My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 750: Last Plea

Frostbite.

The frost-air the Titans had compiled was settling into him. His fingertips, exposed against the broken stone, were beginning to die — the frost reaching into the small capillaries and freezing them from the inside, the skin blackening in a slow centripetal bloom from the nail-beds inward.

He could feel them losing sensation.

He could feel them ceasing to be his.

The Titan’s boot pressed harder.

Phei’s skull protested in a fresh round of hairline fractures.

He had time, in the dim distant register of a body that could not currently understand it was the body in question, to think please.

It was the first time in the engagement his interior voice had asked for anything.

The Titan lifted its boot.

Stepped back.

The shoulder-pin was withdrawn, the crushed hand released. The construct that had used his hair as a tool stepped away.

He was, for one brief moment, free.

Then —

He pushed himself up onto his uncrushed left hand.

Onto his knees.

But then javelin took him through the thigh.

A second through the same calf the previous one had punctured.

A third through his right bicep.

He did not fall, this time, because the javelins were holding him up — three crystalline shafts buried in three different parts of his body, anchored in the broken stone behind him, his torso suspended at a low awkward angle by the pinning shafts.

He hung there.

A fourth javelin punched through his right chest.

A fifth through his lower abdomen.

A sixth through the meat of his left shoulder.

Six javelins.

He was... all anchored.

His body suspended, half-upright, bleeding from twenty separate wounds, his vision swimming, his hearing returning in a patchy ringing that let him hear, dimly, his own ragged breathing through a chest that had been opened from collarbone to thigh, his nostrils caked with frozen blood.

He reached inward, he was able to compile one more ice-marble.

He could not lift either arm to flick it.

The marble hovered in his open palm.

Useless...

He let it dissipate.

Above him, on her frost-disc, Eira watched.

He thought, for a brief dizzy second, that he saw something move across her face. Something that was not the patient teeth.

It was almost — but not quite — sympathy.

It did not last.

The patient teeth returned.

She raised her right hand.

The chains emerged from the cathedral hollow’s broken stone in long ropes of compiled crystalline ice — four chains, each barbed with backward-angled spikes the size of his fingers, each chain aware in the same low-tier register as the Titans themselves — and they moved with patient sentient purpose.

The first chain wrapped his right ankle.

The barbs sank through his ropes of what was left of his trouser and into the muscle of his calf in four discrete punctures, anchoring the chain in his flesh, and Phei felt the chain pull. The six javelins suspending him released their grip on the broken stone — the bond reabsorbing them as the chain took over — and his foot left the ground.

The second chain caught his left wrist.

The third chain wrapped his throat — not crushing, just looped, the barbs anchoring in the flesh of his shoulders and the back of his neck — and the fourth chain caught his right wrist.

Both arms up.

Both legs up.

Throat held.

His body suspended ten feet above the cathedral hollow’s broken stone in the precise spread-eagle posture of a sacrificial lamb being readied for the altar, four crystalline chains taut and barbed in his flesh, his weight pulling against the punctures and the punctures pulling against the chains.

He could not move his limbs.

He could not summon Void-Ice — the small he had access to required hand gestures, palm-orientation, wrist articulation, and his wrists were locked.

He could only watch.

The first Titan arrived.

It drew its fist back.

WHAM.

The fist met his ribs. His suspended body jerked sideways against the chains, the barbs tearing wider, four small ribbons of fresh blood opening at his ankle his throat and his wrists. Two more ribs cracked along his right side.

A second Titan stepped forward.

A second fist met his other side. His body jerked the other way. The puncture wounds widened further.

A third fist arrived in his stomach.

The angle folded him forward at the waist as far as the chains permitted — eight inches — and then the chains snapped him back upright, the barbs catching deeper, four fresh streams of blood beginning to track down the chains themselves toward the cathedral hollow’s stone floor.

The fourth Titan drew its saber.

Phei watched it draw and he could not, in the spread-eagle position with his throat looped and his wrists chained, do anything about it.

The saber opened a long shallow cut from the inside of his other thigh up through his groin and across his lower abdomen.

He screamed.

A fifth Titan stomped the broken stone.

A new forest of crystalline ice-spikes erupted upward beneath his suspended body — the chains held him just out of reach of their tips, the spikes growing to three feet tall and stopping six inches short of his exposed back.

Phei could feel the cold of their tips through the rags of his tunic. He could feel, dimly, that if the chains slackened by even six inches, the spike-field beneath him would impale him in ten places simultaneously.

The cathedral hollow had become an altar.

He understood, with the cold dim clarity of a body that had been beaten past the threshold where strategic thought was possible, that he had been strung up deliberately.

The constructs had not been trying to kill him; they had been preparing him.

A sixth Titan stepped forward.

Drove a halberd through his left calf.

A seventh, a mace into his hip.

An eighth, a saber slicing across his cheek from his temple to his jawline, the cut deep enough to expose the bone of his cheek for one wet visible second before the blood rose and covered it.

He hung there.

Bleeding from twenty-eight wounds the bond would not heal.

His body still alive only because the bond would heal a severance, and his body had, for the moment, no severances.

Above him—

Eira on her frost-disc was watching him take it.

Watching him fail to summon what was rightfully his.

Watching him understand, at last, that the lesson was not the Titans, and the lesson was not the pain — the lesson was that until he reached inward and commanded what was his, this would simply continue until his consciousness gave out and the bond brought it back and the constructs began again.

The ninth Titan stepped forward and drew its halberd back.

Phei — hanging from his four crystalline chains in the spread-eagle posture of a lamb strung up on its altar by the patient teeth of his own fairy — closed his eyes.

And reached inward one more time.