The bandit captain named Ripper liked his digs. His underground loft had once been a proper dungeon and torture chamber under the Mud Castle. As it had been at least a century since it was used for that purpose, Lord Zarik had given him permission to do whatever he wanted with the space, so long as he paid for the renovations himself. Which was a fine arrangement as far as he was concerned.

“Welcome to the dungeon, we’ve got fun and games…” Ripper liked to shriek at the top of his lungs on the few occasions he invited guests to show off his pet project; it was in awful imitation of a song he had never heard, completely unaware he was evoking musical echoes from across time and space.

He seldom had visitors lately, however, as he had finally acquired the object of his greatest fantasy, and for days he spent little time doing anything besides living his bliss. It was only a matter of time before Lord Zarik called on him to head another mission, but until then, he would play with his property.

Creating his own personal elf-girl sex dungeon was his pet project and also his minor obsession.

When he was a boy, he and his friends had come across the daughter of a traveling book merchant who was loitering around town. She looked to be twice the boys’ age but that had never stopped Ripper from being bold and saying what he pleased.

“Let me touch your ears,” his scraggly red-headed boy-self said.

“Absolutely not,” was her cold reply.

Ripper’s friends had laughed and scoffed at his rejection, provoking him to pick a fight with them to reassert his dominance. Years later, when he was finally old enough to be treated as a man without his needing to resort to violence, he was vindicated of the slight against him when he met the young elf woman again. This time, she wore a slave collar around her neck, and a revealing outfit that left little to the imagination. The haughtiness was gone from her icy blue eyes, replaced with a vulnerability he rather liked. The man who held the long chain connected to her collar paraded her up and down the brothel viewing room like a bitch on a leash. She was his personal property, and only one of many such girls he owned and pimped.

The taste of elf flesh was nothing new for Ripper. He made no bones about his preferences, and was already a frequent patron of brothels that catered to his elf fetish.

Ripper got to enjoy more than just petty revenge over her snide refusal that day. While it was certainly a pleasant side benefit, in truth, he had almost forgotten the incident until he saw her again.

What he truly savored that night was the exquisite thrill of total and complete dominance over another.

Even reluctant whores enjoyed certain protections that prevented Ripper from testing the range of his proclivities for sexual violence. Slaves enjoyed no such protections. So long as he didn’t kill the girl and paid the slave keeper for the damages, he could do as he pleased.

Above all else, Ripper had been impressed by how broken-in the woman had become, trained to the point of complete submission.

Then and there, his dream had been born. To own his own harem of doe-eyed elf girls, bound and chained to slaver over every one of his desires. He would tame his slaves himself. They would learn to weep for joy, and scream in pleasure no matter what he did to them.

And now, for the past half month, he had his chance.

“That’s enough of a break,” said Ripper, folding the top right-hand corner of the page he was reading in a book entitled, Best Slave Girl Training Guide, Second Edition.

He set the book down on the chest by his reading chair, then stretched lazily as he crossed to the center of the room. “Let’s get back to work, shall we?”

The elf girl lay in a crumpled heap at the center of the room. Except for her silver suppression collar and the cuffs behind her back, she was naked. The chains attached to her cuffs stretched up and through an iron loop bolted in the ceiling, then down to where the rest of the slack was coiled around an ingenious mechanism that resembled a spool with a ship’s wheel on its side. He had ordered it from a pamphlet he got along with his training manual.

Ripper tsked. The girl was asleep.

“Wake up, bitch!”

He took a bucket from the long table where he kept his tools and toys and filled it in the water barrel he kept in the room. Then he turned it over on the elf girl.

She immediately started coughing and sputtering, robbed of her precious respite from a torment that never seemed to end.

She stared daggers at him through matted blonde hair.

“Good. Now that you’re awake, let’s keep being a good girl. Yeah? Go ahead and stand up for me.”

The girl stared at him but said nothing. Nor did she make any attempts to stand.

She was his first real attempt at training his own slave. At times he was frustrated by the slow process, but his book said it was normal for extremely wilful personalities to take longer to break. He just had to be patient and break her he would.

“Not going to get up on your own?”

Still she said nothing. Still she did not move.

Ripper sighed then went back to the table with his tools. He withdrew a paddle and an enchanted block of wood with two switches. He pressed on the switch with a green arrow carved into it. The magical winch with the ship’s wheel began to turn, spooling the chains until they were taut and pulled the girl’s shoulders.

Quickly she sprang to her feet.

“Yes, that’s a good girl,” he praised her.

She could resist, but doing so might break her wrists or dislocate her shoulders… again. It seemed they were finally moving past that phase. The fact that she wasn’t biting, squirming, kicking and screaming every chance she got were also good signs that things were moving in the right direction.

He kept pressing the button on his controller until it forced the girl to bend forward and stand on her tippy-toes, exposing her buttocks. Her eyes widened at the indignity. As if to say, ‘but I did what you wanted! Why are you doing this?’

“Don’t look at me like that. You forgot to say ‘yes, sir.’ Or, you could call me ‘Master’... Yeah, I like the sound of that too. I honestly can’t make up my mind. You get to pick whichever one you like. Won’t that be nice? But, since you didn’t say anything. I’m supposed to punish you now.”

Her backside was a marred painting of blues, blacks, and purple welts all along the backs of her legs to the swollen flesh of her bum.

He swung the leather-bound paddle against her buttocks hard enough to lift her off the ground. She bit her lips until she bled, stifling the choked scream she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of hearing. She also scrambled to keep her grip on the ground with the tips of her toes. If she didn’t support her weight, she would swing on the chain like a pendulum, hurting her shoulders.

Ripper was about to swing again, when he remembered something.

“Oh, yeah,” Ripper mused. “It’s time for your medicine, isn’t it?”

His training manual stipulated that the key to creating the psychological shift he wanted to see in the girl, required a mix of pain and pleasure. His particular approach required blurring the boundary until the two were virtually indistinguishable within the subject. Certain levels of pain were intolerable and would just cause injury, like dislocated shoulders and broken bones. But so far he had succeeded in finding the middle ground using the paddle and a few choice tools. It was also effective to debase her again and again, both with his words and manhood. Then praise her for being a good girl.

It was all more complicated than he wished, but he was a paint-by-the-numbers guy. If the book said it worked, then he’d follow it. Unless he got frustrated and bored, which had already happened a few times. The book was clear that every step should be followed in its proper order, but sometimes the bandit captain was too impatient to do so.

He didn’t fault himself, though. This was all part of the process. After all, if he let himself get so caught up in the end result that he didn’t enjoy the journey, what would be the point of anything in life?

As for the girl’s medicine, Ripper took a vial of pink tonic from the carousel of potions on his table. He poured the liquid into his palms and then rubbed the oily liquid all over the girl’s backside.

The elf girl squirmed as he rubbed the lotion on her spoiled cheeks and in places she didn’t want him to touch.

It was too much, and she began letting out a series of squirms and groans, some of which didn’t sound like they belong to a person in pain, because they weren’t.

The drug he was rubbing into her flesh was called canthar. This particular batch was alchemically infused with magic to increase its potency. Depending on the dosage and intent behind the magic used, the drug had the ability to function as either an analgesic or aphrodisiac.

The method Ripper was following used the condensed version of it a number of ways designed to warp the elf girl’s senses. Specifically, the method was designed to completely alter her brain’s ability to distinguish between pain and pleasure. Just one dose at these levels wouldn’t make the distortions to her senses permanent.

Which is why Ripper had used it on her body every day, multiple times a day for the past fourteen days that she had been a prisoner inside his dungeon. He had infused it into her food and water. He rubbed it into her wounds and on her lips. He had even plugged her up with rags soaked in the substance for hours on end.

She should have been begging him to fuck her by now. Instead of capitulation, there was only anger and humiliation in her voice, even during her reluctant vocalizations.

He was starting to feel frustrated again just thinking about it.

“Well alright, let’s get to work,” he said, and resumed striking her with his paddle, the gorge in his pants growing in anticipation of what would soon follow.

***

Meanwhile, upstairs at the Mud Castle, things were going swimmingly.

Blomdorf and Jonah made their way through the halls of the keep, careful to avoid stepping on any of the number of guards and bandits strewn across the floor. They were lying in puddles of their own vomit and shit, where they had succumbed to the poison ingested during the feast earlier that day.

Thankfully, Blom-Blom and his brother had not been invited. Neither had many of the Mudalal estate’s weaker personnel.

It had been a feast to celebrate the strongest and most accomplished of the men in Lord Zarik’s employ. A party he had been skillfully convinced was his own idea by a certain devious seductress. Conveniently, the guests had also included men that were scheduled to guard the keep that night.

Sounds of fighting and the occasional explosion (courtesy of Mentiroso’s penchant for pyrotechnics) could be heard coming from outside. The Mud Village’s revolution was well underway.

Inside the castle, on the other hand, it was eerily quiet apart from the occasional retching of the sick and dying.

“Aye, we go this way, Master Blomdorf,” Jonah said in his thick accent. “Am afraid ‘tis a wee bit cramped, but you’ll manage.”

Blom-Blom nodded, his eyes fixed forward in determination, his ham hands twisting around his heavy club.

Jonah led them down a narrow flight of stone stairs, down into what had long ago been a small dungeon. It had since been remodeled, albeit in poor taste. They were headed toward the accommodations of one of Lord Zarik’s bandit captains, who despite having been invited to the feast, did not attend.

“This Gobshite certainly has a flair for the dramatic,” Jonah said in disgust.

The narrow walls were almost claustrophobic for the large Blom-Blom, whose large frame nearly took up the entire space as they took the stairs two by two.

The walls were lit by gloomy torchlight instead of the more commonly used glowstones. These used an enchanted oil which burned indefinitely so long as the torches weren’t moved, and at the cost of producing a light that was much dimmer than normal flames. They were an aesthetic decision. It was no more expensive to light the halls with this method than simply purchasing glow stones which naturally fed on ambient magic. Glow stones had been the primary means of lighting on the Vitalian peninsula for over a millenia, since their discovery and rise to prominence during the height of the Romulan Empire.

“A’right, master Blomdorf,” Jonah said in his thick accent once they reached the heavy door at the bottom of the steps. “You know what to do.”

Blomdorf raised his fist and began pounding on the door so hard it threatened to splinter. He did not let up even when they heard a voice demanding he do so coming from inside.

Jonah was surprised the door was still standing by the time they heard a series of locks and latches sliding from the other side. Then the door opened inward slightly and Ripper stood half naked in the gap, mouth open and ready to curse and shout at whoever had interrupted him.

Ripper’s words got caught in his throat as he realized that his visitor wasn’t below his eye level. Being generally taller than others, he was used to looking down at others as a matter of principle. When he opened the door, he had been startled at being met with the sight of a barrel chest instead of a squirming servant or nervous delivery boy with an urgent message.

He looked up stupidly.

“Blom-Bom? What are you doing here?” his arrogant composure suddenly returned and he put on a slimy grin. “Did you get wind of the piece of ass I got in here and come to get a taste for yourself? Finally choosing to become a man and get your dick wet with the--?”

His words were abruptly cut off when Blomdorf, without warning, put his shoulder to the door, channeling his considerable strength into shoving it open. The smug bandit captain, whose body had been half-concealed behind the door, was unceremoniously thrown backward with a force comparable to having been rammed by a charging bull.

To the bandit captain’s credit, despite suffering a broken collar bone, he showed no sign as he leaped to his feet. The adrenaline pumped through him as his mind and body registered the thrill of a fight.

He almost got the chance to make a pithy remark as he strode toward the weapon rack where hung his axe. It might have been a sarcastic comment praising Blom-Blom’s balls for standing up for himself, or perhaps Ripper would celebrate the fact that he was going to finally get the chance to kill the judgmental giant who had the nerve to think he was righteous and better than anything more than a common brigand.

Ripper believed that he was stronger than Blom-Blom. He might have even been right, had he bothered to treat the big man as a threat. But even after getting slammed across the room, he still thought of his former comrade as an idiot weakling whose only asset was his size. The moment he sprang to his feet, he turned to get his axe while opening his mouth to spew the words that would put the moron giant in his place.

Blomdorf didn’t give him the chance. He hadn’t stopped moving once he succeeded in throwing the door open. Even as the bandit captain was flying backward and striking the ground, Blom-Blom sprinted forward and swung.

The realization hit Ripper in the face in the form of a giant club.

His half-open jaw, agape with words forgotten, crunched audibly as the weapon that might as well have been a tree crashed into it. Blood and teeth soared across the room and the smug, red headed bandit captain crumpled to the floor.

“Good work, Master Blom,” said Jonah, clapping his hands. “Is the arsehole dead?”

Blomdorf shook his head. “No.”

“Pity,” he said, moving around to stand in front of the elf girl, who stared wide eyed and full of fury at him.

“Easy little wan,” he said in a soothing voice, unslinging his bag from his shoulder and letting it drop to the ground. He rummaged inside and pulled out fresh clothes and a bottle of red and gold liquid. He held it up so she could see.

“My mistress gave me this for yeh,” he said. “It’s a greater healing potion she stole from the lord of… well, former lord of the castle. It can’t heal everything done to yeh, but it’ll put yeh in fighting shape. It also means you dinnae want to be takin’ any more potions for the rest of the day or yeh’ll get potion sickness. Ye ken?”

She watched him carefully, then looked at the glowing potion in his raised right hand, and then at Ripper squirming on the ground a few meters away, then back at Jonah.

She nodded. Still, the fury burned in her eyes.

“Mah mistress also says to ask yeh nicely not to attack us when we release yeh. We’re tryin’ to save yeh and getcha back to yer warrior friend. Nothing funny, aye?”

He waited until she nodded again, slower this time. Some of the fury was gone from her eyes.

Jonah unstoppered the bottle of potion and slowly put it to her lips, then tilted it back gently until she swallowed all its contents.

Immediately, she let out a sigh of relief as her entire body began to rapidly repair itself. The tapestry of cuts, welts, and bruises all over her body swirled and faded in seconds until her slightly tanned skin had a healthy glow.

“Master Blom, please help me with tha’ winch. Aye, that wheel thing there. Gently spin it to the left. No, ah said the left. Aye, that way. Gently now…”

Once the chains holding her uncomfortably upright were slack, Johan produced a set of keys he had taken from where they hung on a peg by the door. He held them up for her to see. When she nodded her understanding, he proceeded to unlock her bindings, then the slave collar, which doubled as a magical suppression device. He left this one for last, lest she have enough time to recover mana and attack him before she realized they were only trying to help.

“Well there you are, lass,” Jonah said, “Now if yeh jes’ put on these here clothes, we’ll be on our … oh. Blood and ashes, woman! Well, ah suppose ah oughta have seen that coming...”

Faster than he could think to stop her, and not that he would have tried to anyway, Raine shot forward the moment she was free from her bonds.

She immediately darted for a cruel hooked knife among the torturer tools on the table nearby, then pounced on Ripper’s still disoriented and semi-conscious body.

The naked elf plunged the blade into her tormentor over and over. First into his stomach and chest. Then into his crotch and legs. Ripper groaned and weakly lifted his arms to stop her but quickly succumbed to his wounds with a barely audible gurgle.

She did not stop.

Raine crowed with a terrifying, mad laughter, as her blade continued to plunge her blade into what became Ripper spaghetti and viscera. She only paused this long enough to tear out the pieces of his cock and balls and stuff them down the corpse’s mouth. She squished his heart between her hands. Then resumed her senseless stabbing.

Johan gave Blomdorf directions to watch the girl and make sure she didn’t hurt herself, then meet at the agreed upon location.

The half dwarf sighed sadly at the bloody show of grief, rage and anger, and muttered a prayer for her. It was something he had not done in a long time.

He then turned his back on the gruesome show, and left to find the lady Sly. There was still work to be done.

After what seemed like a long time, and once there was little more than a pool of blood, bone, and fragments where there had once been a bandit captain, Raine finally wore herself out.

She collapsed, her naked flesh awash in sticky red and pink viscera.

Blomdorf dispassionately washed her with the water from the water barrel. Then he dressed her, admiring how much like a child she was now that she slept peacefully in his arms as he carried her away from what had been her own personal hell.

His only regret was that he had waited so long before trying to be a good man. He wished it wasn’t too late for him and his brother to find redemption.