The grand, terrifying audience with Rushifa was over. The demons, their grasping claws now impersonal and efficient, carried Blade and Burmilla not to a dungeon, but to a place of cold, clinical purpose.
They were delivered to Shito's Care Center.
The name was a lie, of course. It was a compound of greystone and weeping iron nestled in a canyon of jagged black rock, its air thick with the scent of antiseptic, ozone, and a faint, underlying copper tang of old fear. This was Rushifa's forge for potential. Here, captured children from a hundred conquered worlds, those who showed a spark of psychic sensitivity, latent power, or, like Blade, a terrifying aptitude for violence, were broken down and rebuilt. Not into soldiers, but into instruments. Torture was not punishment here; it was pedagogy. Pain was the chisel, and fear the hammer, used to sculpt away individuality and leave only a hollow, receptive shape waiting to be filled with the will of Jigoku.
Blade, still trembling with the psychic aftershocks of Rushifa's "lesson," was thrown into a sterile cell with a quartz-like floor that hummed with a low-grade, nerve-jangling frequency. Burmilla was taken elsewhere, her own path of unmaking beginning. They were commodities now, their bond irrelevant, their past a disease to be burned out.
For Birman, the path was different. At eleven, he was deemed past the malleable age for the Care Center's finer sculpting. His strength was physical, his loyalty a simple, programmable instinct. He was processed, branded with a searing sigil on his shoulder, and marched with a chain of other older captives toward the vast, thrumming industrial pits, a slave, destined for a short, brutal life of manual labor in the soul-forges.
But as the slave column passed a soaring archway that led to the roaring cacophony of the Pits of Carnage, Rushifa's gladiatorial arenas where demons and broken champions fought for ephemeral favor, the Lord of Jigoku, observing from an unseen vantage, had a thought.
A flicker of cold amusement. A Nekonian. Not the prodigy, but the loyal one. The one built for protection, for duty. To see that instinct twisted into a fight for mere survival, to see that solemn pride ground into the blood-sand... it presented a more interesting variable than another slave corpse in a furnace channel.
A silent command halted the procession. A demon overseer, its face a mask of blank obedience, separated Birman from the group. He was stripped of his slave gear, given a dented, ill-fitting breastplate and a notched sword, and shoved through the archway.
Birman stumbled into the holding pen for the pits. The air was a solid wall of heat, sweat, blood, and screaming. Through a grated gate, he could see a nightmare kaleidoscope of violence. He should have felt terror. Instead, a grim, desperate purpose hardened within him. This was a battlefield. Twisted and evil, but a battlefield nonetheless. If he could fight, he could survive. If he could survive, he might one day find Burmilla and Blade. His duty remained, even here in hell.
He was brought before Rushifa, who had descended to a observation ledge overlooking the pits. The demon lord looked down at the Nekonian boy, who stood at a trembling but stubborn attention, his sapphire eyes fixed on middle distance, clinging to discipline as his last shred of self.
"You have been given a warrior's chance," Rushifa stated, his voice slicing through the arena's din. "A more fitting end for your kind than lifting rocks. Do you understand?"
Birman swallowed, his throat dry. A chance. A path to agency, however vile. "I... understand," he managed, his voice rough. "Thank you." The words were automatic, a ghost of his cadet training, a reflex of gratitude for any scrap of purpose.
It was the wrong thing to say.
Rushifa's hand moved. It was not a blow, but a precise, almost surgical motion. There was a flash of dark energy, a sound like a wet rope snapping, and a searing, incomprehensible pain exploded at the base of Birman's spine.
He didn't scream at first. The shock was too absolute. He looked down and saw it, lying on the stained stone floor, his own tail, the sleek, seal-point dark fur now just dead matter. A wave of nausea and violation worse than any wound crashed over him. The pain followed, a white-hot torrent that dropped him to his knees, then onto his side, as he curled around the agonizing, absent stump. His blood, a shocking crimson against the grey stone, pooled around him.
Rushifa looked down at the writhing, broken form, his expression one of mild, corrective interest. "You misunderstand," he said, his voice calm, pedagogical. "You do not thank me. You do not have a purpose of your own. You are not a warrior. You are a tool. You are not Nekonian. You are an extension of my will. This," he gestured to the severed tail with a flick of his fingers, "is to help you remember. It is the first lesson of the pit: your body, your pain, your very life, are mine to spend."
As Birman writhed, the world dissolving into a red haze of agony and humiliation, a new sensation pierced the torment. It was not a sound, but a voice, implanted directly into the core of his crumbling mind. It was dry, ancient, and carried the absolute finality of a tomb seal closing:
"RUSHIFA WAS IN THE BEGINNING."
The pain seemed to crystallize around the words.
"RUSHIFA WILL BE IN THE END."
It was a truth that rewired his suffering, framing it not as a random cruelty, but as a fundamental law of his new existence.
"RUSHIFA IS."
The voice faded, leaving silence in its wake, a silence more complete than any he had ever known. The physical agony remained, a roaring fire. But inside, where his pride and his identity had been, there was now a cold, hollow space. And echoing in that space, replacing the memory of his father's praise, his sister's laugh, his duty to his prince, was that terrible, triple-edged truth.
He was not Birman anymore. He was a bleeding, tailless tool. And the hand that wielded him was eternal.
A demon guard kicked him. "Get up. Your first match is in ten minutes."
Shaking, drenched in his own blood, Birman forced himself to his feet. He did not look back at his tail. He did not look up at Rushifa. He stared straight ahead at the grated gate, toward the roaring arena. The sapphire light in his eyes had not gone out, but it had changed. It had hardened, frozen over, reflecting not hope, but the absolute, undeniable IS of the entity that now owned him. The lesson, in blood and void, was complete.
While Blade was subjected to the Pit of Clarity, a chamber designed to scour the mind with oscillating frequencies of terror and revelation, and Birman learned his first, brutal lesson in the arena, Burmilla's breaking was of a different, more intimate kind.
She was taken to a wing of the Care Center known as the Chambers of Acquiescence. Here, the methods were less about grand torture and more about meticulous, soul-crushing erosion. Her cell was not a pit, but a smooth, ovoid pod of a greystone that seemed to absorb sound and light. There were no bars, only a seamless wall from which unyielding manacles, cold as dead star-metal, clamped around her slender wrists and ankles, suspending her a hand's breadth above the floor. The position was calculated, not painful enough to cause immediate damage, but agonizing in its absolute, unrelenting restraint.
Her crime, in the eyes of Shito, was her spirit. The kinetic energy, the clever defiance, the spark of joyful rebellion that had made her a brilliant pilot, these were impurities. The first time she snarled at a demon attendant, she was punished. Not with a lash, but with silence. The nutrient paste that dripped from a tube in the ceiling ceased. The single cup of brackish water that would hydraulically extend to her lips twice a day retracted and did not return.
For a Nekonian, starvation is not merely a physical trial. Their metabolism is a high-energy furnace; their very grace and reflexes are fueled by constant, precise intake. To deprive them is to turn that furnace inward, to ignite a slow, excruciating burn that consumes muscle, then nerve, then will. It is an agony that begins in the gut as a clawing, hollow fire, then spreads into the bones as a deep, aching cold, and finally settles in the mind as a shrill, desperate static.
Days bled into weeks. Time lost meaning, measured only in the escalating torment of her own body. Her sleek, silver-tipped fur grew dull and matted. Her frame, once compact and powerful, became a fragile lattice of bone and taut skin. Her vibrant green eyes sank into shadowed hollows, their light fixated on the spot where the food tube remained stubbornly, tauntingly inert.
Sometimes, the only break in the endless, gnawing silence was Shito. He would glide into her cell, a pale specter in the gloom, and simply stand there. He said nothing at first, just watched her with his razor-smile as she trembled from strain and hunger, as whimpers of pure animal need escaped her cracked lips. His presence was a violation in itself, a witness to her utter vulnerability.
Then, one visit, he spoke. His voice was a soft, oily trickle in the silence.
"Your brother," he said, as if mentioning the weather.
Burmilla's head, which had lolled against her chest, jerked up.
"The little one. Zylo. He is not here." Shito tilted his head, savoring the minuscule flare of hope in her dying eyes. "Before the great cleansing of your world, he was sent off-planet. A junior cadet training mission to a frontier moon. How fortunate for him."
The information was a lifeline. Burmilla's heart, a weak, fluttering bird in her chest, seized it. Zylo. Alive. The image of his small, earnest face, the way he'd hugged her so tightly before their fated departure... it flooded the barren landscape of her mind. A sob, raw and ragged, tore from her. It was a cry of grief, of relief, of agonizing love across the light-years.
"He will get strong," she whispered, the words scraping her throat. "He'll come. He'll find us. He'll save Birman... he'll..."
"He will what?" Shito interrupted, his smile widening a fraction. "Storm the gates of Jigoku? Slay the legions of the damned? Find you here, in this little room?" He took a step closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. "Cry for him. It is all you can do. Let me hear you cry for the brother who lives in sunlight while you rust in the dark."
And she did. In her weakest moments, when the hunger was a screaming beast inside her, she would cry for Zylo. She would pour every ounce of her dwindling strength into that hope, that mental image of a rescue, of a righteous vengeance. These emotional outbursts, these displays of an attachment Shito was tasked with severing, were noted. Each one was met not with a reprimand, but with an extension of her starvation. A week added. Then two.
Hope, in Jigoku, was not a refuge. It was a lever for further torture.
Slowly, insidiously, the lever turned. The beautiful, desperate image of Zylo as her savior began to warp under the constant pressure of agony and isolation. The love curdled. Why was he safe? Why had he been given the chance to grow, to train, to live, while she was here, reduced to a starving, chained thing? Her parents had sent him away to a better opportunity, a diplomatic program on a peaceful world called Earth, they'd said. A chance for a different life. They had kept her, the eldest daughter, close to the military heart of Neko. A tool. A weapon.
The hollow fire in her stomach became a different kind of blaze. It wasn't hope that fed it anymore. It was the tinder of betrayal, fanned by Shito's careful, whispered reminders of her brother's safety. The love for Zylo did not vanish; it was consumed, transformed into something black and sharp. Hatred. A profound, all-encompassing resentment for the lucky, absent child who was living the life she should have had. Hatred for her parents, whose choices felt like a sentence. Hatred for the universe that allowed such inequity.
The tears for her brother finally stopped. Now, when she trembled, it was with a silent, vibrating rage. Her green eyes, once bright with laughter and tactical genius, now glowed with a feverish, emerald malice in the dark. She had nothing left. No love, no loyalty, no hope. Only the cold, sustaining fuel of hate.
During one of his visits, as she hung silently, her gaze fixed on a point in the stone as if she could burn through it with the intensity of her loathing, Shito did not smile. He simply nodded, as if acknowledging a student's completed project.
In the utter silence of the cell, as Burmilla's mind teetered on the final edge of breaking, a voice insinuated itself. It was not Shito's. It was deeper, woven into the very fabric of Jigoku's despair, and it spoke not to her ears, but directly into the core of her newborn hatred.
"Let the hate consume you."
The voice was a confirmation, a blessing upon her darkest emotion. It gave her void a purpose.
"For Rushifa is."
And in that moment, the hatred did not just fill her; it defined her. It became a cold, clean certainty in a world of pain. It was the one thing they could not take, because they had created it. She embraced it, wrapping it around her starving soul like a shroud. She was no longer Burmilla, the sister, the pilot, the daughter. She was a vessel of vengeance, and the target of that vengeance had shifted, blurred, expanded to include everyone who was not suffering as she suffered. The voice had shown her the truth: in this place, hate was not a sin. It was the only form of worship that mattered. And Rushifa was its god.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡyF7u8PH8wZ
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