"Should we wake them up?"
"Nah. They seem plenty comfortable there, and to be honest, I don't want to listen to their explanation of how they ended up like this. Fen probably won't care about explaining, but she'd be a nervous mess that I just don't want to deal with right now." A slightly annoyed voice entered Fen's ears.
"Well, I want to hear it!" A new voice protested, saying, "Amelia told me that he has a girlfriend, so I was just wondering if he finally decided that Amelia's better or if he just stopped caring about her. I think her name was Miko? Well, either way, I do feel a little bad for him. Having to spend a year away from the person you love while they only age a day must be hard."
Fen opened his eyes to see the blurry figures of Orphinia and Marcus standing in front of him, the both of them quickly taking a step back after they noticed that he was awake.
He yawned, "Hey. What're you guys standing here for? Don't you have Lessons to get to?"
His senses were telling him that it was around the time that he needed to leave, based on the grogginess of his mind.
Marcus pointed at the redhead on his shoulder in response, who was still snoring at an obscene volume while she slept. Fen glanced at her before lifting his eyebrow at him as if asking what she had anything to do with them waiting, which made Marcus's eyebrow twitch in annoyance.
"Well. We found you two like this... and we were just curious about what happened." Orphinia said awkwardly, failing to hide the blush on her face. Meanwhile, Fen was mentally disturbed at how two people who had killed people in the Tasks and suffered through the Foundation's training could be so easily disturbed by them sleeping in the hallway together.
'It's not that strange, right?' He mumbled inwardly while images of Miko flashed into his mind. 'Just two friends sleeping next to each other because they passed out from exhaustion. There was no other choice but to sleep together for warmth, these corridors get cold sometimes.'
"I was tired after training and made a noise, and she came to check on me. Before we could go back to our rooms, she fell asleep, and I was too tired to go back to my bed so I just joined her. There. Easy enough to explain." The two of them didn't look content at his pathetic excuse for an explanation, but Fen waved his hand and picked himself off the ground before they could ask anything else, carrying Amelia on his shoulder.
Orphinia looked stunned at his shamelessness before turning to Marcus, who simply shrugged his shoulders at the wordless question in her eyes. Taking advantage of their silence, Fen opened the door to Amelia's room and threw her inside not-so-gently where she landed with a heavy thud. After a moment of worrying silence, the sound of her oppressive snoring filled the air again, eliciting a relieved sigh from Orphinia.
"How the hell did I sleep through that? It's like a damn jackhammer that doesn't turn off," Fen scoffed, amazed at how exhausted he must have been to not even remember her snoring.
He turned around and saw that his Squadmates were giving him a strange look after seeing him throw her into her room.
"What? She won't even remember me throwing her when she wakes up."
"I guess so." Marcus left the Squad room with Orphinia behind him, leaving Fen alone in the hallway still wearing his nightwear.
The darkness of the facility meant that it was harder for people to see before their eyes adjusted to the point where they could make out basic colors and shapes, and fortunately for Fen, it also meant that it was much more difficult for people to make out the redness of his ears while he struggled to keep his expression calm.
Although he managed to hide it before, his heart was rapidly beating from anxiety and guilt, but he didn't know why... He didn't do anything wrong. The situation did force him to end up sleeping next to her, so there was no need for guilt.
He sighed and leaned against the dark wall filled with veins of energy for support, only now noticing that his body was still fatigued from the day before, and his legs still shook when he put his weight on them. During his sleep, his body almost completely recovered, but the lack of food or nutrition meant that he lacked the energy to do anything.
Even as a Stage two Knight, he still needed to eat and take proper care of his body- no matter how good his regeneration abilities were.
And as a Principality, he didn't have enough time to rest. After making sure that Amelia was still fast asleep, he left a note describing where he had left to and went to grab some food from the Common Grounds, taking advantage of the trip to 'educate' some Opfer too.
Even if he was tired and was going against a large number of Empowered, a group of Stage one Opfer was no match against his Stage two abilities. The energy in a single one of his limbs was enough to blast them apart if he wanted to, but he still had to restrict his power to just incapacitate them so he could torture them one by one.
By now, whenever one of the Opfer saw him passing in the hallways, they almost always ran away, or they collapsed to their feet and saved him the effort of chasing them down. Among the candidates, there was even a rumor going around that Fen was a little more lenient on those who didn't run away, but whenever another Principality asked him about it, he always just shrugged his shoulders and didn't respond.
But even if he did go a little easy on the people who made his duties a little easier, Fen's figure became a demon in their eyes, a demon that used living energy to make them feel scorching pain in their bodies before making them collapse into the sweet relief of unconsciousness while resentment slowly built up inside their hearts.
In truth, Fen was just practicing his healing skills on them. It was disappointing, but he wasn't good enough with manipulating his own Vitality to heal other people, so the same thing that happened with Anthony happened with them too as their own cells twisted on themselves and exploded when he tried to make them regenerate.
After impaling the fifth Opfer with Vital Spears in all four of their limbs and another Spear in their stomach, Fen ignored their whimpers and lifted them slightly above him so he could study their body with his energy. He needed to wound them to actually have something to regenerate, so he always did the same thing after beating the Opfer up and drilled Vital constructs into their body in the same places, so there wasn't as much of a difference between the wounds he tried to heal.
It was like an experiment. By using the same types of injuries, he could reduce the number of variables that could interfere with his attempts at healing. His Vital Spears always avoided any important internal organs when they could, and he tried his best to only penetrate flesh.
The Mages were the most annoying when he did this because they always put up some type of resistance with their energy, interfering with his attempts at healing them by disrupting his delicate tendrils of Vitality. The Stage one Warriors were comparably much better behaved because, well, they didn't have any energy to use against him.
The girl currently impaled with his Vital Spears was a Warrior-in-training or Stage one Warrior, and she had the decency to hold back her screams while their skin bubbled up and sloughed off the bone from his next attempt at regenerating her injuries.
'Hmm. So even when I simplify my energy to the best of my capabilities, it's not enough to regenerate their bodies... Am I thinking in the wrong direction?' Fen shed the blood off his body with a wave of his Vitality while destroying another of the Warrior's limbs, hissing in frustration at his failure. 'I don't have to be at Stage three to heal others, the Executioner Knights told me that much, but if simplifying my energy isn't enough to do it, then what the hell should I do?'
He dropped the Opfer back on the ground with significantly fewer limbs than she had when he lifted her, kicking her to the wall after she tried grabbing him with her only remaining hand. Now, she just glared at him with unfathomable rage.
"Huh. How the hell aren't you unconscious yet?" Fen mumbled and crouched next to the Opfer, making her flinch in fear as he suddenly got closer to her. The rage in her eyes immediately died down and was replaced by her fear at the thought that he wasn't done with his duty. She was covered in sweat as a result of his torture, but the fear-induced adrenaline running through her body gave her the strength to crawl backward.
"You've got pretty strong willpower to stay awake after that."
He sighed, "You probably hate me, but I'm not doing this to you because I dislike you. Principalities have our orders from the Foundation to do this, and if we don't obey then we get punished. If you think that that's unfair, then get stronger, strong enough to overthrow us."
After saying his piece, he stood up and walked away from the Opfer after calling for a Healer on the interface to make sure she didn't die. That was the one rule for the Principalities regarding how they treated the other Opfer: they couldn't kill, no matter what. Torture, no matter how severe, was okay because it essentially embued the feeling of their own powerlessness into the Opfer by making them feel pain, but if they died then the whole point of the Principalities would become null.
It was during times like this that Fen hated his duties as a Principality. When he was face to face with how people thought of him, it just drove the idea that he was a monster deeper into his mind.
It was evil. It was cruel. But he didn't have a choice either way, so it didn't matter what his opinion on the topic was.
Fen arrived at Raisen's Training Hall and called out, "Yo, Raisen. You weren't here last night, where'd you go? Don't tell me you found someone willing to spend more than a few minutes in the same room as you, 'cause I'd have to meet them so we can share our hatred for you- Raisen? Hello?"
His voice was met with the same silence as last time, and by the looks of the Training Hall, there hadn't been anyone that had come by since the last time he was here. There was a very thin layer of dust on the desk that the old Knight always sat at, and the mobile interface hummed quietly as it laid unopened on top of the stone furniture.
Picking it up, Fen turned it over to see there was a password preventing him from accessing anything else on it. "What the hell does he have on this thing to even need a password for? Not like anybody's curious enough to look for information about you," he thought aloud, absentmindedly guessing at the password in the case that he got it right.
After trying it five times, the mobile interface stopped humming entirely as if it turned off to prevent him from trying anymore. He sighed, before setting it down on top of the dust.
Another voice interrupted the silence, "You looking for Raisen?"
Fen turned his head and saw a man staring at him from the Training Hall entrance wearing a Foundation-given robe and a mobile interface in between his hands. By the looks of his robes and the magical energy emanating off him, he was a Mage.
The man had dull gray eyes set deep into his narrow face, with unkempt brown hair curling near his shoulders and hiding most of his face. The deep lines near his eyes were the only sign of his long life full of experience, but his smile that wasn't a smile showed that he wasn't yet done with living.
"Who are you?"Fen redirected the man's question with his own; he had enough experience with the Foundation to know not to answer strange questions coming from strange VPF members.
The robed man paused like he just remembered something before saying, "Oh, where are my manners."
He dug into his pocket, apparently searching for something. His search made several small objects fall out of his pockets which made various clunking and ringing sounds as they crashed to the floor before the man pulled out a metallic card from his pocket and threw it towards him.
Fen didn't bother raising his hands to catch and instead manipulated a strand of his Vital energy to pluck the card from the air before it could hit him, making it float in front of his head so he could read whatever the card was while also keeping an eye on this new guy in case he suddenly attacked him.
Was he paranoid? Sure, but in any case, it was better to be safe than sorry.
"Igris Redbrand... Strange name, but for a Foundation member I guess that's the most normal thing about you." If the man was annoyed by his statement, it didn't show on his face.
"Program instructor, Combat Training, to be specific. Shouldn't they just put that in front of your name? It'd save me the reading." Fen threw the card back after he was done with it with a wave of energy. "So, what do you want?"
"Me? Nothing." Igris raised his hands and suddenly, two multi-dimensional arrays of magical energy manifested in front of his fists before they wrapped around and encased his hands in violet energy. "I just came here to tell you that Raisen's not going to be here to teach you anymore; something about personal business."
Fen took a step back before manifesting his signature short sword and dagger weapon combo, eyeing the Mage's fists with a weary expression. His Mana sense was shooting warning signals in his head, but he had no idea why; the spellwork Igris used on his fists seemed perfectly ordinary to him.
But that was exactly why he was weary; the purple energy streaking through his fists looked anything except ordinary. It looked like Void energy, but the facility walls themselves cracked whenever a stray bolt of the energy landed on the stone and that was clearly something that Void energy was incapable of doing.
Even if Fen used every ounce of strength in his body and hit the walls, he wouldn't be able to produce cracks that large, and this Mage was doing that with just the stray energy streaks.
The Mage noticed the direction of his gaze and grinned, his lips pulling back on his face in a cruel imitation of a smile. "You curious about them?"
He stretched his arms in front of him with his palms facing the ceiling.
"I developed the energy myself. It's kinda the best thing I've ever done- but then again, I've done a lot of amazing things, so who knows, maybe this is just one of the more-amazing-but-not-really-the-best things I've done in my life."
"...you really put the crazy in Foundation, don't you?" Fen's weariness increased after realizing that the man in front of him was another one of the 'insane' members of the Foundation; based on the pattern, crazy equaled power in this damned organization. There was the classic example of Raisen, followed by Ellora, and he didn't even want to mention the guys who kidnapped him and brought him into the Program... Anyways, all of them were stupidly strong compared to his meager amount of power.
"Haha," Igris laughed before putting his still violet hands in his pocket with a sizzling sound coming from them, "I guess I kinda do. But that's beside the point, which is that Raisen asked me to do a favor for him. Something about 'help him help you,' or something like that."
"So... Raisen wants you to become my new instructor? Hilarious. Great. Goodbye now, go do whatever crazy people like you do." Fen made a shooing gesture with his hands and frowned when Igris remained planted to the same spot, still with that strange smile on his face. "You can go now. Tell Raisen I'll just wait for him to come back- why are you coming closer?"
His frown deepened into a scowl after Igris started cracking the joints in his hand in disgustingly twisted stretching postures, pulling back the knuckles in his hands to the point where his skin popped apart and his tendons strained against his rippling muscles. Igris apparently didn't hear him and instead ignited the purple energy on his fists with more Mana until his arms were completely wrapped in the strange energy up to just above his elbows.
"You seem to be misunderstanding something," Igris said after finishing his disgusting stretching. "Raisen asked me a favor. Therefore, I'm going to do that favor for him, whether or not you want me to or not."
Igris finally stopped smiling creepily, his eyes narrowing while his face sharpened as he focused. Fen's senses were all blaring warning signals, but his muscles refused to move no matter how much Vital energy he infused his body with. It was like his body was encased in hard concrete, but there was nothing around him except the stale facility air.
"Now, let's begin lesson one: Be prepared to die at every moment."
Fen's world turned black after Igris embedded his fist into his chest, wrapping his fingers around his heart.