Legends of Orlea

Chapter 21:

(Warning! Gruesome stuff ahead, go to halfway point and I'll summarise what happened so far.) 

Zirem had abandoned his friends. The first of many things to go wrong. Now, five days later, he was strapped to a chair, with metal bindings. The woman who he'd defeated, apparently, had been a master at torture; her skill was very high.

She had ambushed him on the floor after the one they'd met, and that was four days ago. The torture he'd gone through had changed his mind. He now didn't have the energy to scream, and his fingers, toes and eyelids had been burned and scraped, so they were now red raw and a bit blackened in places. 

he'd been lucky enough to survive when a five minute timer had been put on, and a poisonous spider had been placed on his shoulder, near his neck. The woman had also used a scalpel to cut through skin in multiple areas, which was one of the lesser pains. Sometimes a gas would come in, and wouldn't leave for a while, at least until he was in great pain and was lacking breath.

He'd almost forgotten, the torture skill allowed the user to augment or decrease the amount of pain felt by injuries. The catch was, the pain level your victim was at, you were at. The default was 0, but if increased, pain would be felt. Currently, he was on level 9 of 10, which was three times the amount of pain as in real life. Domingo was a crazy guy, to have allowed something like that.

The woman came in the big, square-tiled room, and told him to count down by 3s from 1000. At first, the thing seemed stupid, but Zirem had, over time, realised what it was for. To keep him sane. With pain so much higher than usual, it would actually affect his real body, so his wounds would never really heal.

He hung his head. This time, the pain sensor went down. Good. That was what he thought, until he saw the Chewer Worm in her hand. It was just as thick as his eye, and chewed on anything. The comparison brought a thought to him. His legs started thrashing of their own accord, the bindings biting his skin.

"N-no... p-pl-please..." he whimpered pitifully, his voice barely audible. The woman grinned cruelly, and put the worm to his face, right next to his eye. It widened considerably with fear, and Zirem started shaking, legs whipping around furiously. He screamed in pain, terror and fury as the worm found the easiest part of his face to dig into; his eye. And started working away.

His screams could be heard from a kilometer away. In fact, he screamed so loud, the sound waves from his vocal cords reached two players who knew the sound very well. Alicia and Akil raced towards the source of the sound, knowing they might not be able to persuade Zirem to come back. Still, they ran on.

However, they got lost as the scream ended. But before long, it started again. He must have stopped for breath. Akil started trembling a bit as he thought of what his friend was going through; to scream like that... he'd have to be dying and coming back again over and over again...

Zirem felt the numbers come back to his brain by instinct; he didn't need to think to count down anymore. As the woman left, taking the worm with him, she gave him time to himself to heal. Instead, he was thinking of a million ways to get revenge. He knew that he might never get the opportunity to free himself, but he had to have some way of taking his rage out on her.

But when the woman came back, he slumped down, and felt something he never had before. It was a loose knot, one he could untie. The woman didn't notice him. She took pliers, this time, and started snipping off bits of skin. Zirem couldn't even scream anymore. When she was finished, she walked out of the room, and he started untying the knot.

Around two minutes later, he had finished, and had gotten free. Just so no one suspected it, he put his hands behind his back. Two assistants walked in, overloaded with cleaning things and items to partially heal his wounds. "... It's... horrible..." said one quietly.