Chương 122: Hell's Feather

The actual interrogation began, but, like everything Dex had done, it followed none of the conventional rules known in the Empire's torture chambers or in the dungeons of the elves. Dex didn't shout demands for answers, didn't bring out barbed whips, didn't reach for pliers to tear out fingernails. His calm was the deadliest weapon of all. Dex stepped back, releasing the spy's face, and slowly raised his right hand to chest height.

At first, nothing happened, then the air around his palm began to ripple and fracture. Phoenix mana gathered at the center of his hand, but Dex, thanks to his terrifying, newly-honed mastery over this legendary magic, didn't let it burst or take the crude shape of a fireball the way a novice mage would. Instead, he compressed it, condensed it, and shaped it with microscopic precision.

A horrifying instrument took form in his hand: an extremely fine, elongated feather, made entirely of plasma glowing an orange-white. It didn't scorch the air around it, instead, it vibrated at an impossibly high frequency, a vibration that gave off a faint hum, like a swarm of furious bees trapped inside one's skull. It looked as delicate as a shard of glass, yet it carried enough energy to melt steel.

"Do you know what this is?" Dex asked, his eyes studying the fiery feather with cold admiration, as though it were a work of art, indifferent to the terror beginning to surface on the bound spy's face.

"Phoenix fire is quite singular, unlike any other magical fire in this world. Ordinary fire burns skin and flesh and stops at the bone. But phoenix mana... it's a living fire. It feeds. Specifically, it craves the vital mana running through the human nervous system. It doesn't destroy the body from the outside, it uses your nerve pathways as fuel-lines, and ignites you from within."

Without warning, without raising his voice or shifting his expression in the slightest, Dex moved quickly and seized the spy's right hand, suspended in its chain. With a surgeon's precision, he drove the fire feather in, agonizingly slow, millimeter by millimeter, beneath the nail of the spy's little finger. This was no ordinary, bearable burn. It was nothing like resting a hand on a hot stove.

The instant the phoenix's plasma touched the raw nerve endings beneath the nail, it reacted with the spy's vital mana in a microscopic explosion.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAH!" The spy let out a scream no one in the outside world would ever hear, a scream that tore through the vault's deathly stillness and exceeded every limit human vocal cords were ever meant to produce. It felt as though the scream were ripping his own throat apart from within. His eyes bulged until they nearly burst from their sockets, and his entire body convulsed with such force it nearly tore his shoulders from their sockets in the chains. The fire didn't merely burn his finger, it crawled, alive.

In indescribable horror, the spy watched a faint orange glow creep beneath his skin, climbing from his finger, through the veins of his hand, toward his forearm, turning every fine nerve network, every sensory ending, into a burning wick carrying pure, concentrated pain straight to his brain. He felt as if hundreds of ants made of glowing embers were crawling through his veins, devouring his flesh from within, leaving no outward trace but the glow.

Dex stopped, coldly, and withdrew the fire feather a single millimeter, partially breaking the reaction, granting the spy a moment to breathe. The spy's head slumped forward; he gasped violently, drool running from his open mouth, no longer able to control the muscles of his own face. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

"The Organization is planning a two-pronged attack from within, timed to the dawn, isn't that right?" Dex asked, in a tone perfectly natural, calm and routine, as though asking a friend about tomorrow's weather. Dex wiped an imaginary bead of sweat from his brow and went on: "General Vargas and his great army camped outside are nothing but a façade. They're the grand bait, a costly, bloody distraction meant to force Commander Okonnor and the dark elves' elite forces to dig in at the border and defend the walls.

And while every eye is turned outward, you and the rest of the rats planted inside will activate the transmission crystals to crack open small portal-gates within the village, or perhaps carry out the real assassinations of the commanders from behind, and burn the arrow stockpiles. A classic plan. A very effective one too... if I weren't here." The spy raised his head with tremendous effort. Despite pain that nearly stole his sanity, he tried to cling to the last shreds of his pride and his creed.

He mumbled broken words of threat, his eyes streaming with tears and hatred: "You... you're nothing but an insect blocking... the Organization's path. My masters will crush you... crush you... and they'll rape that silver witch... who follows you... in front of..." Dex sighed with profound boredom, cutting him off.

"You talk too much. And your threats are very dull." Dex closed his fist, snuffing out Hell's Feather. In its place, his entire palm blazed with a brilliant white light. He pressed his glowing hand directly over the spy's mouth, forcing it shut, driving his head back until it struck the hard wooden root behind him. This time Dex used a different technique: Purification Fire.

He didn't channel it into the nerves, he focused it instead like a direct, searing brand, scorching the surface of the tongue, the lips, and the inner tissue of the mouth for a handful of seconds that felt, to the victim, like an eternity. The spy convulsed with horrifying violence and tried to scream, but Dex's iron grip smothered the sound, turning it into a muffled, terrified moan.

The spy choked on the stench of his own flesh burning, and felt a different kind of terror swallow his soul whole, not the terror of pain this time, but the terror of losing speech itself, the terror of eternal silence, the terror of being trapped inside his own body, voiceless, forever. Dex pulled his hand away after a few seconds. The spy's mouth was charred and horrific.

Before the man could slip into a shock-induced coma, Dex extended two fingers of his left hand and let a thin, exact current of healing mana pass through them. He mended the surface burn instantly, regenerating the seared tissue within seconds, restoring to the spy the organic ability to speak, and to taste pain all over again. This sadistic alternation between total destruction and instant healing was the cruelest form of psychological torture there was.

In that moment, the spy understood a terrifying truth: this young man would not kill him, would not let him slip into unconsciousness, he meant to keep him alive and aware, tearing him apart and rebuilding him, over and over, without end. The spy's defenses shattered completely. The dam broke.

Dex leaned in and whispered into the ear of the man, now trembling like a child on a freezing winter night, his voice carrying the cold of graveyards:"In Blackrock Prison, I watched crime-syndicate bosses, hired killers, men ten times bigger and more savage than you, men who ate raw flesh, drop to their knees, bleeding, and weep like infants. I watched them kiss my mud-caked boots, begging me, offering everything they owned, just to be killed and have it end... and that, after only ten minutes with me."

Dex paused, pulling back slightly to look into the spy's broken eyes, and finished with an icy smile: "We, my dear friend, are only at the three-minute mark. Please, for my own personal enjoyment, don't break. Make me enjoy this more." In that moment, the spy opened his freshly-healed mouth, and what poured out of it wasn't words of defiance, it was every secret the Shadow Organization possessed, spilling out like an unstoppable flood.