Book Three – Chapter Seven – Part Three – Prelude to the Banquet

“Itarr, heal and bind him to the chair. Now, Ed, those green scales are beautiful. It’d probably hurt if I peeled them off like ripping a scab, right?” Servi asked while walking to the bound Koena. The inhuman brutality he had just witnessed froze him to the core, and it took Servi ripping a scale off his face for him to respond.

“Good,” Servi muttered. She looked at the emerald-like jewel in her hand and crushed it until it was reduced to powder. “This is what I want to know: where are the 4th and 3rd base?”

“We—w—”

“I’m not asking for we! The only thing you’re allowed to say is the fucking location! I find it hard to believe that a group like the Mafia would never give its leaders a map of the bases! For fucks sake! There are only fifteen Numbered from 5th to 1st! You're telling me that the Boss wouldn’t give a whole 33% of his upper leadership information that’s fucking crucial?!

“I—I don’t know! We don’t know! I swear, we—GGGAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!”

Servi did not like his answer, and she let him know that by forcing two fingers into the exposed, red, pulsing-like spot that was once covered by the scale she ripped off. Her index finger curled into a hook while she extended her middle finger. She felt his innards and did all she could to rip whatever she could out of his body. His emerald scales became stained with red. His throat exerted itself to its limits by screaming in pure pain.

Ae, the Skill User, shouted. “Stop it! I’ll tell you what you want to know!” Tears fell from eyes that no longer had the ability to see, and her cloak slightly trembled. She didn’t need to see to picture the dangerous situation she was in. The cries of pain coming from her fellow Numbered, who were powerful and dangerous in their all right, were enough to force the severity of Ae's situation on her.

That pissed Servi off.

“Aww, you’re scared? You think you have the fucking right to be frightened now that someone bigger has come to fuck you up?!” She stomped towards the crying Elf and ripped off her left ear. Ignoring the following cries of pain, Servi saw something she should have demanded earlier.

“Your numbers. Where are they?!” Servi had confirmed Marky and Ae’s numbers, which were under his hair and hidden behind her ear, respectively, but it was possible the other three weren’t members of the 5ths. The odds were low, but Servi didn’t want to make any mistakes. “You! You better have the right fucking info when I come back!”

Servi left with a warning and stripped the other three members.

Ed had his number underneath a scale located on his left wrist. It had been forcibly engraved into his pulsing flesh. Swif’s 5 had been carved underneath his left hand’s index fingernail. Berth, still recovering from Servi’s brutal torture, hadn’t regained the reason to speak. And while that wasn’t a problem because it allowed her to display her various torture techniques to the other three who were conscious, it took up valuable time that she’d rather use to find Momo.

“All right, I’ve confirmed your numbers,” Servi said upon ripping the remainders of Berth’s shirt off. His number had been formed by pushing pebbles into his back. “Ae, tell me what I want, or I’ll rip off the other ear.”

Forcing her words through cloudy eyes and a throat run raw with agony and screams, she spoke a simple sentence. “What you want to know is in the desk at the back.” However, those words were laced with a trap. She grinned when Servi turned her back, showing off a set of yellowed teeth diseased by a lack of cleaning and nearly broke in a cackle when Servi approached the lone desk at the back.

“DON’T OPEN IT!  YOU BITCH, DON’T FUCKING OPEN IT!!!” Berth raged against his invisible constraints, and Servi retrieved a rock from her ring and threw it at him. It struck his chest, and vomit rose from the depths of his stomach and spewed out of his mouth.

“Shut the fuck up and stay silent!” Servi demanded.

Swif opened his mouth to protest, but Servi’s sharp glare shut him up. She wasn’t satisfied with only that, and so she used Telekinesis to take one of his eyes.

She didn’t think about it at the time because her mind wasn’t focused on the plain room that only had its floor and walls going for it, but the lack of furniture in the room should have sent alarm bells through her mind the moment Servi walked in. Other than the desk, there were five chairs and a single bed. An empty weapon rack sat nearby with a quiver of arrows next to it, but that was all this room had to offer.

“Itarr, absorb the desk,” Servi commanded while Swif’s cries echoed in the back. If they were doing their best to prevent her from getting the info, something funny had to be going on. Her ID flew from her waist until it entered her sight and wiggled.

Got it. Servi, there’s a mysterious object in here. It’s round in nature, but there’s a small wire that was connected to the desk handle. There was a stack of papers under it. And there was a small opening behind that.

“It was a goddamn bomb? You bitch!” In a rage, Servi rushed back to Ae, who had quickly lost her smile, and proceeded to rip off each of her fingers. “SHUT THE FUCK UP! JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!” Servi’s anger drowned out Ae’s pathetic screaming until her reason left her. Blood flowed from the ten new openings, and Itarr hastily applied Remedium Lux.

Now, it was clear why Ae's companions didn't want Servi to open the desk. It had to have been a powerful bomb. It was a final failsafe to prevent someone from gaining information relating to the Mafia.

After summoning the papers from her ring, Servi’s face morphed into a crooked grin. It was probably just the thing she had been searching for.

The stack was made out of six small pieces of paper while a stiff and heavy folder, colored black, filled in as the base. The very top one had a message that Servi believed came from the boss himself.

“Do what you wish until Saturday morning is upon us. When the time is at 6 AM, there will be a smoke signal. Follow it. I have already gone ahead with the Numbered and Suits from the 1st and 2nd base. Do not disappoint me, and I expect you all to be here with your Suits by 9 AM. Send word to the other bases and tell them to prepare in any way they can. This operation involves every Mafia member,” she read aloud.

Servi absorbed the top letter and fumbled through the remaining five pages. Rather than creating a multi-paged letter, the five had pictures on them, and they went together to form a map. The discoloration near the edges proved they were somewhat old and well-handled.

Servi used Telekinesis to hold them in place in front of her and rearranged them like a puzzle. There were five Xs marked with red ink, eight places marked with a green B, and 7 places marked with the acronym RASP written with pink ink. She hastily absorbed those pages and flipped open the thick folder.

Ae howled with laughter as Servi’s ear picked up an incredibly quiet metallic clink. It had happened the moment she began to crack open the black folder.

Itarr couldn’t act fast enough, and the expertly constructed bomb went off. Smoke annexed every room in the building and nearly escaped up through the stairwell, but it didn’t have enough power because Itarr absorbed the explosion a tenth of a second after it went off. She couldn’t do anything about the smoke, but Servi didn’t care. Even as her flesh regenerated from the thousands of chunks splattering the wall, Servi wasn’t angry. She was happy. Thrilled. Ecstatic.

Once her legs, body, and some of her head had been made whole by True Immortality, she turned to five Numbered she wanted to torture. She wouldn’t have the chance to do to them what she wanted because that explosion had been strong enough to shoot out hyper-accelerated shrapnel, and each of their corpses had tiny holes that acted as blood waterfalls. The chairs they had been invisibly tied to had broken apart from the dense microprojectiles. The bed and chairs that used to be standing had been eviscerated as well, and the wooden walls surrounding Servi had tiny holes from where the shrapnel had bounced off. The tiled floor was all but gone, and only little chunks remained.

Her armor had been obliterated since she was at the epicenter of the explosion, and she quickly covered herself in more clothing. This time, she chose a simple red blouse with yellow cloth pants. The color didn’t match, but Servi didn't have the time to care about fashion.

But all wasn’t lost. Ae had somehow survived through the horrible explosion. Servi grinned when she heard her groan and used a few thousand stacks of  Remedium Lux to heal every wound Ae suffered. It was so powerful that the white color faded from her eyes and replaced it with a luscious deep brown. The thick smoke from the explosion was too rough for her sensitive eyes, but her amazement didn’t last. A partly regenerated hand gripped Ae by her hair and tossed her down. The black hair she saw struck fear in her heart, and those red eyes looked like they were from the devil. It was both a blessing and curse she had regained her sight, but if she had to choose one, she’d rather be blind. Seeing the true face of the one who had caused so much damage wasn’t worth seeing her friends again. Nor was it worth it to catch a glimpse of the Monarch Butterflies she loved to chase a child.

“Oh, how lucky for me that you didn’t die right away.” Servi stood over her and cracked her knuckles.

Ae braced herself and tried to lean up, but her hands slipped across the bloody floor. The broken tile that remained was sharp enough to cut right into her palm. It should've been painful, but Ae never cried out. Servi decided to get rid of her anger by stomping down on Ae’s trembling left leg. She gritted her teeth, cracking them in a few spots and swallowed any scream.

“STOP! You got what you needed, right? Please, let us go!” The girl’s body shook from the pain. The many holes in her cloak gave way to bare skin. She had nothing on underneath it.

“Us? Bitch, there isn’t any ‘us.’ You’re going to die like those other four fuckups, and I’m going to enjoy wringing the life from your eyes. But before I do that, I need more info. Your fucking boss kidnapped a girl named Momo. She wasn’t mentioned in the letter, so I need you to tell me where she is!” Servi waited for a brief three seconds before stomping down again. “MOMO! WHERE! IS! SHE!!”

“I DON’T KNOW A MOMO!!!!” Ae couldn’t swallow the pain anymore and cried out. The sickening splatters of her blood being sprayed and bones being repeatedly cracked and regenerated were far too much for her to take.

“WHERE IS THE BOSS?! WHERE THE FUCK IS HE?” Servi had moved her stomps up until her thighs were crushed every second while they regenerated every other second.

“FOOOOOREST!!! AAHHHH STOP! PLEASE, STOP!!!!”

Like she begged for, Servi immediately stopped her stomps and walked away. “What’s the signal?”

“It’s…smoke… Wwaahhh!!!” Ae had been left with a crushed thigh, and the pain and loss of feeling had forced her mind to fill herself with dopamine. But the pleasure she felt was still multiplied by the pain, and it gave off a similar infatuation as if taking a Pink Monotonia.

“The bald Elf and this letter said the same thing. Now, where is Momo? Tell me what I fucking want to know!” Servi retrieved a dagger and walked up to Ae. Her arms couldn’t handle propping her up anymore, and she fell to the ground. The rapid narrow breaths she inhaled in her moments of being alive did little more than stave off asphyxiation. “Sorry, I can’t let you die.” With a simple and unnecessary snap of her fingers, Ae’s body was healed to perfection. Only the pain she suffered remained.

“I don’t know a girl named Momo. I don’t know any Momo. But she might be with the boss,” Ae answered. Lying on her side after falling, she remained motionless.

“Then what are the Suits?” Servi flipped her dagger around her fingers and slid its handle up and down the front of Ae’s robes.

“They’re dependent on Monotonia. They can’t live or think for themselves, and it’s the final stages of pure Monotonia Dependency. They would do anything for even the smallest scrap of Monotonia. That’s why they’re the perfect warriors and guards. They have no morality or any feelings left in their bodies,” Ae explained.

You’re kinda chatty now.” Servi crouched down and ran the handle of her weapon up and down the bloody cloaked-covered leg she had broken and healed hundreds of times.

Ae didn’t flinch and kept speaking in the same tone, devoid of any emotion. “I’m going to die. Why should I be loyal to a man whose trap didn’t help kill you? The boss assured us that the desk and folder each had a bomb, and it would kill all of us. It was supposed to be the final punishment for allowing someone to get this far into the base. If we couldn’t win against the intruder, our last goal for the Mafia was to force the intruder to open the desk. They would’ve died, but so would we.

“I loved the boss! I wanted to die by his hands! He took my sight when he first gave me my Number, and I wanted to give him my life!” Ae displayed emotion as her voice took on a thunderous wail filled with tension. She slammed her arms down onto the blood floor and cried out a single name.

“BOSS!!!!!”

“That’s kind of a fucked up relationship, isn’t it? Why would you want him to kill you? I guess it doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. Tell me this: why are the Suits red and the sign to this building orange?”

“No correlation. The building was already here, and it had the sign when we decided to use it as a base. The color clothing the Suits wear doesn't mean anything. It was something we-- the 5th-- collectively decided on after a round of beers.”

“Is there really only five 5ths?” Servi figured if her enemy was in a talkative mood, she would do all she can to get every little bit of information she could.

“Yes. Whenever one dies, a 6th is promoted. Whenever a 4th dies, a 5th is promoted. However, I don’t know how it works for the 1st or 2nd ranks."

“I do have some questions about how the Mafia started and its beginning years, but I feel that it doesn’t matter at the end of the day. When this week is over, I’m going to kill every fucking Mafia member I find. In that way, I suppose it’s a good thing that I found a map. I gotta say, it’s a major fucking mistake that you used a real map. That kind of error is something you never want to make if there’s even a small chance for the enemy to get it. Good work for being the reason thousands are gonna die, you fucking idiot.”

“Thousands? I don’t care about them. If it sounded like I cared about the Suits, then it was a lie. The Boss told us to make good use of them, so I treated them like pets, but there was no love.” Ae sighed and stared up at the ceiling. Not moving, it was as if she waited for death to take her. “You got what you came for, so just kill me. If I can’t die by the boss, then just fucking end my existence. Wait,” she said in a monotone voice as her mind made a connection to what she was told earlier. “Red eyes? Black hair? You’re the one we were told to look out for…”

“Most of what you said doesn't make sense, but I guess I’ll chalk that up to you hallucinating from the torture. But that last part? Well, I’m glad about that. What else did he tell you? Tell me every fucking thing!”

“He only told us to watch out for a girl with black hair and red eyes. That’s all. He didn’t mention a thing about someone named Momo. Hey, kill him for me. I wanted to die by his hands, but if he can’t even do that, then fucking kill HIM!” Ae yelled, and Servi only laughed. She couldn’t implicitly trust the information she gathered, but it was a good enough start to her search.

“Well, I got the info I needed, but I have to verify it. I suppose the 4th and 3rd base would be a good place to start. Surely they know the boss’s location. The forest is too fucking wide to search, and I hope I don’t have to wait for the fucking smoke signal. But I promise I’ll kill the boss to fulfill your weird fucking fantasy.” Servi stood up and tossed the knife in the air. It flipped a few times and came down, blade first, on Ae’s hip.

“Good...” That was the very last word to escape from her lips.

“What? No scream? That takes the fun out.” Servi sighed and used Telekinesis to lift Ae. It was a trifle to rip off her arms and legs, but Servi’s mood was soured by her enemy’s lack of screaming. As she stared at the limbless body in front of her, Ae’s eyes flickered open before they shut. The blood pouring from the four openings splashed about, covering Servi’s legs. She formed a fist, punched right through Ae’s chest, and jerked her whole hand down. The floating body split down the middle, and Servi canceled Telekinesis.

The corpse landed with a sickening splash and splattered crimson all over Servi’s leg. She ignored it and walked over the shredded bodies and into the long hallway. As she neared the exit, Servi hopped into a nearby room and changed into another set of armor. This time, it included a helmet that helped hide her hair and an eye color-changing mask.

That should be fine. Red eyes and black hair are a no-go, but purple eyes and a helmet should be enough. Good thing I put that wig in my ring before charging in.

“Yeah,” Servi said as she replied to Itarr. She stepped out of the room, waded through the blood, and made her way back to the bottom of the spiral staircase. Using Metal Wall from an iron shield Servi had tossed away, a giant block of metal filled in the long hallway. She used the malleability property of Metal Wall to snake up through the spiral staircase. And after Servi reached the room where she first fought the Suits, she cut off the skill and retrieved a second shield.

This time, it was made out of nadrium, and Servi used Metal Wall again to cover the iron in a layer of nearly impenetrable nadrium. It was mainly a deterrent to prevent anyone from digging further. To disguise the nadrium's identifiable physical properties, Servi tossed some dirt from her ring. Then, she used Earth Wall to add the finishing touches before walking out.

It seemed like that was overkill, but Servi did it for a reason. From a far distance, nadrium was noticeable, and the dirt would hide its signifying features. Then again, perhaps there was a better way to do what Servi wanted. But in the end, it didn't matter because everyone inside that base was dead, and that was the only thing that mattered.

Her job wasn’t done, however, and she had at least two more bases to eliminate. She didn’t know if it was possible to destroy every base before sunrise, but she was going to do as much as she could. But she couldn’t spend the entire night on it. If Servi could trust the information she had gathered, Momo was out in the forest with the Boss.

But Servi didn’t know if she should ignore the other bases and rush to the forest. Her entire being wanted that information to be factual, but what if it wasn’t? If she spent the whole night searching the woods when it was totally false, then she’d be the fool. Before she acted, she needed that assurance. She would probably get only a single chance to pull this off, and that single chance had to be foolproof.

Servi stomped her feet and ran to the right, bypassing the line to get into the RASP building until she came to a somewhat hidden alley. Using a single jump, she leapt to the roof of the nearest building and pulled out the map she had found. She figured the five Xs she saw had to be the bases belonging to the 5th and below.

“Then these places marked with a ‘B’ have to be bases like Deset. Look, here’s a place marked ‘RASP,’ and there’s an ‘X’ right beside it. That has to be the 5th base.”

Look, there’s a small number beside it. It says 5. If this map is the real deal, then it can be trusted. Hey, that place on the upper corner is marked New Arcton. You see the ‘X’ with a 2?

Servi read her vibrating ID and did as Itarr asked. It was true. There really was an ‘X’ with a 2 marked on it.

“Then it has to be empty, right? One of the 5th said the boss stayed there. Let’s go and check it out!”

Servi absorbed the floating map and ran towards the edge of the building. With a single leap, she soared across the moonlit sky. For a single moment, Servi believed she could actually touch those celestial beings she so desperately wanted to feel. But at the apex of her jump, she slowly fell, and her dream was no more. Servi converted into a roll upon landing on a second building and transitioned into a perfect sprint.