Nurse Nalep couldn't get close to me without having Ward make attractive bolts of lightning.
"We need Larry, the lightning has to do with some sort of Eneru, oh, and grab Pei'ye as well."
'Isn't Pei'ye a constable?' I thought, too exhausted to say it aloud.
'Don't worry about him, he won't hurt you.' Spirit's mind-voice came off like a parent talking to a feverish child.
I felt the clutches of unconsciousness grasping at me, and I resisted with all of my might.
A few moments passed and Pei'ye walked through the door. I tried with all of my might to control the lightning, only managing to widen the interval between strikes. The people around me started talking, but I couldn't hear them, only getting small snips of words.
"...mark...form...unstable...common...beast...with me..." The voices sounded far away, like they were shouting from a mountain top.
Soon dreams of airships and pirates took me, leaving me in the hands of the staff.
********
"Wake up Ingen, you're in danger." A voice permeated my dream.
As I slowly regained consciousness and opened my eyes, I noticed that I was in a new place.
"Huh?" I wasn't combat-focused enough to analyze my situation, but I did notice my arm was missing again.
I looked around and saw no-one, I was just in a nearly empty room with nothing but Eneru conductive poles.
I got up and snapped awake.
"Hey! Where am I!?" I shouted, looking for a door where there wasn't one.
When no voice returned my call, I tried using intuitive manipulation to levitate some of the Eneru conductive poles, but my Eneru refused my call.
"Oi! Let me out!" I shouted at the wall.
'Who was talking to me earlier?'
'What the hell?' Spirit broke character for a second. 'This feels so weird, it's like this area is dead. I have to use the reserve Eneru in your system to even speak to you.'
After several minutes of pleading and trying different approaches to breaking out of my cell, I gave up and decided to wait.
********
Hours of waiting passed and I was starting to get hungry.
'Orin, are you there?' I tried to use my mind-link, and it felt weak.
Orin left my shadow, he looked like he just got up.
"Ingen, look at your hand."
"Forget that! Your bond mark is nearly gone!" The mark on Orin's head was faded to near-invisibility.
"Look at your thrice-damned hand! The same thing is happening to you!"
As soon as I noticed it, my mind started racing. 'I've got to break out, the most likely cause of this is the dead-Eneru zone.'
"Orin, try Bond Form."
'My very few experiments with Bond Form have taught me that it is not done with Eneru, but I still don't know how it works.'
Orin closed his eyes and started to dissociate and merge into me. After a moment, we were in Bond Form again.
'We will have to use our combined strength for a brute force approach.' We thought to ourself, no mind-link was needed.
We swung at the wall and caused a small scratch. 'This will work, eventually'
We swung, again and again, eventually, I heard the crack of ceramic, and Eneru flooded the room. Flow manipulation bent the metal into a doorway wide enough to exit my cell. We howled in triumph and dashed through. The black lightning returned, arching off of the ram horns on my head and the hidden horn on the back of my neck.
"Who trapped us!?" We shouted, enraged.
"Woah! Down boy!" A bolt of fire warmed the back of our head before we dodged it.
We turned around and roared. "Was it you?!"
The tall, muscular-looking natural man responded with a cone of flames aimed at us. We erected a vacuum barrier with Orin's pressure manipulation and the fire stopped where it was.
'We don't have much Eneru left, we didn't regenerate basically any in the dead room.'
We charged the man and got into melee. We slashed with our claw and black lightning followed.
The man drew a sword and blocked our claw, digging deep into our palm. However, he didn't block the black lightning and got scorched.
"Get out of our way!" We growled, swinging both of our arms in a clapping motion.
The man deflected one of them and dodged the other.
"No! Beast!" He swung at our chest with his sword.
I used Flow manipulation to take control of his sword as soon as it got close, making it blunt and bent to uselessness.
We hit him on the side of the head with our paw, knocking him out. Just then, an animalistic urge came over us to eat. With a moment of effort, we resisted it and moved down the hall.
'It's too bright in here, almost like it's been cleaned recently.'
We continued walking, leaving scorch marks on the floor and ceiling, all the walls were Eneru repulsive.
After almost an hour of walking, Bond Form was starting to get too unstable for even Jente to restabilize, and we separated.
"Great, now I'm naked." We walked on until we finally found a door.
'At least our Eneru has regenerated a bit since then, although Orin has to keep his distance because of the black lightning.
I stood next to the door and waited for Orin to catch up. Then, with a flick of my wrist and a little flow manipulation, the metal door flew off of its hinges and into a nearby wall, followed by a blast of icicles. When the hail of ice ended, I burst through the doorway and set upon the man inside, putting a hand around his neck.
"Go down!" I tackled the frail-looking ice mage to the ground and put my knees on his hands. "I'm going to stop choking you now, but if you scream I will turn your neck into ash." I rotted a tiny bit of his neck with entropic energy.
He nodded and I let up the pressure on his neck.
"Why have you brought me here?!"
"Uh... uh..." His eyes darted around the room and fear was visible on his face. "The uh.. king... wanted to... uh... make us... uh... make you... an accident."
'What was that about trusting Pei'ye?' I admonished Spirit.
"Where am I?!"
"Fort Lao."
'That response sounded rehearsed'
I looked around the room and noticed that the walls were covered in Displays, each showing a prisoner, and somehow broadcasting despite the barriers to the flow and Eneru.
"What exactly is this place for?"
He cleared his throat and looked at me apologetically. "Reeducation."
"Ah, I see." I gritted my teeth but took a mental note to bring evidence of this place outside so that I could expose it. "Final question, where are the armory and cafeteria?"