The next day the black armor was back bright and early—a fact that could only be discerned due to the dozen small and toned skylights in the ceiling above.

"You're not in your restraints," he concluded, seeing Eik sitting against the glass.

"Yeah, yeah," Eik muttered, stood with a groan, and marched over to the metal table. "I'll get back on the table for you. You happy now?" Anything he could do to bolster his own nerves he would need, because it would seem that this wouldn't end anytime soon. Acting tough toward the enemy filled him with something akin to courage.

"Actually, yes, that does make me happy."

Eik laid down on the cold metal to let the cultist lock him down. It took everything he had to not explode in a desperate attempt to escape. It would do him no good. He needed information to escape. Currently he had none of that, so for now he would just have to bide his time.

It took a little over eight hours before the black armor left again. Today he had done more than just hurt him. To test the potency of his 'Toxin', a variety of monsters of differing power ranks had been brought in to be poisoned.

This he didn't really have any objections to. The black armor had already witnessed his strength, and even felt in on his own body. That he had evolved to a C-rank equivalent rank was probably more or less obvious to someone at his level so what was the point in hiding it? Pick your battles, as they say.

The fact that more than five of those hours had been spent getting tortured had also made the tests feel a lot more like a break from that.

The cultist hadn't particularly seemed to care that Eik had broken out of his restraints, so the moment the outer door clanked shut, he flowed out of them again.

"Thank you for your hard work today, boss," one of the octuplets called with mocking humor.

"How about you come over here and I'll beat the shit out of you?" Eik answered. They had talked all night last night and Eik had come to realize just how hopeless those eight men truly were.

They were fully convinced that they would never see the light of day again. That recognition must have forced them to dig out the tiniest shards of joy and humor from even the darkest of moments.

Not even a gram of pity presented in their words—something Eik actually found himself rather grateful for. The last thing he needed to get through this was someone crying for him and telling him how tough it was. Dumb banter like this was much better to keep his spirits up.

"Do we never get anything to eat in this joint or what?" he asked them.

"Nah, we'll probably get something today, we reckon. He likes to make the newcomers feel despair their first night here. He thinks it makes you more likely to break or whatever the hell he wants you to do. We usually get food and water every day otherwise."

"But you guys didn't get any yesterday either," Eik pointed out.

"Yeah, we kinda noticed, bro," one of them shouted to giggles from the others. "Wouldn't want to get your hopes up on the first day after all, would he?"

"My hope isn't that easy to break."

"Yeah, buddy, we noticed that too. Pretty cool of you to tough out what he's putting you through. But we're sorry to say… your hope will break, sooner or later."

"Why?"

He could almost hear the shrugs. "The rest of your life is a long time, man," one of them said. "And that's how long you're going to be here. He'll get bored of you, but he won't let you go. You'll be in there forever. Might as well get used to the thought."

"That kind of pessimistic, isn't it?"

"Get back to us on that in a year. In three years. Ten years from now, if you can still say that to us, we will agree that you kept your hope intact."

"There's a war, you know," Eik said after a brief pause. "It just began a few months ago. Between Moon Shall Swallow and the Alliance."

This got them off their asses and up against the glass. "The Nidafjeld Alliance? Are you sure?"

"Pretty damn sure. That's how this lunatic became interested in me in the first place. They launched an invasion on the Alliance home world and a bunch of the new worlds. Are you guys from the Alliance too?"

"No, our world never joined them, although they tried to get us to. We joined a smaller coalition, although it didn't go that well all things considered. We lost a lot of people to the cult."

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"I have a lot of friends in the Alliance. They'll come for me."

"How are you so sure?" one of them asked.

His mind went to the pills of Eik's Legendary Mystery Medicine that would soon be missed. "Because I have something that everyone wants and I'm the only one who can get it."

"Like what?"

"Like I'd tell you, buddy," Eik laughed. "Maybe later."

"Fair enough," sounded the answer. "How would they even know where you are?"

"Maybe not where, but they will know that I've been taken. I broke my bed and disappeared without a word to anyone. And I don't have that many powerful enemies yet. The cult will be the most likely suspect after that. This guy wasn't exactly subtle about his interest in me last time he tried to get me," Eik said. "It's a matter of time."

"We like the confidence. We're almost feeling some of that hope ourselves now."

When the outer door clicked open once again, letting in what looked like the last of the evening light, they all grew silent. "Food," one of the octuplets mouthed soundlessly.

Seconds later, a cultist weaved her way between the cubed prisons, hauling a huge sack. She stopped at some of the cubes and pulled out large chunks of meat, plates of food, or containers with unknown contents that she pushed through slits in the wall that had been made to fit whatever was being given.

Eik could only see properly into the octuplets' cube, as well as two others, both of which held plants. Putting a fucking plant in a cage was exactly the kind of dumbass thing that armored nut job would do.

The octuplets got a tray each of some kind of colorless slop as well as containers of water. Eik got the same when it came to his turn.

The tray was placed on a flat surface in front of a narrow slit, blocked by a latch that could only be slid away from the outside, and pushed through the slit with no contact between Eik and the cultist at all.

"Thanks," he said when he got the tray in his hands. The cultist didn't offer a response.

At the moment when the latch was moved to allow the tray to pass through, there was an open passage leading to the outside.

Well, kind of.

While there was nothing to physically block it, it was much too small to allow anything to pass through, much less a whole person trying to escape. But that wasn't all. Eik only just noticed it, but a shimmering green sheen spanned the entirety of the narrow passage.

When the cultist left again he called to the octuplets and asked them what that was. He wasn't quite hungry enough yet to actually consider eating that slop that he had been served.

"It blocks all abilities and Ak'ki from passing through. It's to prevent Awakened from using their skills to escape. We've tried… a lot," one of the brothers called back.

"What about stuff like physical transformations or body resizing and stuff like that? Does it block that too?"

"Yeah,"

"How?"

"You're asking the wrong people, man," one of them said, knocking on the glass of their cube to emphasize his words.

Eik leaned against the glass and slid down to the floor. It took him four hours to gather enough of an appetite to touch the colorless swill. It was even worse than he had anticipated.

The next day he got hurt some more and the black armor had come up with a couple more senseless experiments that didn't really reveal anything more about Eik's abilities, which only helped further prove how much of a poser the bastard truly was.

At feeding time, Eik rammed a toxic spike into the green barrier, just to test the claim if nothing else. It rippled and crackled at the impact but didn't give at all otherwise. It managed to completely block his Backflow-boosted attack. He got in another four high-powered stabs before the shocked cultist could slam the latch shut again.

The one sent to feed them today was a young man instead of the young woman. Did they change the personnel every day?

Having received the report of Eik's aggressive outburst, the man in the black armor decided to punish him during the next morning session. However, since the morning session already mainly involved an intensive course in getting horribly and near fatally injured, Eik really couldn't distinguish between punishment and business as usual.

Two days later it became clear that personnel did not change every day, but was, as a matter of fact, on a four day rotation. Eik didn't know if these four subordinate cultists were disciples of the lunatic in the black armor or had simply been roped into serving him because for one reason or another. Well, whatever. Why the hell should he care?

As the days became a week, and a week became two, there wasn't much change in the daily schedule. Although he had become gradually more confident in his ability to withstand the torture without giving in to the man's demands, which had barely changed, he could feel that something in his mind was changing due to the abuse.

After all, experiencing such indescribably horrific pain every day with no end in sight would warp any mind no matter how strong. It wasn't a question of being tough. The human psyche just wasn't designed to endure something like that for so long without succumbing to death.

Naturally, he should have died many times over already, but there was nothing natural about the situation he was in. Kept alive through magic and alchemy, there was nothing to stop him from going a little mad.

Two things helped him keep his sanity. One was the nightly conversations with the octuplets. Although Eik had grown significantly more reserved and quiet as the days went, the torture grating him down to the bone, he still found it to be an ultimate source of light and humor in a perpetual cycle of terror and pain that was designed to tear him apart both physically and mentally. For that he was eternally grateful, and although he had not told them, he had vowed to himself that he would never leave this place unless he could bring along those eight guys.

The other thing that kept him going was immersion in the training of his aura. Every night, from the moment the black armor left him alone and until he returned the next morning, even when talking to the octuplets, he kept his aura up and energetic.

Even when he went to sleep he tried to maintain his aura and eventually managed to find himself waking up with it still active from the night before. Just from the feeling that the swirling white haze gave off, he knew it was growing more potent and more concentrated with every day that passed.

After a little more than three weeks, Eik was woken up by the sound of the feeding latch. He sat up and looked up. The black armor stood waiting, accompanied by one of the four subordinate cultists. They had brought a cart on which a human-shaped metal cabinet was mounted. Eik felt his stomach drop at the sight.

Wasn't this fucker supposed to grow bored of him soon? Why did he keep showing up?

Knocking his armored knuckles against the glass the black armor sang. "Today we're going on a field trip."

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