When Rory woke, he felt cold, his mouth felt disgusting, and everything in his vision was blurry. Moving his mouth and tongue ineffectually, he blinked repeatedly. All he could make out was a blotch of white surrounded by black which faded into and out of his vision. He blinked a bunch more times and eventually his eyes were finally able to focus.

He found himself in a dark room and couldn’t really see much beyond a dim light over him. He tried to roll over and realized he couldn’t. In fact, he couldn’t move anything very much. He turned his head and noticed he was naked except for a pair of thin gray pants like the normals were wearing at the testing center. Worse though, he was held down to a M-steel table by invisible force restraints. He could not see them but he knew they were there as he could feel them holding him down so all he could move freely was his head and feet. He tried pulling free at every point in his body but failed each time.

Freaking out, he called, “Hello? Is anyone there? Help!”

There was no response. For what felt like hours to Rory’s terrified mind there was nothing but him struggling to get free. Finally, he heard a door slide aside and footsteps. Lifting his head, Rory was relieved to find Killean enter.

He smiled and said quickly, “Kill, help me get out of this. Something happened and we’re in troub…”

Rory’s voice faded as he saw his friend smile down at him. His face looked weird and he didn’t help. What was wrong? Why wouldn’t he help?

“Kill?”

His best friend finally spoke, “Hey, Rors.” And that was it. No thing about what was going on or how he was going to get Rory out.

Before he could ask for help again, Rory heard the door open again and he lifted his head to see Killean’s parents slowly walk into the room. Killean’s father was a big man with a pointed black beard that Rory always found scary. His mother was a pretty woman with blond hair that went just past her shoulders and had a wave to it that Rory always liked. They were both wearing their fancy almost cloth-like white and blue techarmor, which for them enhanced their Soul Crafting capabilities by adding stability to the fingers, hands, and wrists, as well as improved Soul Power flow for whatever crafting they were doing.

They walked up to the table Rory was trapped onto and the father snapped at Killean in his Britannian accent, “What did you say to him?”

His best friend visibly cowered from his father. “N-nothing, sir,” he said shakily.

Despite his situation and everything that was going on, this scene shocked Rory. Killean’s parents had never been cruel like this in Rory’s presence. They were always polite, fair, and giving.

His mother said in a similar tone of anger which sounded off in her own accent matching her husband’s, “If you weren’t such a rubbish useless boy, this wouldn’t have been necessary. You know that right?”

Killean looked down and, as it was facing Rory, he saw his friend’s face show anger and fear in equal measure.

Confused and scared, Rory spoke up. “What’s going on? Why am I here? I wanna go home.”

Mr. Walsh looked down at him and had a sneer on his face when he ordered with a forceful snap that made Rory jerk in his restraints. “Shut up!”

Then his expression shifted to one Rory recalled from one of his visits to their labs, Mrs. Walsh leaned over him and examined him like he was one of her experiments. “It’s a shame. You were supposed to be of use to him. But instead, you exceeded him by far too much.” Then back towards his son in that sneering tone, “Not that that was so hard with his low level and no element.”

Rory opened his mouth to ask to go home again but Mrs. Walsh slapped his face. It stung and tingled. Tears started falling from Rory’s eyes then and rolled down the sides of his face. He started whimpering and got slapped again causing him to cry out and whimper again.

Mr. Walsh sighed. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter now. Rory, are you listening?”

Rory was so freaking out and overwhelmed, he didn’t respond just thinking about how he wanted to go home. He felt another smack across his face and he jerked again.

Mr. Walsh’s face appeared over his and said slowly, “Shut up and focus. Are you listening?”

This time Rory nodded if for no other reason than because he hoped it would make the slapping stop.

“Good. Now, young man. You are going to grow too strong and won’t be under our control. Your father broke our agreement, which I suppose I understand given the results. You were supposed to join our son as one of his. But our son turned out to be a weakling and you are far too strong to be controlled by him. Truthfully, you’ll grow too strong for any of us, and as tempting as it would be to have you, we can’t risk it. The fact that it proved out this facility’s value is besides the point.”

Rory blinked up at him, understanding almost nothing of what the man said. “Well, you can’t be allowed to grow. Our preference would have been simply to terminate you the way we usually do with your like. Unfortunately, we’ve been warned that that damn Sutherland and her little private army have their eyes on you. She’s watching too closely for you to simply vanish.”

She nodded and looked down at Rory with that same interested but compassionless expression. “It’s a shame we can’t keep your body. If we could figure out what happened to give you such high compatibility and could reproduce it and add it to our activation formula…” Then she sighed and shook her head. “Ah well. No point in focusing on what we can’t have, is there? And we have your father for study.”

She looked Rory in the face for the first time and asked, “Tell me, do you know of the true history of Soul Constructs?” A second later she spoke before Rory could even think about an answer, especially after saying the thing about his da. “Never mind, of course you know nothing.” Returning to her perusal of his body with an occasional poke and prod with some sort of instrument, she continued. “About a thousand years ago, humanity figured out how to terraform planets and had successfully colonized a good portion of this solar system. Unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out how to break the light speed barrier and were therefore stuck in our local space. Then our ancestors found a species of alien that was made entirely of energy. You know them as the Soul Cursed. Unfortunately for humanity, that species is obsessed with consuming the energy we now call Soul Power. It turned out humanity had a sufficient amount that the Cursed started eating us like a breakfast buffet. For some reason, they can absorb it from normals while we can’t, which is a shame. Anyway, our primitive weapons and defenses of the time were useless against their non-corporeal forms.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Rory jerked and gasped as she poked a particular hard jab into his ribs with something cold and sharp.

She continued on like nothing happened. “And so the Cursed went from planet to moon to planet wiping us out until they eventually got here to Earth. Well, to cut to the chase, things weren’t looking too good. That is until an Irish scientist named Michelle Walsh made the discovery that saved our species. She postulated that the energy the Cursed were made of could be used by us as much as by them. And so at the cost of close to a hundred thousand humans who kept a single creature busy and sacrificed themselves so she could run her tests, Dr. Walsh found the key to the energy transfer that occurs when one is killed by a Cursed.”

Another jab caused Rory to gasp. That time she appeared to have taken some sample of something.

“Through a copious number of failed experiments, scientist discovered how to grant control of that power to humans. The energy seemed to have a mind of its own and wanted to move in particular ways. Thus it was through following the energy’s paths that particular structures around the hands of some humans could, for reasons beyond your understanding, connect to the energy. It resulted in the creation of Soul Constructs allowing humanity to push back the Cursed. We now use the energy to power our society and here we are today!”

Mrs. Walsh seemed quite pleased with herself for that history lesson. Rory didn’t understand why she was telling him all this.

She must have seen his confused expression because she said, “Ah yes. While a little bit compressed, you are wondering why I provided our history, no doubt. The reason is to explain that the inscription process we have today to enable Soul Constructs is entirely disparate from what was used back then. They had to burn the formations into the hands and arms using hot metal. It resulted in quite a few problems as you might imagine, but it did get us to where we are so the sacrifices were worthwhile. Now, you may have noticed the name of the doctor I mentioned. Walsh. Yes, my husband’s family are her descendants. We have some of the original materials used in those experiments as it was passed down.”

At that, she vanished from Rory’s view before returning a moment later holding up a long piece of black metal with a strange oblong wheel on the end. Rory’s firs thought was that it was really big. The diameter was longer than his arm. Then he saw that along the edge of that wheel were all kinds of strange carved shapes and lines.

She continued, “This particular tool has inscriptions that, well, we frankly can’t understand. At first, we thought it was a hidden treasure. We tried experimenting with it on Soul Construct wielders and normals alike. The normals died quickly, which was expected. The others though… they all became crippled wielders. You see, we were wrong about it being a treasure. This is actually a flawed inscription, not allowing for growth. So, in your case, you could swing those impressive Chakram you’re so compatible with all you like, but you will always be too weak and slow in your body, mind, and weapon to be a threat to us.”

She was smiling again at the end.

Rory’s eyes were wide and he said hoping to say anything, “My da will-”

Mr. Walsh cut him off with a quick, “No, he won’t. He’s dead.” Rory’s eyes were wide and tearing up as he shook his head back and forth. Mr. Walsh continued, hammering home Rory’s despair. “All over Ireland, a few terrible outbreaks have occurred and, unfortunately, one was near your house. Unlike you, your father didn’t have the protection of Sutherland. She can only burn so much influence and call in so many favors after all. Anyway, he, his guild, and all of his friends are dead. Your mother wasn’t there but is just a low-level inscriber and no threat, either physically or financially.” And then in an utterly plain tone, he asked, “Is it ready yet Janet?”

“Almost,” she replied. “You know how inefficient it is.”

Rory heard a sigh but he was too shocked by the words. He looked over at where Killean had been standing to plead for help from his friend but he was gone. Rory deflated. His da was dead. He was stuck, going to be hurt and whatever else. What could he do?

Rory whimpered, “I’ll tell the—”

Once again he was cut off before he could even finish by Mr. Walsh. “No. You won’t. Because no one will believe you and if you try, we’ll kill your mother too. She’s alive, for what that will be worth, as long as you’re quiet. Tell anyone, including Sutherland, and we’ll find you and she’ll be dead before you realize you killed her.”

Rory closed his mouth and eyes as more tears fell. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He then heard words from Mrs. Walsh that made him start to shake in fear.

“It’s ready.”

At that point, Rory felt his entire body from head to feet pressed down into the table by an invisible force. His palms were face up, his fingers spread and his forearms available. Then the pressure on his whole body tightened and he could barely breathe, never mind move.

Utterly impassively, Mrs. Walsh explained what was going to happen. “Since you have the ice element, we are going to be infusing ice Soul Power or it won’t fully take. At least that will be interesting to watch. More expensive, sure, but certainly worth it for the data we’ll gather.”

She had a pensive look on her face which changed to a smile of someone who had a brilliant thought. “Oh. We forgot to mention another quirk of this inscription. It’s quite large, as you can see. The largest, or more precisely, longest inscription we’ve ever heard of in fact. And it will definitely be far too big to fit on just your hands and arms; especially with you being so small and it being meant for a rather large adult. So it’ll have to go around to your chest as well. Possibly farther but we’ll see. The key here is that the placement has to be perfect or it won’t work as an inscription and we’ll have to heal you and do it all over again. And, of course, since you have a dual Soul Construct, we’ll have to do it once for each side of your body. Again and again, you create both inconvenience and interesting experimental material.”

After a few minutes of shuffling silence except for Rory’s whimpers, he heard Mrs. Walsh say, “As no human can be this perfect, we’ll use some mechanical assistance.”

He then saw a M-steel arm appear above him holding the rod and large wheel from before. Except this time the wheel was glowing a bright white and giving off an equally pure-white mist.

“Now, let’s see how this experiment pans out, shall we?” Mrs. Walsh said interestedly.

Then the arm lowered and Rory felt the most painful thing he had ever known anyone could ever feel on his left palm. He couldn’t move anything, including his jaw, but over his own crying and muffled screams, he heard the sizzling of his skin and flesh. His hand was moved by whatever was controlling his body and it continued around to the back and rolled around a bit. Then the pain moved from his hand to his arm and then beyond. As it did, Rory tried to beg for them to stop. In his mind, he called to his da to save him. Called to his mum to help. Pleaded for anyone and anything he could think of. Even that admiral, Sutherland.

Mrs. Walsh was right in the end. Rory’s body was too small for it to fit only on his arms and chest. It had to roll all the up his arms, down his chest, and past his hips and onto his thighs. Through the pain, he hadn’t noticed the slicing open of the gray pants.

It had stopped just short of his knees.

He vaguely heard, “How interesting. He received some repetitions at the end, unlike the others.”

“Fascinating…”

For a moment Rory thought it was over, but the respite was for just a moment as the robotic assistant repeated the process over again on his right side. He fainted more than once but woke to the agonizing pain again and again.

And then there was no more pressure or sizzling and he began fading out one last time. As consciousness left him, the last thing Rory thought he heard was the voice of his best friend calling his name. And then he knew nothing but nightmares of terror and pain and torment that his body was too damaged and tired to wake from.