Magnius woke up chained to a table. He looked around him but could find only darkness. Also, he was still naked.
The hell happened?
A door opened and light filled the room. A man came in with a permanently glowing mana crystal, illuminating the room in a soft ominous light.
"Hello!"
The man was older, a scruffy graying beard decorating his face like needles.
There were deep wrinkles around his eyes, but his features were soft. Just like Vaina's.
The soft features were in sharp contrast to the massive burn scar that covered half of his face, disfiguring him.
Magnius frowned. Who the hell was this guy?
A painfully detailed tattoo of a spider's web was on his neck, the different strands twisting and weaving into each other.
"I heard from my daughter your name was Magnius, is that right?"
The man suspended the crystal from the ceiling so that the room was more evenly lit.
"Your daughter?"
"The woman you got… familiar with yesterday evening."
"Vaina?" Magnius already suspected it but he should make sure, anyway.
The man chuckled.
"Is that the name she gave you? Haha."
He knew Vaina was withdrawn but she'd even given him a false name? Somehow, he managed to feel more betrayed by that fact than her stabbing his neck with a needle.
"Who are you?"
The man put on a long white lab coat.
"You can call me the spider's fang."
The man stretched rubber gloves over his hands.
"But that's not important. Who YOU are is important. Or what you are, specifically. You're my gift." The man smiled at him.
"What are you going to do to me?"
Magnius was trying to buy time, but he realized it was useless when the man brandished a set of tools set on a small table he hadn't noticed before. They were tools for taking people apart.
"You are a gift to me. From my daughter. You see, I was planning on getting rid of her. She can be a bit of a handful, sometimes."
The man approached Magnius with a scalpel, a manic smile on his face.
"But not this time. You are exquisite. You see, you had fractured ribs when you were given to me, but look."
The spider's fang pressed down onto his ribs, now completely healed.
His smile grew even wider, nearly splitting his face.
"You heal. Indefinitely. So I am going to take you apart. Indefinitely. I'll monopolize your organs and sell them on the market, a permanent source of revenue."
The spider's fang cut open his stomach with the scalpel. Magnius screamed from the pain, straining against the chains holding him down to the table.
The spider's fang laughed like a demon.
"Exquisite. You are truly the perfect gift."
Magnius would kill him. He would crush his smiling skull and then-
The spider's fang cut into his organs and Magnius screamed again.
"I'll kill you! You f@$cking bastard!"
The man just giggled at him.
"Kehehe! Is that a threat?"
"It's a promise! You bastard, f@%ck!"
__
"Are you okay?"
"Maybe you should stay at the dorm for today?"
Layla's friends were worried about her. She had dark bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, and she was twitchy like a nervous cat.
"Yes, I'm fine. Don't worry about me."
But she wasn't. Layla was extremely worried. She shivered at night from anxiety and nervousness.
Magnius hadn't visited her this week, like he usually would. He was days late by this point.
He hadn't missed their meeting a single time so far, so why was he missing it now, without even letting her know?
Did he go into a gate and die? Or something even worse?
She decided she couldn't take it anymore and went to the only person she knew with a connection to him: Runald Grafton.
"Do you know where he is?" Layla nervously asked the old teacher, as if she was asking him something immoral.
"Who are you?"
"I-I'm…" Layla thought about her reply for a moment before answering in the most strategic way.
"I'm his sister."
Grafton's eyes softened at her reply.
"No, I don't. But I wouldn't worry so much."
"But…"
Grafton emulated his 'stern enlightened old man' voice.
"Do not worry. He will be back soon."
"A-alright…"
The way Grafton said it to her felt like a dismissal, so she relented and went back to class. But she would ask again tomorrow.
Grafton said he wasn't worried, and he honestly wasn't. Magnius could defend himself. Sedia was the one who taught him, for mana's sake.
But…
Just now, Layla had planted a seed of doubt, and it was very quickly growing into a sprout of worry.
—
Sedia was pissed. Seriously pissed. The flames at the ends of her hair sparked up at random intervals as she lost control of her magic temporarily.
Magnius had been gone for a week. A damn week.
She'd sent him out to have sex and he stays gone for a week?! It should've taken him a few hours, at most.
"Grr..."
If he was just wasting his time when she found him, she would seriously burn him to a crisp and scatter his ashes in her fireplace. Damn brat.
Sedia entered the area he most likely would've gone to for intercourse. It had been over a decade since she had last visited, but the black light district still made her feel rancid to her core.
She caught one of the web's look-outs watching her. Did that pervert spider still run things around here? She knew she should've killed him when she'd had the chance.
She closed the distance between herself and the female look-out. The female look-out was visibly shaken when she noticed Sedia's hunter badge.
"H-how can I help you, miss?"
"Seen anyone unusual come through here last week?"
"Y-you'll have to be more specific. A lot of unusual people come h-"
Sedia trapped the woman against the wall. The woman's soft features transformed into a grimace of pain.
"Don't act stupid. A man in a bathrobe, hair the color of white ash. Handsome. Tell me,"
Sedia's hair was completely covered by her flames.
The female's soft eyes shook.
Oh, yeah. She knew.
"Now."
—
"Hmmm, It's a bit boring to take you apart, now. C'mon now, Maggie! You used to scream so succulently whenever I took out your stomach!"
The spider's fang was trying to get a rise out of Magnius while he cut him open. But Magnius didn't even flinch. He had screamed for the first couple days, but by now he was tired of screaming.
He just stared at the man cutting into him unflinchingly, promising death if was released from his bindings.
"Tch. Stingy bastard. You don't even talk anymore. Did your mind break, or something? Cause that's no fun."
The experience of having his organs taken out over and over again and being forced to watch had definitely changed something in his mind.
But did his mind break? No.
Did he become crazy? That was very likely.
All he knew was that he no longer felt the pain.
"Well, since you're boring now, I guess it is time to test; that." The spider's fang was referring to his heart. He had taken out every other organ, and they had miraculously healed back after a few hours. But he had never taken out Magnius' heart or brain, because he didn't know if that would kill him or not. And he didn't want to risk losing this source of permanent revenue. Until Magnius got boring.
"I'm really gonna do it, okay? I'm gonna take out your heart. Say something if you don't want that to happen." The man had a melancholic expression on his face as he tried to goad a reaction from Magnius.
Magnius just stared at him.
The spider's fang sighed, taking up a scalpel so he could get to work.
The door to the small room burst open, and one of the web's goons opened it. It was Niles, newly promoted after bringing Magnius to the spider's fang.
"S-sir! T-t-the-there's… She…"
"Spit out out, you dumb buffoon! I'm busy."
"T-there's a woman! She's a hunter! She just walked into the building and…"
The spider's fang became incomparably annoyed. He'd met hunters before. They weren't that big of an issue.
"So? Deal with her! Are you telling me dozens of men can't overpower a single woman?"
"We tried, Sir! But anyone who gets close to her just…"
"They what?"
"They bu-"
The spider's fang got the answer to his question as Niles was turned to ash right in front of him. And then the ash vaporized from the heat.
Sedia stepped through the doorway, the metal frame of it melting around her. Her hair was like a coat of pure flame, covering her entire back.
She looked at Magnius on the table and said;
"I warned you, no maidens, didn't I?"
The spider's fang fell backwards on his ass, dropping the scalpel to the floor.
Sedia approached him.
"I see you're still into this kind of stuff, spider. Should I burn off the other side of your face, this time?"
"H-hieek!" The spider scrambled away from her.
"Not him." Magnius stopped her from going any further.
"What?" Sedia glared at him.
"He's mine. I promised."
"Fine." Sedia approached the table he was bound to.
"This will hurt." Sedia burned off the metal bindings at his wrists and feet, but Magnius didn't even flinch when the molten metal burned his skin.
Magnius took a deep breath to heal his wounds and sat up from the table. He hadn't taken a deep breath the entire time the Spider's fang, or more accurately, the Spider himself had been working on him. Slowing down his healing meant the spider could spend less time with him.
Magnius wiggled his toes when stood up.
"How long has it been since that night you kicked me out?"
"About 7 days."
Magnius approached the Spider. The man scrambled backwards even more, flattening himself against the wall with a terrified expression on his face. He looked like he was trying to melt into the wall to escape.
"7 days. You cut me open 38 times over that period. 10 livers, 8 stomachs, 7 lungs, 12 kidneys, 2 intestines, 3 pancreas and one spleen." A wide smile spread over Magnius' face.
"I will now give you an equal amount of pain compared to that entire period in mere seconds."
"W-wait!"
Magnius stopped in his tracks and listened to the spider's plea.
"Why?"
The spider was surprised by this, extremely taken aback.
"I- ee…uhh..."
Magnius cocked his head at him inquisitively.
"You have 2 seconds. One,"
"H-huh?"
"Two."
Magnius grabbed his skull and squeezed slowly. The old man's eyes bulged out of his head and he screamed.
"Please, stop!"
"I promised, didn't I? That I would kill you."
Magnius stuck his hand into the old man's abdomen and pulled on his skull. The old man's body was torn apart in separate places, but most impressively, his head and spine separated from the rest of his body.
For the first time in a week Magnius was covered by someone else's blood.
"That was satisfying." He dropped the separate body parts like wet rags and looked at Sedia. "Don't burn him. Let him rot."
Sedia just stared at him.