JaydeRussell
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Operative - Ch. 43
🕑 Added 2023-08-10 06:00:04 +0000 UTCChapter 43 - Stay of Execution
Bryce
“Forgive me if I’m overstepping,” a masculine voice apologized. “But it seems prudent to point out that the subject is on the verge of a potentially lethal heart attack, and we’ve yet to put resurrection measures into place. If she’s killed now, then it will be several days before we can bring her back.”
“Fine,” Mother spat as she tore the barbed needle-like blade from my chest and stabbed it through the palm of my hand. I reflexively pushed against the restraints, which only caused more pain to flare as they bit into my skin. “Get her stabilized, then do whatever it is you need to ensure she can’t escape. Scour her soul while you’re at it. If you find anything related to rescuing Sora, then tell me immediately. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I stopped hyperventilating some time later as the unnatural panic subsided, but even then, the pain didn’t stop. In fact, it only got worse as the haze lifted from my thoughts.
“Good. It looks like you’re cognitive.” A pale-skinned devil stepped into my peripheral vision. “Now, I’m going to remove your gag, and I suspect your first instinct may be to bite through your tongue so that you can drown in your own blood. I suggest you resist that urge to the best of your ability. I won’t allow you to die while under my care, and any attempt to end this session early will only cause you further discomfort. Do you understand?”
I nodded as best as I could while restrained, which seemed to be enough for the devil, because he reached forward to remove the metal gag. “There we go. Feel free to stretch your jaw, but I’d recommend against trying to speak.”
“H-how long?” I ignored the pain in my throat as I croaked out the question.
“You’ve been in our custody for just over thirty-seven hours.” The demon gave me a disappointed frown before disappearing from my view. “I know you have no reason to trust me, but I make my recommendations in the interest of keeping you as comfortable as the client allows. I suggest you follow them.”
“How noble of you.” I actually managed to cough out a laugh at the absurdity of that idea. “I don’t suppose your commitment to my comfort includes room service? All of this torture has me a bit peckish.”
“Unfortunately, your first death is scheduled to be of starvation. After that, you’ll be administered the minimum number of calories required to survive through a gastric tube.”
“Sounds delicious. Looking forward to it.”
“I assure you that it’s not,” he said as he stepped back into my field of vision. “Now, I removed your gag because I’ve been asked to scour your soul. Which means you have a choice to make.”
“Lovely. I’ve had so few of those recently.” Blood had started to pool in my mouth, so I swallowed before continuing. “What are my options?”
“The process is somewhat technical, so I’ll try to keep it simple for you. I’m exceptionally good at what I do, and can be quite surgical when extracting information this way. If you can commit to not resisting, then it'll be over quickly with limited pain. Otherwise, I promise that this will be excruciating for you.”
I ignored his condescending tone as I tried to process what he was actually saying. It sounded like he was planning on trying to brute force his way into my soul without a spell. Unless I had severely underestimated him, that probably wasn’t going to work, but there was one way that I could be sure.
I pushed mana to my eyes the same way Tess had taught me. At first, nothing happened. So, I kept steadily increasing the mana until I eventually managed to overpower whatever magic suppression system was targeted at me.
The faintly glowing devil tilted his head quizzically. It seemed like whatever was suppressing my magic was making it difficult for me to detect mana, and I suspected that it worked both ways. Otherwise, I doubted this devil would have been nearly as confident. “Well? I would like confirmation before we get started.”
“Please, just make it quick.”
He nodded before stepping out of my vision. “I’ll do what I can to limit the pain, but I’m afraid this won’t be pleasant.”
He gently placed his hands on either side of my head and I tried to flinch away. Even this limited contact felt like razor-blades being dragged across my skin. “Wait!” He peered over me again with an expectant look. “Why didn’t Mother insist on doing this herself? It seems like something she’d enjoy.”
“Damaging a soul attracts unwanted attention. So, we require all clients to sign a contract stating that they’ll leave any procedures with that sort of risk to our staff.”
“She agreed to that?”
“She agreed after it became clear that we were the only group capable of retrieving you from Tess’s afterlife. Even then, she only did so begrudgingly.”
“Does that mean you won’t let her destroy my soul when this is over?”
“Unfortunately, the contract only stipulates what happens while in the institute. We have no control over what the client chooses to do while not on our premises. Which was something that Mother made us clarify several times before signing.”
“That doesn’t bode well for me, does it?” I asked, and he shook his head grimly before moving back out of my vision again.
“No, I’m afraid that it doesn’t, but that’s a concern for quite a few decades from now.” An icy dagger of mana stabbed into my mind before I could respond, and I pushed back on instinct. “Please, try not to resist. I promise it will be over soon.”
“Right back at you.” I shot a tendril of mana through the connection, wrapped it around his soul, and tore it free. He dropped dead, and I shattered it before pulling the fragments into myself. The power was invigorating, but the heightened senses, combined with whatever elixir Mother had given me, were nearly unbearable. Every sense that my body was processing seemed to trigger a pain reaction. It was as if my entire nervous system had been rewired to only experience one thing.
I took a long moment to rein in the pain, but once I managed to get ahold of myself, I used my newly soul-empowered strength to tear my right wrist free from the bolt pinning it to the table. Nothing about it was easy, but I managed not to scream long enough for whatever healing effect Mother had put on me to kick in.
Next, I pulled out the blade she had left in my palm and used it to start cutting through the restraints. It took longer than I would have liked, but eventually, the only thing keeping me on the table was the bolt in my left wrist. I bit down on the handle of the knife and pulled myself free. Again, only just managing not to scream even as darkness crept in on the edges of my vision.
“Fuck me.” I panted after I spat out the knife and finally took a moment to just take a damn breath. The room they had been keeping me in was smaller than I expected, maybe four meters long on any given wall, and the only furniture was the metal table I had been strapped to, along with a pair of matching trays on wheels. One of which held a series of neatly arranged needles, blades, and liquid-filled vials. The other had a similar array haphazardly tossed onto it with each implement still covered in my blood.
I looked away in an attempt to focus on the present before my mind was able to drag me back to a few of Mother’s more creative ‘punishments.’ It was barely more than a token effort. Everything was far too recent, and the risk of it happening again in the near future was much too real.
So, instead, I did my best to direct the panic into action by pushing myself off the table and limping toward the heavy metal door across from me. It was unlocked, thank the gods, but pulling it open made me realize how idiotic I was acting. I had almost no information about where I was, and blindly rushing into the middle of everything was probably going to be the fastest way for me to end up right back where I started.
I closed my eyes and focused on slowing my heart while trying to think of any sort of plan. Unfortunately, the more I thought about it, the more getting caught felt inevitable. I had very little idea of where I was, or who was holding me.
Even if I did somehow manage to escape, what little I knew of this ‘institute’ made them seem like the type to have some sort of tracking spell focused on me. Or hells, they could just have a vial of my blood hidden away somewhere. Gods knew I had given up plenty of it already.
None of that meant I shouldn’t at least try to escape—after all, my situation really couldn’t get much worse—it just meant that I needed a contingency plan in place first. After a minimum amount of thought, I figured that the first step of any contingency plan needed to be contacting somebody to let them know what happened. The only question was: who do I try to contact?
The answer, unfortunately, put me in the exact same situation I had found myself in when Mother killed me the first time. I could either send a message to Tess, and she’d no doubt try to bring me back to her afterlife, or Thea and have her rush in blindly to save me.
Okay, maybe the situation wasn’t exactly the same. Mother had already proven her ability to reach me in Tess’s afterlife, but at the same time, I had no idea what the goddess would do if I managed to escape. Nobody was supposed to return from her afterlife, and I knew things—dangerous things—that she no doubt didn’t want getting out.
I put that thought aside for the moment. What Tess did or didn’t do after I escaped wasn’t relevant right now, so I focused on the alternative. Thea. It was pure cowardice, but I hated the idea of her coming after me. I was barely holding it together as it was, and the idea of having to watch Mother do to her what she had done to me was… it was too much. It would break me. If I ever managed to escape, then I was going to have to beg her for forgiveness, but, again, that wasn’t an issue to deal with right now.
Having just eliminated the two obvious choices, I branched out to less obvious ones. Technically, I knew three other gods that weren’t Tess, but I quickly eliminated them as options. Frankly, I didn’t think I could trust Chorus to not tell Tess immediately, and besides, I wasn’t sure if he was strong enough to fight Mother on his own.
Kai was another option, but she had the opposite problem. She was too strong and far too unpredictable. If she visited the lower planes, where I was presumably being held, then there was no way people wouldn’t notice. Plus, I didn’t quite trust her not to accidentally kill me while fighting.
Then there was the prince of the hells. Orrid was an absolute wild card. I had only really met him once, and during that meeting, he nearly killed me just because he thought it would irritate Lilith. Maybe I could manipulate him into fighting Mother, but that was far from a guarantee. Besides, that gave me a different idea.
As far as I was aware, I was still a member of Lilith’s household. She had direct connections to at least two of the demon princes, and unless she had already managed to wriggle her way out of the title, she was the duchess of Hel. That felt like exactly the sort of political power I needed right now. And if that wasn’t enough, well then, at least I knew she was capable of keeping a secret from Thea.
I nodded to myself to firm my resolve before I started casting a message spell. Whatever was dampening the magic in the room was going to be irritating, but I was confident in my ability to overpower it with just raw power. So, once I formed the spell, I dumped far more mana than I thought was necessary into it and… I cursed as it failed.
It took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize why the stupid spell hadn’t worked. During our meeting with Mother, Tess had ‘unlocked an innate talent for meta magic in me.’ Which meant I was now a natural caster, and would need to adjust every damn spell I knew to account for the changes to my mana. Don’t get me wrong, it would absolutely be a gift eventually, but right now, it didn’t feel that way.
Even with the messaging spell being one of the simplest I knew, it would be a miracle if I managed to get it working before I was discovered. So, I disguised a short curse as a prayer to Tess before quickly getting to work on the modifications.
