The sting of the whip caused her to jerk from the pain. Her mind refused to let a sound escape her clenched lips. She felt her rage grow with each lash as bloody sand sprayed out onto the white marble floor of the atrium. Her abuser did not vary his pace or strength. Each strike hit exactly the same. It was almost rhythmic, and there was no personal feeling in the abuse. She was just an example. Her tormenter was another slave, forced to deal out her punishment with little interest in anyone involved. It was almost clinical in nature since there was no direct connection between the two sides present.

Her punishment resulted from her cousin’s escape attempt that morning; it followed the pattern she had grown to expect in her fifteen years living in the human city. Dissent would be matched with pain, pain, and more pain until there was no energy left to resist. Her masters did not even attend these sessions. The idea was to focus their anger internally since the punishment was caused and dealt out by her fellow slaves, but she felt no resentment towards her cousin or the man whipping her. She only wished her cousin had been successful because then she could have taken this with pride, knowing that her relative was getting a second chance at freedom. She had never even had that.

As the youngest of her people, she was the only one born during their period as slaves. Her mother had been pregnant with her during the raid and couldn’t move fast enough to flee with the others. Over a hundred of her tribe had been captured, and every single one had refused to bear a child during their captivity to deny our new masters any more slaves. She had been the exception. As a result, the masters had ordered all punishments be dealt out to her instead of the person at fault as a lesson. Her people stood there now watching as each lash fell, a scene no newer to them than to her, and she felt only grief that the whippings came less frequently as time went on. Her people were giving up and resigning themselves to this fate, and that scared her more than any whip.

The man finished her sentence with the last of fifty lashes. She was left unable to rise from the small marble pedestal she rested against. Years had left the marble with a pinkened hue from the blood of slaves punished here, and it felt cool on her burning skin. She almost missed it when her mother pulled her away as the movement pulled on her torn, ragged skin. This finally prompted an animalistic scream to echo through the chamber as the pain got too intense for her to bear. Her mother gently pressed her face into the cleft of her shoulder to muffle her cries as they returned to the small cells built into the city’s walls that her tribe called home.

Once there, her uncle tore chunks off her cousin’s chest and proceeded to grind them up in a nearby mortar and pestle. When it was all ground into bits from his intense strength, her mother rubbed the grit into her bloody wounds. Being a half golem-like her family, her body could slowly regenerate with the new material to replace the lost flesh. She could always repair lost sand, but the flesh would never come back, and each punishment changed her body permanently. Her once pristine white flesh with a gritty texture now was striped with strips of grit filled scars. The colors ranged from her cousin's tan to a charcoal black, depending on the relative it had come from. Very little of her youthful white sand remained pure. Most was a pinkish human color that matched her remaining flesh, and if it wasn’t for the stripes, she could look almost human, not that the masters here would make such a mistake.

Half monsters like herself were scorned by the pure-blooded humans that ruled over them. Few pockets of resistance remained in the dungeon system since it was split between the humans who ruled the bottom-most regions and had no tolerance for them, the water king Khiren for whom their dungeon system was named and was so powerful that no non-water creatures dared to cross into his domain, and the orcs who pretty much everything else. The rest of the creatures that existed had either been enslaved, eradicated, or were holed up in one of the smaller dungeons surrounding the system. The minotaurs were the only group to have claimed a valuable portion of the system. They were left generally alone as a fence between the human-controlled territory and the orc’s.

Her people had been captured from a satellite dungeon located near Khiren’s territory but too far from water to be invaded by him. From the stories told to her by her mother, it sounded like a great place for them. It had been filled with minerals and ore needed for their evolution from basic sand golems like herself and had been safe until the humans found them. Now her people were trapped in the same state they had been in before the attack fifteen years ago. They were kept from anything they could use to strengthen themselves, and each punishment left her people with less and less remaining material. Her cousin had been made of hardened clay, and he had once had a sturdy frame that she could remember from childhood, yet now his form looked haggard and rough from his inability to shape himself to fix the damage. They were weak, and despite their superior bodies, they had no way to defeat their captors. Only escape existed as an option, but her people had lost faith in that possibility now as well.

She was not like her people in that regard. They had seen the world and experienced the loss of their whole way of life. She had not. Her began and ended with this city nestled in the heart of the human’s primary dungeon. It had been relatively safe, boring, and completely different from the stories told to her by everyone else in her tribe. They had cool classes like the Fortress class her uncle had. She had worked as a servant her whole life, and with skills relating entirely to cleaning, cooking, and serving others, she would at best receive the Attendant class if she continued like this. She had already turned down the Servant, Sweeper, and Maid classes that had been offered at levels five, six, and seven. With only a few levels left until ten, where her last choices would be offered, she knew a change needed to happen fast.

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Her punishment gave her the day off, but her family still had to leave to finish their duties, and she hated how weak she was while recovering. Right now, there was no one watching her or suspicious of what she may be up to, yet she was too sore to make use of the opportunity. For the last year, she had plotted how to get out and had yet to find a way that would work. The other slaves outside of her tribe would report anything they saw to a supervisor, and the killing field outside the wall made spotting an escape trivial. Her status screen gave little assistance to her plotting as nothing there would be of use; however, she looked again anyway if for no other reason than to smile at the knowledge that the almighty humans controlling them did not have such a screen. Only monsters or monster hybrids could see such detail. Humans did not even get to see their definite progress and had to guess. She had no such limitation.

Name:

Verity Stonefist

Stats:

Skills:

Level:

7 (30%)

Strength:

11

Name:

Level:

Affect:

Age:

15

Dexterity:

12

Cleaning

10 (10%)

Grime Repulsion, Minor Destruction

Race:

Golem-Human Hybrid

Agility:

9

Caregiving

7 (34%)

Sense Needs

Class:

--------------

Will:

8

Unarmed Combat

5 (55%)

Reinforced Fists

Weaknesses:

Humidity, blunt objects

Cooking

3

(8%)

Acting

1 (10%)

Purebred humans had magic pertaining stats like intelligence and wisdom, but golems' bodies use all their magic to sustain themselves, and there is no capacity for them to learn magic. Instead, they have a will stat that would increase the effectiveness of their bodies. Verity had never bothered to increase this stat since her masters discouraged it, and the other stats allowed her to get work done quicker. Now she regretted that choice since her injuries were derailing her plans.

As the time wore on and she finally gained some movement back, she heard the workers returned and sighed forlornly at her misfortune. While she loved her tribe, she knew there was no life here for them, even if they themselves had forgotten that fact. Their masters would not kill her tribe if she escaped, and if she could manage to get aid from the remaining members of her people, then they could free those she left behind. It was with this idealistic daydream of being the savior to her kind that lulled her into an uneasy sleep.