He felt free. He couldn’t recall the last time he felt this pure and happy. It was like he was a naive child again.
But slowly, this sense of freedom was being suffocated; chains of consciousness and self-awareness were being shackled to him.
He no longer felt free. Now he felt like he was dying but in reverse; he was being reborn, rejuvenated, recaptured.
And he hated it.
He wanted to move, to lash out and escape, but he couldn’t.
There was nothing to lash out at. He was caught in a half-awake and half-asleep state, not fully aware of what was happening but also not slothful enough to ignore it.
And then, all of a sudden, he was dragged, flailing back to life.
Snapping his eyes open, he jolted up and fanatically looked around the minimalistic room he found himself in.
He glossed over the figure slumped on a chair almost automatically, he only glanced briefly at the individual and that was enough for him to ignore her existence.
Technological devices hummed all around him, the monitor on his right showed off what looked to be his heart rate, alongside a bunch of other numbers and symbols he didn’t understand.
The one on his left looked like a kid's interpretation of runes; countless squiggles broke out and squirmed across the screen before disappearing again.
There were also other apparatuses around, like a giant floating cylinder that glowed and hummed with a strangely relaxing tune.
What caught his eye the most, however, was the glittery, multicoloured mixture that was being fed into his oddly healthy arm from an IV dispenser.
It felt tingly, like someone was tickling him inside his veins.
It wasn’t exactly pleasant, but it didn’t feel that bad either. It was just weird.
“Taken a good look around?” A soft and dismissive voice questioned.
Thomel had been trying his best to ignore her while he sized up his surroundings, in no small part because he had caught a glimpse of the Lonel Corp patch on her blood-red robes.
Turning shakily towards her, he eyed her up nervously.
What he had at first taken to be a dark-red robe actually looked like it might have originally been white.
Despite her brutal clothing, she didn’t look too threatening. With her short and curt brown hair, she would fit in at just about any service industry.
That is if she didn’t have that jagged scar which covered the entire left side of her face. Whatever had caused that must have nearly killed her, just what had she fought?
At least she seemed to also be taking a laid-back approach to whatever was happening here, which helped put him somewhat at ease.
But he knew that it was all a lie, she could snap him like a twig if she wanted to. She had no need to act intimidating, the reputation she and her peers had built from their endless slaughtering was more than sufficient to make up for the lack of formality.
“Uh, yes, nice place?” He spoke cautiously, mentally sounding out every word before he said it.
“Yup, very nice place. Pity you don’t have the money to afford it.” She replied callously, looking him up and down with bored disdain.
“So you paid for me?” He asked, wincing just after he said it.
“More like we gave you the money and you paid for it.” She yawned, staring at a speck of dirt on her fingernails with a pondering look.
Her cold words struck him like lightning and left him dazed, he just stared blankly at her as she finished scrapping the dirt off her nail and then stood up, striding briskly towards him.
His shock was replaced by a foreboding sense of dread as she pulled out a crisp stack of paper and pen.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Congrats hunter, you’ve got a chance to pay off your debt. Just do what’s literally stated in your class and hunt a few animals for us, then your debt will be taken care of. It's a very good deal, isn’t it? Better than losing all those nice, regrown organs and limbs.”
Her apathetic tone didn’t change but it didn’t need to. She didn’t need threats to be intimidating.
Carefully, he nodded his head and without even taking a look through the contract she handed him, he signed it.
He knew it was a bad idea but it was either this or a guaranteed and likely death, that was if he was lucky.
He’d heard rumours of people who refused to sign or had defaulted on their debts being tortured for days on end.
Some of them weren’t even rumours but rather articles, like that case where a group of desperate gamblers were kept in tanks of weak acid and infused with healing magic, when their skin decayed and the liquad started to eat through their organs they still survived a few extra days in pure agony.
He had survived the clutches of one sadistic monster just to have another one grab a hold of him and unlike the last one, he doubted there was any hope of escaping this fiend.
With evident boredom, the debtor picked up the contract and started to leave the room. Pausing just before she left, she turned slightly and threw him a small booklet.
It smacked him harshly on the head, eliciting a snort from her as she exited the room. It was the first sign she had any emotion other than boredom.
He wanted to swear, to throw up his arms and curse the heavens. Instead, he stared at the booklet lying on his exquisite ward bed.
After no small amount of delay, he finally mustered up the courage and reached out to grab it.
The booklet was mass-produced, just like many things in this world. It was also just as open-ended as pretty much every single piece of corporation literature.
Open-ended on what was expected of him of course, not so open-ended on the punishments.
How being locked in a room and forced to listen to audio ‘therapy’ for up to twenty-four hours was even allowed was beyond him.
Surely someone in upper management would have gotten pissy over how unproductive that was and cancelled it?
People who did logistical and more intellectual work risked trauma and brain damage which would limit their effectiveness, while people who did more manual labour were a dime a dozen, it would make more sense to just replace them.That was just basic common sense that almost every corporation knew.
There were a couple of other punishments like that one, terrifying and brutal, but also too inefficient for most managers to justify using.
Then again, this was the Lonel Corp; he hadn’t had any interaction with them before, but he sure had heard of them.
Or more specifically, he had heard of their debtors. How such a seemingly normal and impotent class had become a symbol of pure fear was a story just about everyone had listened to at some point.
Normally the worst stories began when they started to fall behind on repaying the corporation clothing and other effects they had been made to buy.
He turned another few pages of the booklet, skipping the punishment section and reaching the end credits.
A whole thirty people were listed at the end, almost none of them probably actually helped make this thing at all.
Reading through it had been a total waste of time; he still had no clue what was expected of him or even how he was meant to go about working for them.
With a sigh, he closed the booklet, and that was when he noticed the clumsy handwriting on the back.
After reading it, he couldn’t help but let out a deeper sigh. They wanted him to get out of the hospital and enter a car with the number plate C31GE1 tomorrow morning.
There wasn’t any mention of what time, so he was going to just have to leave as soon as it was morning. No sense pissing off his new overlords.
Especially not when they had a habit of gutting people and forcing them to eat their own stomachs, and then charging them for the hospital visit to get it regrown
He was tempted to throw it against one of the sickly-white walls, but he overcame that desire and set it beside himself instead.
What had he gotten himself into? How had a simple hunting competition turned into such a horror show?
Thomel couldn’t help but suspect that it was planned. It wouldn’t be the first time a group of under-levelled and underprivileged people got killed off for the amusement of some board members and powerful managers.
Who better to kill off than a bunch of hunters who barely nudged the profit quota up? Maybe it wasn’t even for fun; maybe it was a purge>
Why save him, then?
Calling out his status screen, Thomel took a look over everything just to make sure he was the same person he was the last time he’d checked.
image [https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/98668981/096cda8dc411427aa4b192882acf897e/e30%3D/1.PNG?token-time=1720310400&token-hash=Mo9H4nwMVfuXb9jL0DwBUx5g2bim7uz90pKw0GeAL2Y%3D]
He hadn't even gained a level/stat point from his ordeal! Everything was the exact same
He didn’t know if he should feel relieved about that or sad.
Presently he didn’t really care; a wave of tiredness had hit him hard and he wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and embrace the lucrative freedom that sleep offered.
He could think over everything in the morning. Opening his mouth wide, he released a yawn instead of a sigh as he laid back onto his surprisingly comfortable pillow.
While reality itself felt like a nightmare, the embrace slumber offered was a warm reprieve.