TRIGGER WARNING - Attention, this chapter contains content with violence, gore, torture or something similar! Avan was pushed roughly through several corridors and almost fell down several times, but was able to get up again with difficulty and follow the silent front guard while the rear guard tried to make his life hell again. After several pushes and shoves, Avan and the guards arrived in front of an iron-reinforced wooden door, which gave a solid and stable impression. Without comment, the front guard knocked loudly on the door several times with her gloved hand. "Sir? We have... brought your guest as requested!"He shouted through the door and stepped slightly to the side, while his expressionless gaze flitted over Avan once more and he could have sworn for a moment that he saw something like pity in the guard's eyes. A cursing and clamoring could be heard from behind the door, and some metal objects which had been discarded ungently on another surface. The voice came closer to the door and a squeak could be heard in the door as a key was inserted into the keyhole and turned with a rattle and clatter. The front guard continued to stand expressionless, as if she had experienced this scene often enough, while Avan suddenly heard a soft whisper in his left ear from behind him. "Have fun, little rat. Hope to see you again soon." And before he could turn and glare at the strutting guard, he caught his first glimpse of the figure that had appeared in the doorway before him. With an audible gulp, Avan suddenly realized who this person was, that it was none other than the obese merchant who had wanted to buy him at auction, standing in front of him and staring at him with an evil, lustful look. "Well, who do we have here? The stolen good comes back to the owner, hmmm?" The fat man spoke and let his gaze wander over Avan as if he were nothing more than a piece of meat and merchandise. Before Avan could reply with something disgusted, that morbidly sweet-talking voice sounded again. "Come on, come into the good room! After all, we don't have forever!" With a nod to the guard standing next to the door, the guard looked at Avan in a prompting manner and a slight glow emanated from his slave bracelet, which was more than enough for him to understand, and he followed the fat man into the room contritely. What had sounded like a lust nightmare before, especially from the attitude, now turned out to be something much worse, to Avan's alarming certainty. In front of him was a table apparatus with various leather and iron reinforced buckles. The table could be moved and angled in all directions thanks to threads and mechanisms underneath, and the jet black wood was more than just painted black, it was saturated with dried blood. The floor, though still a shade of gray in some places, was stained a rusty brown and the entire room reeked of decay. On the far side, directly opposite the entrance door and behind the torture table, was a rolling table with an iron surface on which, unknown to Avan, but terrible tools from his worst nightmares were neatly lined up next to each other. He didn't even notice that he was frozen after his first step into the room, until the heavy iron-reinforced wooden door closed behind him and the sound of an alarm siren in his head made him startle. Lustfully and tasting Avan's fear on his tongue, the non-merchant stared at him, licking with a comically scarred tongue over a long twenty-centimeter knife, which he suddenly held in his hand. Before Avan could back away or react in any way, his brain too busy stuttering and stumbling with thought after thought, a sudden searing pain hissed in his head, and he collapsed unconscious like a lifeless doll. "Wake up, my sweet!" Whispered a warm and wet voice in Avan's right ear, and he slowly swam back to the surface of his consciousness. How... where... am I? Slave. In the basement vault? He tried to remember what had happened last, and swallowed with a hoarse throat. No, that sadistic guard! The merchant! NO! screamed his subconscious, as the thoughts slowly became clearer and came to the surface. Panicked, Avan opened his eyes and instinctively tried to take a step back. He expected to stumble, but to his shocking realization, nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, he could not move. Avan blinked several times and had to orient himself briefly in the torchlight of two torches hanging on the wall in front of him. Please don't tell me...! It ran frantically through his head, and he looked to the left, directly into the disgustingly sweet grinning face full of anticipation of the completely-sure-no-trader torturer. "Ahh finally! I thought I'd overdone it a bit this time! Yet every SECOND is SO precious!" Spoke the fat man and licked with pleasure over the buff upper lip, only to chew afterwards on the left half of the lower lip. Avan suddenly knew what must have happened, and felt the full extent of his situation in his own body, which did not move an inch, and the iron-reinforced leather buckles cut into his ankles and wrists, while in his panic he had briefly tugged at the leather collar on his neck and cut off his own air. He was completely stretched on the torture table, his legs slightly apart from each other, his arms bent right and left at an angle, and his head fastened to the top of the table with the leather collar. If Avan had been able to think about the situation, he would have noticed the similarity to the human bodies depicted in the biology books from his school days, which were also always shown in this position. "So, my little, new, test subject! I've heard a few rumors." The torturer spoke from the left, and grabbed a simple-looking hammer from the tool table of torture instruments with glittering amused eyes. "I've been told your lash... Healed faster than previously thought. And that after only one day you were walking around with so little pain, where before others in that position would need at least a week! Excellent, don't you think?" "And just imagine how happy I was to be able to play with you after all! A gift, for my services! I am not allowed to inflict any external wounds on you, because this would immediately be noticed and reported to the gadfly Maxim, but... there are also... the inner values. Isn't that right, young man?" The fat man grinned directly into Avan's terror-widened eyes, enjoying every second the fear and dawning of his victim. The Hammer which had been revealed earlier was slowly being dragged along his leg. Avan flinched as much as he could in his restraints, not expecting the cold metal. Fear growing more with each passing second. The man had begun a crazed whispering chant. “Where first? The toes? No no that’s too easy! The ankle? Tibia? or maybe the Femur?” The Hammer, which had been making its way up his leg, stopped just above his knee. The hammer rested upon his upper thigh, being twisted roughly on his skin. “Aww but I can’t! Too much damage and he’ll die of blood loss. We don’t want that!” Avan felt cold dread shoot through him. Winding it’s way up and down his limbs, curling around his wildly beating heart. “I know…” Avans heart skipped a few heartbeats. The fat man grinned once again, looking directly into Avan's terror-widened eyes. He was enjoying every second the fear and dawning of his victim. He moved. Before Avan could process what had happened, a terrible pain exploded in his left knee. Or more precisely, the entire left kneecap itself had shattered. An agonised groan escaped Avan. The powerfully curved, inconspicuous flat hammer had struck with little warning. "Awwwwww!" Groaned the man next to him. He pressed the hammer back into to wounded knee. Avan cried out inhumanly loud. He tried to wriggle, to free himself, to crawl away from the monster in disguise of this man. But that struggle was in vain. His movements made the pain worse. He could feel the bones in his leg shift, grinding and tearing through his flesh as he moved. A throbbing pain pulled with each quick beat of his heart. Blood began to pool under his skin, swelling and already bruising. A whine escaped Avan´s lips as the pain repeated on loop, shooting up his neural pathways in jolts and waves, exploding infinitely more. Avan broke out into a cold sweat, he was dizzy and nauseous, he couldn’t breathe because it hurt so much. He couldn’t take the pain and mercifully, the soothing blackness of unconsciousness welcomed him, taking him into its soft embrace. When Avan awoke again, it continued with the other knee, whereby his torturer took his leisure the next time, with all the effort to stretch everything out until his involuntary guest drifted again into the welcoming blackness. And so it went on, for Avan a torture, a hell, his voice after the third wake up so hoarse that he could only groan. His bones in both knees were shattered, and with every groan and pain-filled wriggle he felt hundreds and soon thousands of bone splinters stabbing into all the soft flesh. His legs were barely recognizable as such, reshaped and more lumps of flesh than anything else. Swollen, purple and with countless deformations visible under the skin. Avan's feet were bloated to double or even triple their size, and in one of his waking moments, Avan just stared at the horror show that his lower body had gradually become. At one point, the fat man had started humming a creepy children's tune as he worked with increasing precision to inflict the most pain on Avan before he sank back into unconsciousness. And to Avan's own dread and horror, he succeeded increasingly. What had been a single blow at first, overloading his senses and leading him immediately into the welcomed darkness, was now a creeping, a waiting, and a promise, once it finally took Avan into its dark embrace. At one point, and Avan no longer knew when or for how long, Avan had trembled. At another point in the torture, he had cried, pleaded, not realizing the satisfaction it gave his torturer to see him like this. While every bone from below the waist down to the smallest toe had been broken into larger or smaller pieces, the man had managed to keep the skin from bleeding even once. So hours passed, which for Avan represented a delirium and he was no longer aware of when he was awake, when he had nightmares, when he screamed, when he cried, when he stared in shock into space, and when it was finally over. When he woke up one more time, the pain now a constant companion of his, Avan blinked at the ceiling, sluggish and mentally on the edge. He prepared himself for the fact that the now permanent companion called pain was about to get more accomplices, and waited with a blank mind and an empty gaze. Seconds passed, which felt like hours to Avan, and he didn't even notice when a click sounded behind him on the right. His ears were just as overloaded with all the screaming, and his brain could only process the process that was happening very slowly and like thick honey. Two pairs of hands grabbed him, one on the left and one on the right, and lifted his powerless and disheveled body. Leave it, leave it! It's no use... He thought in delirium, not sure if he had whispered it secretly or only thought it, or if something in this direction had crawled through his head at all. To his great surprise, sounding more like the neighing of a dying horse, Avan only laughed when he was actually hoisted off the table. Another one of those dreams! Yaaaaa... Out! his thoughts distorted, and he laughed again, his voice hoarse like a madman. In his dream, Avan was rescued by two guards of unknown origin, and maneuvered so carefully between them that it could only be a dream for him. What else! Ahahaha, what else!... As his dream guards hoisted him through the door to the torture chamber, two other guards stood outside, one of them the demon of a guard, who looked at Avan in disgust and made only a snide sound. Between the guards, slumped on the floor and on both knees, knelt a vaguely familiar face. Something familiar, or something he had seen only recently. The woman's cheap linen clothes were torn to shreds, and she stared upward with a hopeless gaze, no longer even seeming to have the strength to cover her own exposure. She was more naked than dressed, and you could clearly see what had happened to her, and where it was going next. All this Avan perceived only incidentally, and he was still firmly of the opinion that he was stuck in a restful dream. He simply could not understand or believe that hell had finally ended. That the demon simply let him go was incomprehensible, even if a shrill voice of reason in the farthest corner of his mind was of a different opinion and screamed at him inwardly, but was powerlessly ignored. The woman sitting on the floor between the two guards had been, to Avan's current unawareness, the one he couldn't have helped during the training, and only his subconscious seemed to recognize vague connections, while Avan's consciousness denied everything he saw. He didn't remember when, or how, or why, but the next time Avan awoke, he momentarily startled, and cried out loudly as the pain, which had already subsided, went all the way back to his head and led him once again into the realm of darkness. Avan blinked, and powerlessly opened his eyes, somehow remembering not to move jerkily, and looked at some kind of neon tube above him on the ceiling, which seemed to be hanging from a white painted ceiling. Not a neon tube. Glass. And runes... his train of thought summarized the observation for him. Cautiously and very slowly, anxious to flip his companion pain off, Avan let his gaze wander to the left. He found himself in a kind of white room, with bedclothes hung on poles that did not show him what was hidden behind them. No... No sheets. Room dividers. His head once again performed a masterly feat of observation. Much to his surprise, and after all his nightmares and daze of pain, he was actually no longer in the torture room, but in a kind of hospital room. Avan's thoughts jumped back and forth, still not really clear. How...? How could I have survived that? The internal bleeding alone! Why? What happened? It ran confusedly through his head, while a kind of dizziness seized his senses, his head still not ready to do strenuous mental acrobatics. Confused and drenched in sweat, Avan had only one intuition, and he looked inward. Gasping for air, he gulped in a breath. He cursed, and inwardly rejoiced. Where before a simple almost nanometer strand of celestial energy had flowed into his navel, now a fist-thick cord quivered and flowed, pumping invigorating and voluptuous ambient mana into him. He instinctively knew that much of the mana was being wasted because it was still bouncing off the barrier around his soul core and fizzling back out into the air, but where before only drops had landed in a wound for hours, now a rivulet was his constant companion. Thanks to Akkalon... Avan expelled his unintentionally withheld breath, and fell again into a deep but healing sleep.