“There is the Stud Potion...pointless, though…it has little effect on women. Some of my old stuff? The Dairy Potion, maybe? No, I ironed out the side effects of it a long time ago,” the deranged master of ours muttered to himself in a frantic effort to find a way to deliberately strike me with another mutation, with as many mutations as he could actually, to turn me into a beast before the crystal that he shoved into my guts burned away the last vestiges of my humanity.
“There’s only the...no ...no, I can’t.”
‘Yeah, take your time, asshole...,’ and let me finally die. Seeing the disgusting black vein spreading across my chest, it seemed that even my remarkable regeneration wasn’t enough to save me this time around.
“Oh, come on, spit it out. What is it? Or do you want me to pull it out of your mind?”
No doubt the shoelace bitch’s favorite threat. And it was no wonder. Her grip over my mind could get tighter than that of my array or the iron collar. Worse, according to her threats, she seemed to be able to make a mess of one’s mind and pry whatever she wanted out of it. The thought of all the things she could pull out of mine sent a shiver down my spine, a painful one, wrenching a whimper out of me.
“I’d rather keep my mind intact...ma’am.”
“I promise, I’ll be gentle.”
“Sure, you will. I’ve seen the drooling idiots your...kind turns people into when they’re done with them.”
“They outlived their usefulness,” the shoelace bitch replied nonplussed. “Did you?”
Before the asshole got around to spouting the answer, another whimper escaped my lips as the tendrils bit into my lungs, squeezing my heart even tighter. My breaths grew short and heavy, accompanied by a shitload of pain.
“B-but... what you’re asking me to do is use... ‘that’.”
“Oh, ‘that’. Fuck... I see. Why didn’t you say so before?”
“I was told not to mention it to anyone, let alone use it like that without permission from...”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“Y-you know what could happen, right?”
“Of course,” the shoelace bitch barked back, a hint of concern in her voice for the first time.
‘That’? What the bloody heck could the ‘that’ be that made them both reluctant to use it? Not that I minded. Them not using it meant less pain for me and, hopefully, the end of this nightmare.
“Actually, this might be an opportunity.”
‘What? No. No, no, no, no. Please, no...’
“We’re moving this - shithole anyway, so...”
“What about the city? What if...?”
“I couldn’t care less.”
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“And your... elders? I was told...”
“Tsk, I’ll explain it to them. You have my permission to use ‘that’. Good enough?”
“More than enough,” said the asshole, his voice quivered with eagerness that made all my instincts scream at me to run away. He couldn’t help using that high-pitched little boy voice whenever he made us slaves drink his vile concoctions. And this time, both his voice and the concoction screamed especially bad news.
But knowing what was to come was one thing, and being able to do something about it was another. Right now, I didn’t even have the strength to scream in my mind, let alone defy my master’s orders, which, to my satisfaction - one had to find joy in the little things - he didn’t realize.
“All right, tell her to drink this.”
“Did you hear that moron? Bottoms up.” As soon as her words rang out in my mind, they took hold of my body. Then, when the deranged asshole put the bottle to my lips and poured its surprisingly richly sweet contents into my mouth, I swallowed it without so much as a whiff of struggle.
Well done, me.
The concoction didn’t even give me a chance to lament over my weakness or hurl a few more curses at this world before it began its vile work.
While the pea-sized core burned its way through my body, the liquid ran cold like icy glacier water, freezing my throat. No exaggeration. With the last whimper escaping my lips, I could actually see my breath as if we were in the midst of the winter months. Fascinating as it was, the moment the cold reached my lungs, and with that, the burning hot tentacles, pain unlike anything I’d ever known - and that was saying something - shot through my body.
With the life almost drained out of me, all I did was arch up on the table, my mouth wide open in a silent scream.
The worst part of it? I didn’t lose consciousness, let alone die - but I guess that would have been too much to ask for and require not having the bitch in my head. I could feel her sickening touch preventing me from drifting off into the nightmares of my dreams.
And frankly, those right now sounded like a lovely place to be.
Instead, I got to fully taste the fallout of the war between heat and ice, carving its way across my body. In fact, the fight seemed to cluster mostly around my heart, as if the forces saw it as the most crucial stronghold to occupy. The contest raged on and on, for what seemed like an eternity, before the sheet of ice covered my vital organ, claiming its victory.
‘Finally, some mercy!’
The sharp pain turned into a nice, dull pressure, giving me a chance to take a few breaths, heavy and labored as they were.
“Talk! Keeping her awake is a pain in the ass.”
“It … it s-seems ...”
“Tsk, it seems? To me, it seems that the fabled Alchemist of Potions is all talk.”
“The...the decay has stopped spreading.”
“For mind’s sake! I can see that myself. Does that mean it worked - or not? Talk!”
“I don’t…the potion took effect, of some kind. But I never used ‘that’. For all I know, it could be her regeneration getting stronger, some other side effect, or a ton of other things… I won’t be able to tell until I open her up and...”
Whatever those two argued about next died away in a rumble that echoed in my ears as my heart took its first beat under the ice sheet. Then another, and one more. Beat after beat rang in my ears, each one pounding harder than the last. Once again, my body’s tenacious clinging to life denied me the mercy of death.
‘Seriously, WHY?! Why couldn’t I just die?’
As usual, no answer came. Instead, another heartbeat rang in my ears, followed by more. Before I knew it, my whole head resonated with the deafening pounding of my heart as if I were standing in a bell tower at high noon. The whole world has shrunk down to my heartbeat. In a steady rhythm, it pounded my sanity away.
And just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, my whole skull tingled.
* 106th glyph engraved on Indomitable Will (⦿⦿⦿⦿)
Ah, the Lattice and my hateful Slave Array, the cursed runes binding not only my fate. They always seemed to revel in my misery, chiming in at my worst times.
Sometimes - well, often actually, I wondered if it simply worked that way or if this whole world just hated me for what I was - an outsider, a foreigner ripped from her own world and brought here to this nightmare.