CHAPTER 74 CONTEMPLATION

TRIGGER WARNING: portrayals of depression and attempted suicide amongst other trauma.

//AN: I know I said I wasn’t going to get as dark as I had before, but it’s kind of how the story is flowing currently. It both serves as a segment that describes his current situation, why the mc feels the way he does and why he’s doing what he does. Or helps preemptively explain what he is going to do anyways. It also grants more perspective into Lurks personality, the control she has over him physically and mentally, even when she’s not using her abilities. The main meat of the stuff happens in the flashback which is denoted by using italics, so if you want to skip that part talking about attempted suicide to avoid the uncomfortableness it might make you feel, that’s the part you want to skip. It's the last bit of dark gloomy shit I've got in the story planned for this arc.

Just as a reminder, this entire arc is taking a turn to the darker side of reality and in this case fiction. This isn’t a fetish writing, a lot of this stuff makes me feel just as gross as everything else, but it is, unfortunately, one of the best ways to develop the character in the direction I plan on going forward. I could write more about it here, but honestly if you have any questions, reaching out to me through the Discord would be the best way to go. I’d be happy to talk more and try to explain my thoughts on the direction of the story as non spoilery as I can. Anyways, enjoy the chapter. I plan to try and flip flop the feelings so that it never stays too dark for too long. But there is going to be more of this going forward. We’re hitting the halfway point for the arc as well, being about 60k words. I plan to go to about 120k for the entire arc. We'll see if I make that though.//

***

I was right in my deduction that it was a type of pot pie. It was also really good. Like, really good.

Kayla seemed to enjoy it as well. It was a bit strange to me, however. I was more familiar with shepherd’s pies or like chicken pot pies, or turkey ones. Pot pies that had some meat or veggies in them, instead this one replaced everything with the different types of fruits. Although there were also potatoes in there as well.

We had made it halfway through the pie when I heard David call that it was time for everyone to line up.

“Oh…” Kayla said with a slightly disappointed look on her face, her gaze lingering on the rest of the pot pie.

I chuckled a little at her forlorn expression causing her to turn away blushing slightly.

“I’ll hold onto this in my room, it should still be good after our shift.”

Her expression brightened up a little.

“Also, Jolene could just make more of these if I give her the ingredients, so it’s not like this will be the last time you’ll ever have one.”

“I… didn’t really know where she had gotten the stuff to make this with, but I guess that makes a lot more sense.”

I nodded, “Yep, I’ll run this to my room, you go ahead and get in line before we get in trouble.”

Kayla nodded standing up and making her way to the gathering of people.

I covered the distance to my room relatively quickly. Once there I formed a small shell around the rest of the pie, completely enclosing it to make sure that no bugs or anything got to it while we were busy.

With that taken care of, I made my way back to the group just in time to be the last person in line. The man I got in line behind turned to look back at me, gave me a brief nod of recognition before turning back to face the person in front of him.

The line eventually started moving and we traced our way through the cavern and eventually passed the door. Lurks was standing there waiting for the last person in line to go through before she closed the door behind us.

I gave Lurks a slightly wide berth, not wanting to be close to her if I could help it. I watched her as she turned to close the door and went to keep following the line when her hand landed on my shoulder causing me to flinch violently.

I saw Lurks smirk at my reaction. Nausea built up in my stomach and my legs felt weak while she kept her hand on my shoulder.

“You’re not going with the rest, you’ve got another fight tonight. You’ll follow them.” She finished by gesturing with her head to a couple of soldiers that walked up to us, one of them giving a salute to Lurks before turning to look at me with no small amount of disdain.

Now that she mentioned it, I think I remember David saying something about not having to work with everyone else if I was going to be fighting instead.

Lurks removed her hand from my shoulder and I struggled to hold back a sigh of relief.

I followed the two soldiers as they led me through the cavern on a familiar path to the arena.

This time, with [Parallel Minds] I was able to focus on where we were walking, the pathing specifically, the people around us, and some of the conversations they were having all at the same time.

It was all pretty much useless information, talking about various things, who not to play card games with, the different men or women they had managed to bed. I immediately tuned most of the conversations out, especially the ones that were sexual. Hearing about sex, even consensual, had not been something I had been interested in before coming to this world. It certainly hadn’t changed after, and it had only gotten worse after Lurks. Now I was physically repulsed by the idea of it.

After my mind got caught on that I spent more time trying not to think about my experiences that I no longer focused on my surroundings despite [Parallel Minds] and didn’t realize before the soldiers stopped in front of the waiting room. Or at least that’s what I viewed it as. It’s where they stuck all the slave fighters. I figured they probably broke them up among several rooms just to keep too many of them getting crammed together and trying to fight before their time, sabotaging the operation.

I drew a lot of looks from people again as I came in here, I didn’t particularly recognize anyone from last time. But then, I hadn’t exactly been looking at my surroundings. My mind had been completely out of it when I had come through here. Getting a chance to sleep had definitely helped, it had at least given me a chance to think about anything else that wasn’t the… situation I had been in.

I allowed my armor to slowly start forming up around me. While I stood in an uninhabited corner of the room I allowed my separate minds to observe my surroundings.

[Parallel Minds] was an interesting skill, I’d seen it described many different ways; most of the more interesting ones had been when they had personalities attributed to the separate minds. So naturally reality had to have a more boring interpretation of the skill.

Instead of having something I could communicate with it was more like that of a computer handling different tasks at the same time. My physical brain just seemed to be the baseline hardware and as I leveled the skill I got access to more threads to compute data with. It was kind of like my mind had broken off into smaller segments without actually reducing my capabilities? It was hard to explain how it felt, it seemed like it should be completely overwhelming but it wasn’t.

My mind perfectly handled and coordinated all the different aspects without an issue. Which worked out nicely for me.

After standing in the corner for thirty minutes I started to get a bit tired, so I made a chair for myself to sit on. Fifteen minutes later I made myself an apple to eat.

‘Ping’ [Fruit Production] Has leveled 1 > 2

I smiled at receiving the system notification. There was still some primal satisfaction at seeing numbers get bigger. Probably something that I wouldn’t ever grow out of.

I took a bite of the apple, it crunched nicely in my teeth. The sound immediately brought forth an image of Lurks looming over me, one of my fingers in her hand bent at a horrific angle.

I immediately leaned over and vomited onto the floor. Multiple people gave me a disgusted look. I just did my best to ignore them. I hurled the apple into the wall with all my strength causing it to splatter upon hitting the rock wall.

I slumped back into my chair with my head in my hands. The shoddy wall I had sub-consciously constructed in between my waking mind and the memories of what Lurks did was slowly breaking down. Every little thing I did brought forth yet another thing she had done to me.

Some of it was easy to stomach. By comparison, anyways. Physical beatings had been the least of what she had done to me. Even the finger memory I had gotten just now wasn’t even that bad, it had just been sudden.

But that was slowly falling apart. This wasn’t something I felt equipped to deal with.

I struggled to hold back tears of frustration and no small amount of fear.

And I was terrified, extremely so. I wasn’t even sure how to go about addressing this problem. Sitting here thinking about that also brought to mind a completely separate problem.

Several actually.

All of them being tied back to the fact that my mind had been read. Every last bit of my thoughts had been unveiled, that brought forth the problem that Lurks, and by extension Drikith, knew I was from Earth initially. They hadn’t done anything yet, which seemed quite surprising, although I guess they had all the information I would’ve been able to give them. So at that point why would they need me?

The other major issue I had was that I'd been planning on escaping. That wouldn’t necessarily be a surprising secret. As wardens I’m sure they were always expecting people to try and escape.

No, it’s mainly that my main plan to break out of here was a little more sophisticated than digging a tunnel and escaping that way. I also had no doubt in my mind that they had wards preventing people from doing just that. I had no idea how they would go about doing it, but I had no doubts that someone has tried that already. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t.

No, my plan had involved a little bit of bribery by making use of David's prison operations. From there working on getting a stealth skill, leveling it up in the cellblock and then once it was high enough level I would bribe some of the guards to leave the door to our cellblock unlocked and hopefully at that point I’d have a relatively decent grasp on the soldiers and their rotations through the areas.

It would take a little bit of effort and hinge on way too many variables to probably be realistically feasible, but it had been the makings of the plan not the final draft. It was murdered by Lurks before it had even made it out of my mind.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I really didn’t have a chance of escaping at this rate either. From the way Lurks acted I had no doubt she planned on… making use of me whenever she had the urge to. The thought made me violently sick again and I only barely managed to keep it down this time. I ran several of my [Parallel Minds] at doing various things to help distract my own mind.

One of them formed a few flowers on the arms of my chair. I reached out and plucked one with my good hand observing the detail of the flower. It was a beautiful white lily, the yellow in the center contrasting nicely. It made me happy to look at the flower, once again I had to wonder if that was the elvish nature or the nature of my class bleeding through, but at the moment I didn’t particularly care.

Anything that helped deal with the overwhelming disgust and trauma-fueled hatred I was feeling was welcome.

I sat there just contemplating the flower.

My entire life was just fucked from now on wasn’t it? What the hell was I even supposed to do? Was I just going to be her bitch for the rest of my life?

I let out a long sigh. I wanted to escape, but how exactly was I supposed to plan it out if Lurks could constantly just read my mind and pull out whatever thoughts she wanted to?

There had to be some limit to her capabilities, the problem was that I just had no way to determine what those were. Or if they did actually even exist, for all I knew it was possible for her to take down people several tiers higher than her.

Although I didn’t think that was necessarily the case. Lurks seemed to be the type of person that hated having anyone above them. Basically exceedingly narcissistic. As such she probably didn’t like answering to Drikith, but did simply because he was stronger.

To a degree I understood how she felt, if only because she was inflicting the exact same situation on me.

I tried to brainstorm several different ideas for potentially getting out despite knowing they’d be fruitless since it wouldn’t take much effort from Lurks to even find out about them. But I was desperate. I needed something that said to me that it was possible. I needed to know that I could escape, that I wasn’t actually going to be stuck here forever.

I wanted to know that someday I could go home to my family again.

But no matter how hard I thought, nothing came to mind. Everyone around me was too strong, there were too many guards, and I was just too weak.

That’s what it always came down to. Me being too weak.

This time I wasn’t able to stop myself from crying silent tears of frustration. I covered my face with my hands again to try and preserve any small amount of dignity I had left in my mind.

It physically pained my heart to think I was never going to leave this world, that my parents will think I just disappeared in the night without saying anything. That they would die not ever knowing what had happened to me.

It hurt even more to know that they were probably looking for me right now, stressing about me. Despite knowing that I was an adult, I could take care of myself.

I let out a bit of choked laughter.

‘I really didn’t deserve my parents, huh.’ I thought to myself. They had done so much for me growing up, even into adulthood. Cause lord knows how hard it was to find a job in our economy that could actually support you living on your own anymore.

On top of them I had friends that I had talked with regularly. Although most of our interactions were over the internet, some of them still lived pretty close to me, it was just easier to hangout online than to actually go out and see each other.

Would they even spend time trying to figure out what had happened? Or would they think I just decided to start ignoring them and cut them out of my life? Maybe it wouldn’t even matter to them in the long run.

Would it even matter to my parents that I was missing?

The thought that I held no value to the people I valued the most is what broke me the most. Despite everything Lurks had done to me, the single most painful thing to my mind was that all of the relationships I had cultivated were meaningless and wasted effort on my part. I had wasted effort on trying to stay on good terms with people that didn’t even want to be on good terms with me.

An unidentifiable mix of emotions stirred together in the pit of my stomach. How was I even supposed to deal with this?!

I wanted to scream and break things. I wanted to just curl up into a corner and cry.

I’d rather die than deal with this.

A memory instantly tore through my mind at that thought.

***

Lurks had stepped out of the room after someone came to the door and bothered us… her.

It was a blessed reprieve from everything she had been doing to me. But I wasn’t sure how long it would last. I could hear her outside the door talking in a heated manner with someone. My mind struggled through the drug and pain induced haze it was in to comprehend their words.

It was all just a meaningless slurry to my mind as I laid there on the bed staring at the ceiling. After a few moments, a thought worked its way into my mind.

I would rather die than continue to live like this.

My mind made up, I struggled to push myself off the bed. I fell to the floor in a heap, the pain from the fall not even registering in my mind anymore. My mental state was far too gone and broken to even bother with acknowledging something so insignificant.

I spent a few short moments looking around the room. I looked up above, and unfortunately there wasn’t anything particularly sturdy enough to try and hang myself off of. So I’d have to go about this a different way. I sat there looking for several moments before my drug addled brain finally realized how stupid I was being.

I could make magic infused wood. I could just create something to do it with.

I slumped back down on the floor and tried to focus my mind. It was a struggle, magic wasn’t coming easily to me right now with my mental state. I wasn’t sure what she had given to me, but it was strong. Strong enough that it completely bypassed any resistances I had.

Eventually though I managed to pull it off. A small bit of wood slowly sprouted up from my hand. It slowly grew and grew in shape as I poured every bit of mana I could into it. Eventually I molded the shape to how I desired it to look. When I finished I was holding a small knife.

In a fight it would be completely useless, barely bigger than a swiss army knife blade. The cheap kind.

For killing myself? More than enough.

I was slightly surprised at how not afraid I was at the moment, it probably had something to do with the drugs.

I was able to recognize that my decision making was being corrupted, but at this point I didn’t care anymore. I would much rather be dead than have to continue being raped, or tortured, having my bones broken only to be forced to reset them with healing, to then have them broken again. All the while she would mentally defile every precious memory I had, or corrupt them and turn them into my worst nightmares. Seeing my family tortured and killed in front of me, the broken remains of my friends.

I couldn’t go back to that.

I couldn’t.

I could escape though.

I slammed the knife into my neck. Once. Twice. Three times.

The pain was barely even there. In fact I wasn’t even sure if there was pain.

A soft gurgling escaped my lips as my blood spilled down my neck and into my mouth from the inside. I coughed weakly as the thick fluid filled my throat, making it difficult to breathe. My vision started fading out and with it came a sense of peace.

This isn’t how I wanted to die. But choosing my own time was better than living a way I couldn’t control.

I heard a distant scream. But that wasn’t my problem anymore. I slowly let my eyes close, welcoming the embrace of death. It was a lot warmer than I thought it would be.

And just as I thought it would finally be the end, a single command tore its way through my mind

“HEAL.”

My body moved completely on its own, I slapped my only arm against the wounds on my neck and started repeatedly casting [Nature’s Touch] on them. Meanwhile one of my [Healing Blossom]’s sprouted out of the ground.

In just a few short moments I was yanked back from the brink of death.

My senses slowly cleared, the drugs were still in my system so my thoughts were slow and uncomprehending.

Fingers slowly filtered through my hair and my eyes finally focused on the face above me.

Lurks had a sad, pained look on her face.

“Why did you try to kill yourself?” She asked me softly while running her fingers through my hair again.

The touch was so soft and loving, in conjunction with how she gently stimulated my brain with her abilities in my mind, evoking feelings of love and trust. Either from memories or just because of the comfort her actions caused me to feel in my mind as she treated me with care and love rather than by using her abilities to cause me pain.

It made me completely forget in the moment, who she was and what she had done to me.

“I just wanted to die…” I whispered in reply.

“Why is that?”

“I don’t want to live like this anymore. I- I can’t. It hurts too much.” I said, whimpering pitifully at the end.

Lurks gave me a compassionate look, while shushing me softly. She pulled me in, hugging me gently. “You’ll be fine,” She whispered back to me, “I love you and will take care of you. So in turn you have to trust me, okay?”

I hugged her back, taking comfort in the warm feeling I had in my chest. I felt safe here, safer than I had been.

“However,” She said, her tone changing drastically, causing my blood to run cold. “There still needs to be a punishment for what you just did. I can’t have you thinking it’s okay to try and hurt yourself without my permission. I’m going to make sure you never want to do anything like that ever again”

I broke down in tears, any pride I might’ve held in those moments having long since been torn away.

I begged her for mercy.

My words fell on deaf ears.

***

I was shivering as I hugged myself in my chair, the memory slowly fading from my mind. I wanted to puke again.

Had Lurks actually put a memory on a trigger in my mind so that if I resolved to try and kill myself I’d get a flashback?

Before I could contemplate this any further, someone walked into the room and stopped near me.

“Ah man, that’s fucking filthy. Elf. You’re up, come on.”

I looked up, it was one of the soldiers, his partner waiting by the door. I stood up and slowly followed after him. We eventually made it back to the arena, the enormous cage in front of me. Currently two people are fighting in it once again.

One of my [Parallel Minds] caught sight of Lurks on the ground floor waiting for me again. As we got closer Lurks focused on me, I felt her sifting through my mind. She made it uncomfortable, but not unbearable. As she touched my most recent memories she smirked.

“Good, you know now.” She said, I could barely hear her over the sound of the guys in the cage, skills going off constantly and the announcer currently narrating the fight to the viewers.

At that moment all I could think of was: why? Why me? Why was I the one that had to go through this?

Lurks just laughed, “It’s you because you’re my favorite type.”

I was too afraid to even ask her what she meant by that, I didn’t even want to know.

She answered anyway.

“I love seeing men like you, the confident, proud ones. The ones grounded in who they are, well adjusted to the world. I love seeing them broken, dependent on me. I love the adoration and hatred they feel towards me as I twist their minds, I love seeing that moment where their entire world collapses around them and they finally snap under the pressure. You haven’t quite gotten there, but you’re teetering on the edge. You’re struggling so desperately to make sense of everything and hold on to your last bit of sanity. The panic you feel, the confusion, the anxiety, and hatred. I can feel every emotion you have and every single one of them is so… intoxicating.”

She licked her lips as she stared at me hungrily. She reached out with a hand and gently caressed my cheek causing me to flinch at her touch.

“I’m going to enjoy breaking you the rest of the way, I plan on doing it slowly. I can’t go too fast, I have to make sure to enjoy this. I doubt I’ll get a hold of another elf, even if you’re not truly one yourself.”

With those final words she thrust my sword into my chest and made me grab it before turning around and stalking away.