Black Out

His body was cold, so very, very cold. There wasn't a single inch of his body that wasn't suffused with a sucking cold, like his whole body was covered in falling ice. Something about that filtered through the cotton in his brain, telling him this was a bad sign; though, for the life of him he couldn't wrangle enough thoughts together to grasp quite why.

He felt his eyelids slide open, but the world stayed dark. He stared dumbly into the dark for a moment, squinting vainly at the nothing before him as his mind tried to process the confusing mass of nothing that met his gaze. After staring into the dark for an indeterminate time, he began to see little flickers of burning red and later a grey so dull as to stand out even amongst the infinite black. Eventually he managed to make out that the large mass of grey was dancing with dozens of smaller red masses, little bits of red spreading across the grey form everytime they came in contact.

He watched them for a time, feeling the pervasive cold on his body growing worse and worse even as the fuzz in his mind began to fade away and his thoughts came clearer; no longer feeling as if they were swimming up through an ocean of muck to reach his conscious mind but instead more like a simple expanse of dirty water. He came to the dim conclusion that the grey flailing and being engulfed in red was a good thing, and that the numerous red blots that got snuffed out when the grey managed to touch them was not good; though, he wasn’t quite sure how he reached that conclusion. He could also feel the mud beneath him flowing away, pulsing quicker with every flash of red and blast of hot wind in his face; he couldn’t quite piece together why, but that thought made him smile.

He watched enraptured as the large grey blob slowly succumbed to the burning red, slowly being overwhelmed until only the red remained. Even in its last moments, it still managed to snuff out a dozen of the dancing flames around it. A blast of air hit his face as the red encrusted blob reared back for a final time before collapsing, but he couldn't hear anything. A distant thought told him the feeling of something dribbling down his neck and his inability to hear may be related, but he wasn't quite able to articulate the thought.

He blinked dumbly as one of the red blobs approached him, slowly coming into a blurry focus and revealing itself to be a vaguely humanoid form. He could just barely make out two burning orange eyes set above a yellow toothed grin that seemed to wrap around its face. Its mouth didn't move yet a voice swam into his mind, bypassing his blown out ears entirely. "You have broken yourself against our enemies, little crow. The Lord Of Hellfire will not see this go unrewarded.” The voice was echoing and wispy, like a flicker of smoke dancing amongst his thoughts and scalding the edges of his mind.

The figure extended its left arm to him, pointing at his own with one long finger. Slowly, his gaze swam down to follow the appendage, staring dully at his arm, or what remained or it at least; from just above the elbow his left arm was reduced to splinters, only a thin trail of red paste left as evidence of what happened to it. He began to giggle faintly, watching his ruined muscles twitch and pulse as he tried to move a hand that wasn't there.

Even knee deep in blood loss and shock, the familiar rasp of a blade being freed from a scabbard drew his gaze back to the demon before him. His mind swam around that thought, a few sparks of insight connecting scattered dots and recalling that he had summoned this creature, and that it was probably a demon. He stared up at it, attempting to summon up the will to care as it pointed a long and cruelly serrated red blade at him.

A faint memory filtered back through the muddy water of his mind, of his master teaching him of the ritual he had performed, teaching him just why it was a last resort; when it runs out, exhaustion will hit you like a brick to the face, it only lasts three hours, and if you fuck it up even a little bit it is highly likely you’ll destroy your soul in the attempt. However, the thing that his watery thoughts dredged up now, as the demon raised its blade into the air, is what happens to those summoned when the caster dies before the ritual finishes; rather than be pulled back into Hell as usual, they get to stay. While he couldn’t quite muster up the energy to be afraid, he did comprehend that being vulnerable before a creature that would directly benefit from his death was probably bad.

He mustered up the energy to focus on the demon’s face, staring straight at it with what he thought was a brave expression but probably just wound up looking listless. Even so, he didn’t blink, staring straight into the hellspawn’s burning eyes as it’s hooked blade rose. Even with his vision swimming and blurry, he could have sworn he saw the edges of the demon’s permanent grin widen ever so slightly as it met his gaze, before it brought down its blade in one swift motion…

...and cut off its own outstretched arm just above the elbow.

I made sure to physically keep Rokharth in my view even with my Extreme Paranoia allowing me to see him with my eyes closed; I just didn't trust it anymore. Not that I really trust my eyes either, they could be fooled or lie to me just as easily.

Extreme Paranoia +1

I kept my eyes from narrowing with an effort of will even as my thoughts swirled like a mutinous whirlpool. I can’t trust my own eyes, can barely trust my own thoughts, how could I ever trust the system? How could I ever deem it an accurate judge of reality if my own senses aren’t?

Extreme Paranoia +1

I'm never going to be convinced I'm wrong to distrust something just because the thing itself tells me I'm being paranoid, if anything that makes me even less inclined take your word!

I was knocked from my meandering thoughts by my host stopping in front of a large set of double doors. I nearly walked past him when he stopped out of nowhere, feeling a cold water run down my spine at the realization that I'd almost let his damnable trait beguile me once more.

I ignored the smirk on his face as I aborted the step that would have taken me past him, glaring at him in silence. His smirk widened into a grin, "You're improving quickly, good. You'll need to do far better than this if you plan on living an appreciably long life." He gestured to the door with a flippant wave of his hand, “Our gymnasium is somewhat… ad hoc, but it will do for now. When I deem you either adequate enough to succeed or enough of a failure that I don’t care if you come back, I’ll begin sending you out on proper missions.” His grin widened, fang like teeth glistening in the candle light, “If you do well enough, I’ll even send you out to wet your blade on some nice and soft targets. That is what you want, no? I call smell the hunger for death in you, the lingering taint of murder on your soul; you want to spill blood and take life, to grow stonger as your enemies fall dead at your feet. Hmhmhmhmmm, watch that you don’t become a Reaver little rat, theirs is a fate most find far less appealing once they’ve actually had a taste of it.”

I raised an eyebrow at that, but he had already thrown open the door and walked inside before I could ask what exactly a “Reaver” even was; by the sound of it I could guess it was related to a strong bloodthirst and was something that may seem appealing on the surface but came with some sort of cost, but that didn’t really explain much. Regardless of the numerous questions building up in my list of things to ask, I scurried after the smug bastard.

I couldn’t tell at first glance what the room had been before the Burnpikes had moved into the place, but at a guess I’d say some sort of primitive muscular rehabilitation area or maybe just another repurposed cafeteria. There were balance poles set up all over, rungs hanging from the ceiling in a random arrangement, the walls were dominated by makeshift rock climbing setups ranging in difficulty from the kind of shit literal children hang around on to a steep overhang with centimeter thick hand holds and coated by what looked to be a shallow river of ever flowing water just to make it that little bit more fucking impossible, and an entire half of the room was dominated by a forest of interwoven wooden poles arranged into some sort of three dimensional maze of jagged ends and rough corners.

The bloodstains coating the jagged jungle gym were decidedly not encouraging.

Rokharth clapped his hands, drawing my gaze away from the portent of death before me, “Now, I’d love to just toss you into the forest and see if you make it out or bleed to death, but Markus put his foot down on that after too many failures he believed somehow had some degree of promise wound up never coming out. That, and the smell got so bad he kept making me retrieve the bodies, which is just too much of a hassle to bother with.” Something told me he wasn’t joking about that and I couldn’t quite repress an unconscious grimace at the implications.

He turned to me with a wicked smirk in place and eyes that shone in the dim and flickering light, “This is a general evaluation of your abilities, so rather than dumping you in the deep end and seeing if you survive, you’ll be starting at the most basic end and working your way as far as you can while I scrutinize your every move and make disapproving noises.”

I stared at him with half lidded eyes, contempt evident in every inch of my posture. He simply raised an eyebrow, “Well, the fuck are you waiting for? Get to it!”

I sighed, turning to examine the room to see if I could find where this supposed “most basic end” even was. After a moment I gave up and turned to him, “Where should I start?” The maggots in my throat turned my voice into a wet rasp, but I ignored my unending background horror with practiced ease.

He gave me a flat look, “That’s up to you, what do you think looks easiest, hmm?”

I sighed, easily guessing this was yet another part of this supposed test designed to get a feel of my personality and what I thought were my strengths. That, or he was just fucking with me.

Either way, the longer I delayed the longer this shitshow would take. I glanced over the available array of scratch-made gymnastics equipment, considering the climbing wall before deciding to put off reliving those far too recent incidents and heading over to a set of balance beams. I may be very evidently good at climbing, but I get the feeling they would not approve of my rather destructive methods.

Not that that would stop me, I’m not about to make things harder for myself for the sake of preserving shoddy workmanship like this. Though, I might just hold back on releasing the Blight in an ostensibly allied facility… I wouldn’t really mind it wiping these assholes out, but I’d rather not reveal such a powerful and dangerous weapon to anyone, let alone people I’m still seriously considering killing.

Besides, rats are notoriously good at balancing, so this should be a cinch.