Continuing to stare at Jaina lessened my rage. I had no solid sense of time. This could have taken seconds or days. All I knew was that I didn't want to hurt her anymore than I already had. So I rendered her into a comma. Healed her as much as I could and tried, and mostly succeeded to envelope her in a shield to protect her from my mana.

Even without my direct attention the two new experimental voluntolds remained locked in their new personal hells.

A while back, I had started each on rounds of their cells tearing themselves apart only to be pulled back together again. This would happen randomly across their entire body, to prevent them from getting to used to any one source of suffering. I made sure they stayed awake so they could watch each others' fates.

I had long since taken away their ability to scream. The silence, other than the sounds of tearing or erupting flesh was perhaps worse than their pitiful cries of agony.

Honestly, by this point, I think their minds might be too broken to really understand what was going on anymore. I felt very little other than intense pain from them, it might be all they could feel anymore.

Bizarrely, their pain no longer affected me. Was I adapting to it or had I burned out my own pain receptors?

Hmm. Yeah I wasn't really back to myself yet.

There was something both artistic and revolting about how their blood was splattered all over the room. I felt a great sense of satisfaction while also loathing myself.

As my wrath died down, I thought I might have gone too far. It wasn't that I hurt them that bothered me at this point. As much as it was that I let their actions bring me to that state where I felt that this was the appropriate response.

I spent quite some time healing them to a physically perfect state. Though I disabled the connections to their non vital cyberware. Let's see if they could recover from my "treatments". Maybe it wasn't too late to fix this.

Probably not.

Yeah, I was pretty sure I was too fucked up right now to trust myself.

Breath in, Breath out. Focus on your heart beat. Keep Breathing. Count something odd but interesting to myself.

Not really helping. Well some, but not enough.

My BTC was trying to tear my arm off and had been for a while but I was busy and mostly ignored it. Now I felt I could find out what it was complaining about now.

[ You have seized control of a Mana Nexus ]

Huh? Oh.

I took Jaina's tower from her. Whoops. Didn't mean to do that. I'd have to figure out how to give it back to her later.

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[ You have evolved Regrowth into Flesh Crafting ]

Hey, that didn't sound anywhere near as pleasant as Regrowth. In fact, it sounded kind of creepy. Was I going to become a villain?

Maybe I already was one?

[ You have evolved Growth into Propagation ]

Okay, that didn't sound so bad.

[ Due to extreme stress you have merged the spell patterns of Flesh Crafting and Propagation ]

[ You have gained the spell Life Crafting ]

Nice, that sounded much more friendly. Though maybe it was too late for me to try to be friendly to folks. Yup, pulling apart two ladies piece by piece and forcing them to watch it happen probably burned all of my nice guy cred.

Hey! I put them back together but I didn't know if that was a good thing or not.

[ Due to extreme stress you have evolved and merged your Auras ]

[ You have gained Aura of Life Crafting ]

Ah that's why everything had seemed so effortless. The Aura was more of an automatic effect and as long as I had the mana to feed it it could affect everything it touched. The tower had allowed me to draw vast amounts of mana. Normally, even with the evolutions, I doubted I could do so much at once.

I nodded to myself, I hadn't become some all powerful demigod. I was just a pissed off asshole with a huge mana battery.

[ You have evolved Cleanse into Purify ]

Could I use that to clean out my brain from the sickening things I just done?

Ah, seems my sense of morality had woken up. Yup, there's the guilt and remorse, took it long enough.

Turns out, no, Purify doesn't effect ethical or emotional quandaries. I cast it three times to be sure.

My clothes and I were sparkling clean though.

Movement caught my attention.

Ingrid was struggling to move.

Already? Damn she was tough.

To be more accurate, she probably wasn't actually aware, this was likely a subconscious movement.

Her left hand creeped into her left pants pocket. Her nomad cloths though horribly stained with gore were mostly intact.

She pulled out a small box shaped object. I was pretty sure that was a remote detonator.

Ah, that answers that question. They planted the explosives, sure it was logical to assume so, but it was better to have confirmation.

Suddenly, I felt a little less horrible about how I treated them. Using explosives was always a bad play in a population center, too indiscriminate. If you were willing to consciously risk children, you didn't deserve much in the way of mercy by my standards. Tarnished though they were now.

What kids you might ask? The Nomads' kids. Also a few of the first Lordaeron folks summoned here were expecting. Yay.

Now that I thought about it, all the Nomads were unlikely to be in on this plot. Who brings their kids to a cluster fuck like this. Unless... no that was the path of paranoia.

Ingrid's finger kept pressing the button, but of course the explosives had all already been dealt with by the Probes. Robo buddies are awesome, I won't let anyone say different.

I was just staring at Ingrid repeating the same futile action over and over again, when I felt a hand grasp my shoulder.

I didn't even flinch, if they were that close they were in my Aura, which meant if I wanted them dead they were dead. Even Mr. Wick.

"You okay?"

"No, John, I'm pretty fucking far from okay. But thanks for asking." I turned to look at him, "How much of that did you see?"

He grimaced, "All of it."

"Let me guess this was the first moment you felt it was safe to approach." I shook my head, trying not to let my shame get the best of me.

"Yeah." Good ol' John.

"Really sick, huh?" I asked already knowing the answer.

"Seen worse." John deadpanned.

I gave him a stare.

"Take what you did, now apply it to children. Sure not quite as intense at any given moment but almost so, over months and then years. That's what they did to failures back home. Training Materials. Object Lessons." I didn't detect an ounce of deceit.

I nodded, "There's always someone worse."

He grunted, "Until there isn't."