* Warning:This chapter depicts violence and cruelty. Reader discretion advised. Please proceed only if you feel comfortable*
Agnes stared at the small girl behind the table, a silent war raging behind her eyes.
The evidence was undeniable—the whispered miracles, the regrown fingers, the vanished fevers.
*This child has power.* It might not be enough to unravel a high shaman's curse, but perhaps it
could bolster Judith's ravaged body. Perhaps it could buy them *time*, where the Guild's masters
had only sold them false hope. That sliver of possibility was the only leash on the volcanic pride in her blood.
Arin listened, but a flicker of distant recognition passed through him—something in their sharp,
imperious gaze tugged at a memory buried deep within his mind . He dismissed it as Agnes spoke,
her voice taut with impatience. She had already wasted an hour in this filth.
"You will come with us to Veldryn Manor," Agnes stated, the command leaving no room for refusal. "A member of our family requires your services."
Arin blinked, then shook his head with a gentle firmness. "I'm sorry, but I see patients here.
If you can bring your family member to the clinic, I will examine her."
Rowena's eyebrows rose a fraction. The name 'Veldryn' typically acted like a key, unlocking immediate obedience. This calm refusal was… unprecedented.
Beside him, Lia turned to ice. *Veldryn.* The name was a hammer blow. The Argent Forge. The armory of the Empire.
A family whose displeasure could erase towns from the map. "Arin," she breathed, a raw, guttural warning.
"How dare you!"Agnes roared , for her it was an unconscionable slight.
It was an unconscionable insult. She had expected awe, fear, immediate submission. Not this placid resistance.
The roar was instantaneous, volcanic. She moved before the last syllable faded—a blur of refined, lethal motion.
Lia lunged from the window to intercept, but she was a half-step too slow, her movement one of protection, not pre-emptive attack.
Agnes's hand did not merely slap Arin's cheek.
CRACK-THUD.
The sound was wet and final. It was the sound of a gate slamming shut on mercy.
Arin's head snapped sideways with terrifying force.
He didn't just stumble; he was launched.
His small body left the ground, crashed into his rickety chair—splintering it—and landed in a heap on the packed dirt floor several feet away, skidding to a stop.
A stunned, deafening silence gripped the clinic for one endless, half-second heartbeat.
Then, a sound. A tiny, broken, wet whimper.
White. Then sparks.
Then a roaring in his ears that drowned everything. The world was a tilted, nausea-inducing blur.
His face… it didn't feel like his face. It was a balloon of pure, screaming agony.
He lay curled on his side, one small hand fluttering up to touch the ruin of his cheek. The touch was fire. He whimpered again.
No, no, no… Through the blinding pain, a deeper, more primal terror screamed.
The illusion! The magical facade that shaped his features, that made him a girl shuddered.
He felt it warp, like a reflection in a pond hit by a stone. For a horrifying instant,
the delicate lines of the girl's face he wore rippled, threatening to dissolve and reveal the boy beneath. With a desperate, scraped-raw effort of will, he clawed the magic back, forcing it to solidify. The illusion held.
But it now bore the evidence. The savage, blazing brand of a perfect adult handprint was etched into the skin, already swelling, turning an ugly, deep purple.
Hot tears, beyond his control, flooded from his eyes, carving tracks through the dust on his face.
Lia saw him fly. She heard the whimper.
She saw the handprint bloom on his cheek, and beneath it, that terrifying, momentary ripple.
Rage, cold and absolute, erased fear. With a wordless snarl, she launched herself at Agnes, dagger aimed for the space between rib and hip.
Agnes turned. Her expression was one of contemptuous annoyance, as if swatting a fly.
She didn't even draw her own blade. She caught Lia's wrist mid-thrust with a grip like an iron manacle, twisted with a cruel,
clinical wrench that forced a gasp of pain from Lia's lips, and drove her own knee, armored by hard leather, deep into Lia's solar plexus.
All the air in Lia's world vanished in a voiceless, agonizing rush. Her eyes bulged. The dagger clattered to the floor.
She folded, every muscle paralyzed, and collapsed, writhing soundlessly, fighting just to draw a shred of breath. she was no match for Agnes.
Arin Through the blur of tears and pain, he saw Lia fall. A jolt of terror, sharper and cleaner than any physical agony, lanced through.
"Lia!" With a ragged, guttural cry that tore at his raw throat, he pushed himself up onto one elbow.
He raised a trembling, dirt-smeared hand towards the tall, angry woman and released his only attack—a weak, diffuse pulse of raw mana.
It washed over Agnes Veldryn like a warm, slightly startling breeze. It ruffled a strand of her fiery hair.
She didn't flinch.
She didn't even blink.
The annoyance on her face curdled into something colder, darker, more intent.
A spark of intellectual curiosity ignited in her winter-chip eyes.
If persuasion had failed, and this… creature dared to resist with parlor tricks, then force would do. Simple, direct force. And if the rumors were true—if the child really could heal—then force wasn't just allowed. It was efficient.
She could break him again and again until he finally obeyed..
She closed the distance to Arin in one long, purposeful stride.
With her boot, She flipped him onto his back as if he were nothing, then dropped her full weight onto his lower body, grinding him into the dirt..
The air left his lungs in a helpless puff.
"Now," Agnes said, her voice low, conversational, almost bored. "You will learn to heed your betters."
What followed was not a beating born of hot rage. It was methodical. Cruel. Deeply, horrifyingly clinical.
She first drove a fist, hardened by years of weapon drills, into his stomach.
All the air, all thought, all sense vanished in a sickening whoosh. His mouth gaped like a landed fish, but no sound came out.
A wave of nauseating, deep-cramping pain radiated outwards, stealing his breath before the first cry could form.
Before that wave could crest, Another blow, hard as a blacksmith's hammer, crashed into his lower left ribs.
SNAP-CRUNCH.
The sound was wet, intimate, hideously loud in the quiet room. A white-hot spear of agony lanced through his entire being,
centered on that one, shattered point. This time, a scream was torn from him—high, shattered, utterly childlike.
"Aaaaah—!" he cried out.
But even through the blinding white pain, a deeper, older instinct—Satoshi's instinct for survival—fought back.
The rib is broken.
A shard could pierce a lung. You must stabilize.
The illusion must hold. If it fails, if they find out Arin is an girl , even he can't imagine what will happen to him.
As the broken bone grated inside him, a frantic, microscopic trickle of golden light—not the blazing healing he used on others,
but a desperate, internal triage—raced through his own body. It didn't stop the pain.
It was a frantic mason, fusing the jagged edges of the rib just enough, just in time, to prevent a lethal puncture.
She felt it. She felt the impact, the definitive, satisfying crack of bone giving way beneath her knuckles. And then, beneath her knee,
she felt a strange, sudden solidity where there should have been yielding ruin. Her eyes, fixed on Arin's contorted face, widened a fraction.
Not just healing others. Regeneration. Under direct assault. In real-time. A dark, fascinated awe mingled with her cold anger.
This was… unprecedented.
"Remarkable," she muttered, almost to herself. The curiosity in her awoke, overtaking the enraged noble.
She became a researcher testing the tensile strength of a miraculous material.
She shifted her weight slightly for better leverage and hit him again. In the exact same spot.
CRUNCH.
The freshly, hastily-knit bone gave way with another sickening, wet sound. Arin's scream this time was weaker, choked, ending in a sob.
The golden light scurried back inside him began the horrible work of re-knitting.
Another measured blow. Break.
A hitched, breathless whimper from the floor. Heal.
Another. Break. A weak, trembling convulsion. Heal.
It was a hellish cycle beyond any conventional torture. The searing, bright agony of the bone breaking. The bizarre, deep internal itch and wrench of
it mending itself. Then, before the pain could even begin to recede, the fresh, shattering explosion as it was broken again.
No rhythm, no recovery—just a continuous, rolling tsunami of pain. His own magic, his gift, had become his prison and his torturer.
He lost all sense of time, of place, of anything but the knee on his chest and the next impact. Tears and blood from his bitten lip mingled on his face,
dripping into the dirt beneath his head.
He curled instinctively, a futile attempt to protect his core, but there was no escape from the pinpoint accuracy of her violence.
"P-please…" he whimpered between one impact and the next, his voice a wet, ragged whisper barely audible over his own hitched breathing.
"St-stop… it h-hurts… please, stop…"
Agnes didn't stop. Her initial anger had been fully transmuted into a cold, focused drive for results.
"Which will break first, little healer?" she mused, her voice detached, analytical.
She punctuated the question not with a fist, but with a sharp, open-handed strike to the side of his head. "Your bone? Or your will?"
For Arin the world flashed blinding white, then dissolved into a high-pitched, metallic whine that drowned all other sound.
His vision swam with dark spots. The pain in his head joined the symphony of agony in his ribs and stomach.
He was crying openly now, great, heaving, helpless sobs that wracked his broken body.
The professional facade of healer, was gone. Eradicated. What remained on the floor was a terrified, brutalized child.
"Help…" he slurred, his words mashed together by pain and swelling. "Please… stop… make it stop… please… I'll… I'll do anything… just make it stop…"
He was begging. Pleading to the void. To the knee on his chest. To anyone who would listen.
The principle of one silver, the clinic, the defiance against the guild—all of it was ash.
There was only the next second of pain, and the desperate, animal need for it to end.
He was a child, begging for the pain to end.
The scene was so profoundly disturbing that even Rowena, her face pale, took a half-step forward. "Agnes, that is enou—"
The clinic door burst open. Gang enforcers, drawn by the sounds, surged in. They saw their gentle healer pinned under a noble,
face bloody and swollen; Lia gasping against the wall; the noblewoman standing over the healer like a butcher.
With a collective roar, they charged.
A flicker of annoyance crossed Agnes's face. She didn't look up. As the first enforcer reached her, she released a pulse of
concussive mana—a visible shockwave that blasted the women off their feet, sending them crashing into tables and walls.
In the chaos and dust, Lia, bleeding and half-blind with rage, saw her chance.
Dragging herself up, she focused every shred of her remaining power into a single, lethal spear of force magic.
It struck Agnes squarely between the shoulder blades.
Caught off-guard, Agnes was blown off her feet. She sailed backward, crashing through the clinic's flimsy wall in an explosion
of splintered timber, disappearing into the street.
The enforcers turned on Rowena, but she was already moving, ducking their wild swings and darting outside to her sister's side.
In that fractured moment, Lia staggered to Arin. He was a weeping, bruised mess, one eye swollen shut, breathing in wet hitches.
Yet, as she reached for him, his trembling, bloodied hands came up, pushing feeble golden sparks toward her wounded side.
"L-Lia… your… your side…" he hiccupped.
"stupid fool, Heal yourself first " she wept. With a final, desperate burst, she hauled him up and half-dragged him toward the rear wall.
Her foot found a hidden trigger. A section gave way into a dark, narrow passage—an escape route prepared weeks ago. She pulled them
both through into the dank, freezing alley, leaving behind only blood on the dirt, the wreckage of a sanctuary, and the fading echo of a child's shattered sobs.