand around his neck, but was unable to pry apart the massive fingers that fully encircled his neck with a vise-like grip. Unable to turn his head, Lam stumbled out of the room and into a hallway, propelled forward in quick, stagger-inducing pace, held semi-upright by his captor. The scratching sounds of Lam’s shuffling feet and panting breath were drowned out by the echoing reverberations of the giant’s footsteps. He caught glimpses of wooden doors made of rough hewn planks, gray, stone slabs comprised the floor and large stone bricks covered in mildew the walls, lit by flickering torches in black, iron sconces. Lam was casually tossed into one of the alcoves stemming from the hallway, the back of his head cracking against the stone wall, disorienting him. Cold iron manacles chained to the wall were screwed onto to Lam’s wrists, splaying his arms apart above his head. Lam was finally able to see his jailer, sort of; a gigantic individual, at least a meter taller and wider than Lam, his features hidden by the voluminous hood of a brown robe. The giant casually walked away from Lam, the sound of his footsteps gradually fading away.
Standing there, Lam briefly strained at his bonds before dismissing escape as futile and started at the realization that he felt no pain, except for the relatively mild pain from the knock to the back of his head and catching himself on his elbows. He flexed his fingers and toes, amazed at their dexterity, and ran his new, scar-free tongue across his unbroken teeth. He tentatively spoke, “I feel…” with none of the pain that had accompanied movement for as long as he could remember. Looking down at himself, he saw that his body had changed. Where before he had been pale and emaciated, he looked like what he thought a normal body looked like, though without any hair. The scar he had on his stomach was missing. He tried to bring his hand to his head to determine if he had hair there, but was stopped by the chains.
Lam had a vested interest in medical breakthroughs regarding pain management and movement disorders. He ardently followed support forums, and read as much medical research as he could. He had heard of no procedure that would have come close to eliminating his convulsions and eliminating his pain, much less remove scars and regrow teeth. It must be that liquid chamber I woke up in. I was probably in there for a while, and could have breathed that stuff in, he thought, but phobia’s aren’t really susceptible to rationality. The incongruity of his miraculous healing in the cylinder—an advanced technological phenomena based on the mechanical sound and feel of the pump, the metal, grated floor, and the smooth walls and door of the apparatus—and the dilapidated, medieval environment he was currently chained in, along with his giant of a jailer made Lam suspect he was dreaming, but this was a much too vivid. Perhaps he was in an isekai fantasy, but he couldn’t recall any story which featured advanced technology alongside fantasy elements, though his characterization of the healing as technologically based might be premature considering his fleeting experience being released from the container. Likewise, he could be under the control and in the hovel of some luddite cult in a science-fiction universe. He had always enjoyed reading—more active hobbies difficult to pursue due to his condition—and the glut of web novels featuring that genre made for many a pleasant experience, though actually being transported was far from desirable. Lam thought it comparable to people liking to watch horror movies while not wanting to be to eaten by vampires or hunted by serial killers, the fantasy romance genre notwithstanding. An actual isekai situation wasn’t likely to be constrained by the fiction he read anyway. “Status,” he said experimentally. He internally sighed with relief when a status page failed to appear.
Lam’s earliest memory was waking up in the hospital from a coma. He had been told that he had been hit in the head by a hammer, stabbed in his stomach, and rolled off a dock into a lake by who everyone assumed was his mother, who was subsequently shot when she attacked a police officer with that same hammer. She did all of this in full view of the police officer who shot her, among others, though far enough away from anyone who might have prevented her attack on Lam, which meant that Lam was only in the lake for perhaps a minute. All she had on her was his birth certificate for some reason, which is how Lam knew what his name was and his birthday. His mother’s name, any other family Lam might have had, why she had wanted to kill Lam, were all mysteries which Lam had long dismissed as futile to think about. He had always assumed that his drowning phobia was the more benign result of the attack. The combination of damage from the hammer, the blood loss from and infections from the lake water seeping into his stomach and head wounds, breathing lake water for a minute, had all somehow resulted in his pain and convulsion rife existence, and the six month long coma. Years of surgeries, recovering from those surgeries, physical therapy, choking and stabbing myself trying to eat, malnutrition due to not being able to eat, the pain, all of the tribulations of my existence gets zapped away by a magic box, only to end up chained to wall to be eaten by some giant cult member, Lam thought, morosely. Probably wanted me healthy enough to taste good. How long was I even in there?
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Lam occupied himself by alternating between flexing his fingers and standing on his toes, fascinated by the ease that he was able to move. When he heard the giant footsteps returning, he desisted his limited calisthenics, and looked towards the hallway. The giant appeared from the hallway alongside a slim man similarly clad in a hooded brown robe. The other man was maybe a third of a meter taller than Lam, though he was much skinnier. He carried a crude, wooden scepter topped with a fist size conglomerate of shiny, white stone with what looked like a dull emerald peeking through in places. The white and green stone was attached to the haft with grayish, frayed twine shoddily wrapped around the gem and the shaft. Strutting around in front of Lam, waving the scepter around, he said…something—rapid syllables spoken in a high-pitched tenor. Seeing Lam’s lack of comprehension, he swept the hood of his robe off of his head. The alien face stared at Lam inches from his face. His face was an amalgam of human and cat-like features; he had onyx-colored skin and large, silvery eyes with a black cat’s nose and long, gray whiskers emanating from his cat-like cheeks. His long, white hair was was parted in the middle and hung to the top of his shoulders, and he had thin, arching, white eyebrows. Unlike a cat, he had no fur on his face and had human-looking ears and mouth, although his thin lips were a slightly lighter shade of black than his skin.
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The cat guy seemed to look affronted at Lam’s failure to respond to his…interrogation? He stepped back from Lam, and, flourishing the scepter like he was a concert conductor, tapped Lam at the top of the his sternum with the stone capped scepter. Lam inhaled sharply through his nose, and gritted his teeth, but otherwise didn’t react to the shock waves of pain that seemed to emanate from where the stone contacted his chest throughout his body. He was well-versed in not reacting to pain, though this was a bit more intense than what he was accustomed to. After a few seconds, cat guy removed the scepter and looked at the gem part suspiciously. Evidently, he was expecting more of a reaction from Lam. He stepped back towards the giant and swatted him, back-handed, in his stomach with the scepter. The giant emitted a guttural howl and keeled over, knocking the cat guy over and landing on top of the cat guy’s legs. As the cat guy was falling, the scepter flew from his hands and landed in front of Lam’s feet. While cat guy extricated himself from beneath the unconscious giant, Lam dragged the scepter against the wall with his foot, pinning it against the wall behind him. The cat guy stood up and, spotting the scepter, bent down in front of Lam. Lam kneed him in the face as he was reaching for the scepter. A brief flash of blue light emitted from where Lam’s knee contacted the cat guy’s face. Lam felt like his knee had hit a wall and cracked his patella in the process while the cat guy didn’t seem to react to either Lam’s knee or to the blue light. Lam’s leg reflexively bent back from the contact and the bridge of his foot went underneath the scepter’s shaft, just beneath the stone. He kicked the scepter’s stone into the crouching cat guy’s face, the heel of his other foot acting like a fulcrum. The cat guy flung himself onto his back, screaming and clutching his face with his hands. The scepter rolled away from Lam’s control, near where the cat guy was screaming.
The cat guy reached around blindly with one hand while the other still clutched his face. His hand contacted the scepter and, fumbling, he grabbed it around the center of the shaft. Stumbling to his knees, still whimpering, he somehow lost his balance and fell forwards. As he was falling, he hurled the scepter away, trying to catch himself. The scepter’s stone head hit Lam just below the solar plexus, embedding itself halfway inside of him. Lam vision was consumed by a hot, white flash. A feral wail welling from deep within Lam’s diaphragm was stifled through his clenched jaws, accented by the sounds of his teeth cracking. He desperately rose up onto his toes, trying to move backwards away from the pain, his heels digging into the wall behind them. Waves of pain billowed from the stone, rippling through his body to his head and extremities and returning, the frequency rapidly increasing with his adrenaline-fueled heartbeat. And then, the pain just stopped. He could feel, and differentiate between, the cracked bones of his teeth and toes and the lacerations the manacles made sinking into his wrists and the protrusions of the erratically cut stone lodged in his stomach, but the pain—all of the pain—-had dissipated. Lam opened his eyes. Looking down, he could see the shaft of the scepter protruding from his stomach, it’s end undulating up and down with his slowing breathing.
Cat guy had sat up sometime while Lam had his eyes shut. His astounded-looking stare was fixated on the scepter, his mouth gaping.. He looked at Lam and, slowly, stood up and started walking towards Lam. Green flames spread from around the back of the cat guy, consuming him. In less than a second from when Lam first saw the oily-looking, green flames, the cat guy had transformed into a noxious cloud of smoke and ash. Unable to hold his breath quickly enough, Lam breathed in the smell of burnt hair and flesh that was all that remained of the cat guy, and started coughing and gagging. He would have emptied his stomach had there been anything in it, immediately feeling nauseous from the smell and the thought that he had just inhaled a person. Lam’s eyes reflexively shut against the flames and burning gases, tears streaming down his face from the limited exposure to the fire and smoke. His arms strained against the chains as he tried to cover his mouth and nose, and rub his eyes.
“Poor baby. Here…” said a woman’s voice and Lam felt a cool breeze against his skin. He heard a squeching sound and the pain-free, piercing sensation of the scepter was removed. Accompanying the breeze was the strange sensation of his skin and bones knitting together, the hole in his stomach collapsing in on itself and knitting itself together. His coughing subsided as the chilly air filled his lungs, and absorbed the smoke and smells he had inhaled.
“Did that bad man hurt you? Don’t be scared. Mama’s here,” the voice spoke again. Lam, eyes cleared by the chilly, healing wind, squinted his eyes open and saw a slight, brunette woman dressed in same brown robes the giant and the cat guy were wearing, though the hood was pulled back. She looked a few years younger than Lam, or at least younger than he used to look, a few years younger than 30. He hadn’t looked at himself since the healing contraption; for all he knew, he looked like he was 16 now and she looked older than that. She moved towards Lam’s restraints and started to undo them. She was about the same height as Lam. “I’m so sorry. I should have been there when you got out of the Egg, but I was trying to look like how you remember me, and it took a while to adjust my appearance. I didn’t want you waking up to strangers, but then…I’m so sorry, baby.” She fumbled with the manacles, and looked towards Lam. “I’m going to have to wake Gregor up. He tightened these things too much.”
She walked over to the giant and waved her fingers in a directed fashion towards him. Green shapes were drawn by her fingers, suspended in the air as if she was finger-painting on a transparent canvas in front of her. A bright green mist emanated from her hand and enveloped the giant’s head. The giant started, shook himself awake and lumbered to his feet. She started speaking to him in the rapid, multi-syllabic manner the cat guy had used to interrogate Lam. The giant’s grunted responses were monosyllabic and he seemed to shrink into himself as she harangued him. The giant pointed an enormous finger at Lam, and said something that caused her to pause. She looked to Lam, or more looked past him as if reading something behind his head.
“Your soul is…what’s your name, how old are you?” she asked, accusingly.
“Lam. 30,” Lam murmured. He hardly had the chance to practice speaking, and decades of only sporadically speaking wasn’t overcome in an instant. That, and his bizarre ordeal, made Lam even more reluctant to speak, his brain frazzled. This lady just cremated a guy in front of me.
“Lamentation Absolution Marshall?” she asked, incredulously. Lam just nodded. “How did survive to 30? Dantian healing…did I miss,” she murmured, poking Lam in the stomach just below his solar plexus, where his scar used to be, where the scepter had been. “You should only be 5!” she exclaimed. Lam was confused. It seemed obvious that he was older than a toddler. This healed body was at least as tall as she was?
Lam cleared his throat, and shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going on. Are you going to unchain me?” he asked, hesitantly, shaking his manacled wrists.
“There’s been a mistake, several mistakes. We were going to train you before your System integration. Chronos is probably livid. You need to get an Interface right away,” she said as she started painting the air in front of her again, much more urgently than what Lam saw previously. The shapes she painted with her fingers were colored purple this time. Lam’s surroundings seemed to warp and spiral around him, and he disappeared.