Clockwork Minds

Chapter 8: The Players and Their Games

The psych ward lay in smoldering ruins behind me, the chaos I'd sparked spilling out into the world like wildfire. Outside, the world may have seen a troubled institution destroyed by rogue geniuses, but inside these walls, it had always been far more than that. It was a proving ground, a crucible where we pushed each other to the brink of madness and genius, feeding off one another's darkness, pushing past boundaries until even the doctors feared us. We'd spent years honing our skills, and refining our tastes until we'd transcended the games society deemed acceptable.

There was Luan, always pacing in a corner, his fingers tracing invisible circuits in the air, his mind lost in fragmented whispers to himself. He'd had the talent to make robots out of discarded parts, machines that did his bidding without question. But his mind? Fractured. It was like watching a switch-flick between personalities, each one slightly more unhinged than the last. One moment, he'd be Lucian, the calm and collected strategist with a surgeon's precision, designing mechanical marvels. Then, he'd become Leon, a sadistic and cackling presence who reveled in making those around him suffer in small, calculated ways. No one knew which side they'd face at any given moment, but each one was as dangerous as the other.

Then there was Safestia. She spent her days counting—counting the seconds, the tiles on the floor, even the hairs in her brush—her fingers twitching in rhythm as though each number grounded her, giving her the illusion of control. Everything had to be even, perfect, in order. I once saw her snap when a nurse disrupted her tray of food, the cold rage in her eyes freezing the room. Beneath that obsessive exterior was something raw, something that thrived on the power of knowledge. She knew numbers and formulas like others knew breath, and she saw patterns in everything, every move, every facial tic. When she talked, her voice was icy, and deliberate, her words chosen to dissect her target with as much precision as any scalpel I'd wielded.

And then there was Kyelli, the most openly twisted of us all. A wiry boy with an appetite for pain that bordered on fanatical, he'd eagerly volunteer for any test or experiment, watching the doctors in morbid fascination as they measured his resilience. His eyes would light up when he talked about the anatomy books he'd been allowed, sharing grisly details in a gleeful whisper, or musing aloud about ways he might conduct his own "studies" on anyone who dared cross him. He was unflinching, immune to pain, and almost entranced by the agony of others, so long as he could watch and learn. When he was bored, he'd look for ways to create his own experiments, marking time with bruises, bites, and scars as though his body was just another object to be tested.

It wasn't long before we outgrew the petty challenges they gave us. Traditional chess, cards, board games—they were too predictable, too tame. So, we invented our own twisted version: Torment Chess. The rules were simple: play a standard game of chess, each move calculated and precise, but if you lost? You'd be strapped down, giving the winner five whole minutes to execute whatever twisted, brutal ideas they'd been bottling up.

I'd won my fair share of those games. My weapons of choice were simple—pliers, needles, and clamps—items I'd smuggled or bartered for, each one with a distinct purpose. My favorite, however, was the scalpel: a slim, beautiful blade that glided over skin like ink on paper. The gleam of it was hypnotic, and I wielded it with care, making each cut a testament to control. Five minutes was never enough, not when there was so much potential for pain and so many ways to get inside someone's head. But I made every second count. I always did.

The others had their own specialties. Luan preferred to tinker, creating tiny, vicious gadgets that inflicted precise pain without leaving a mark—electrical shocks, pinpricks in nerve-dense areas, slow, calibrated torture that left his victims trembling. Safestia, ever the analyst, made pain an equation, using her knowledge of pressure points and body mechanics to push her opponents to the brink with cold, controlled touches. And Kyelli? He was as chaotic as ever, reveling in every scream, every flinch, his methods brutal and raw, his joy uncontained.

Together, we became legends within those walls, feared even by the nurses and the doctors. No one could control us; no one could understand us. And they were right to be afraid. We weren't like them; we'd transcended the need for validation, for approval. We were forces of nature, bound only by our own rules, living in a realm of pure intellect and twisted desires.

Now, as I stood amidst the ruins of the institution that had tried to break me, I knew I'd succeeded beyond even my own expectations. We'd taken everything they'd thrown at us and turned it into fuel for our ambition, our madness. And now we were free—free to test our theories on the world, to see what lay beyond the walls of the ward, beyond the constraints of society.

I took one last look at my companions, each of them marked by the same darkness, the same thirst for something more. This was our dawn, the beginning of a world that we would shape with our own hands. And the world would remember us.

4o.