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Chapter 3 - Fear

Kagu woke up in a cell. It was pitch black, he could see nothing, he could hear nothing. The only thing he knew was that he was experiencing a pain he had never felt before.

"Someone! What's going on? Where am I?" he yelled, yet he got no response.

He tried standing up, but it was too painful. He was laying on his side, hands cuffed behind his back.

-"I need to find out where I am. I won't gain anything by just sitting here, I need to gather information regarding my surroundings."-

Despite his mounting panic and distress, he began forming the Haijin into a small ball of light just past his face. What he saw next terrified him. There were corpses, everywhere. Blood splattered the walls, children, dead, mouths open screaming and eyes open wide in terror. He realized that he wasn't the only one here, there were more cells lining what appeared to be a hallway. As soon as he realized what surrounded him, Kagu froze. Fear, a fear more potent that anything he ever felt, even when he was an orphan alone on the streets, began strangling him. He couldn't breathe, couldn't think. A loud thud echoed on the walls, knocking him out of his trance.

"Oh my, look what we have here!"

Dread began seeping into Kagu's bones. He knew that voice.

"Well, well, well. You should really be more careful when performing powerful spells. You know you could've died little guy," the man said as he began walking towards Kagu's cell. "You sure created a ruckus. By managing to save your own life, you destroyed miles of forest in the opposite direction of the mansion. Unluckily for you, it seems you almost exposed my little hobby."

As the sound of the footsteps stopped, the man was standing right in front of Kagu's cell.

"You've been out for days, I've been yearning to have some playtime together. Ever since you've grown older, you've been a little ass to take care of. I was secretly hoping that you would fail, but my benefactor was really interested in how effortlessly you manipulated Haijin. I told him it didn't matter, since you couldn't even convert it into an element, but at the end of the day he had the final say."

Kagu's eyes widened, as the man kneeled down in front of his cell. It was none other than Triton, the man that brought him in and took care of him in his time of need. He was more than confused, he knew that Triton was a difficult man, but he'd always shown more kindness than anger. It made no sense why he sounded so comfortable surrounded by the stench of death, and it made even less sense that he appeared to be Kagu's captor.

"Whenever you blew up that forest, you actually exposed my little playhouse. It's a nested little bunker in the ground, I never expected anyone to find it. But you sure made a mess, and sooner or later people would come to check it out. Luckily I'm a master of illusion magic, and I was able to hide it from everyone. Finally though, once I reported the incident to our funder, he said I could use you for some of my experiments to cover the expenses for the damage you caused."

He began to stand up, rattling a ring of keys as he searched for the one to open Kagu's cell. All the while, Kagu's mounting fear was rising to new heights with every revelation. As Triton found the right key, a demonic grin engulfed his face. Having never seen this side of the man that took him in, Kagu had no clue what to think.

"I was told to do some experiments on you, try to find out why you can control Haijin so effortlessly. But I don't think that's what I'm going to do. I've been following orders for so long, I haven't been able to let loose in a while," he said, shivering. "Oh yes, I'm getting chills just thinking about it. We're gonna have a great time, you and I."

Kagu heard the cell unlock, and Triton step in. Kagu began floating, and he tried casting a spell, but he noticed that as soon as the cell unlocked he could no longer manipulate Haijin. In his fear he began shaking, almost wetting himself. All the while Triton just laughed.

"Don't worry buddy. You and I are going to be spending a lot of time together. Don't be scared, it'll be all fine. You have absolutely nothing to worry about," Triton said, punctuating his sentence with a psychotic laughter. "Ha! Who am I kidding, you're about to endure a pain no man has ever felt before. I am going to break you. There will be no one to save you. This is no fairy tale, you will die here, suffering a fate worse than death."

In his fear, Kagu passed out. Triton just laughed as he walked down the hallway.