"Do you feel their pain yet?" He chuckled, a hint of hysteria in his voice, "Of course not how could you know what they could've possibly experienced, much less cared about the pain they felt," the man dressed in a slightly bloodied suit and a black oni mask said while casually walking around the table. "I did nothing," the ragged man strapped to the table said as he glanced around the same desolate room for the hundredth time.
The room itself contained little but the bare needs to make one such as himself suffer. It contained a masked man, 2 tables, 1 with with a man strapped to it, and another filled with devices made to inflict the most amount of suffering imaginable upon each and every person to be under their mercy, baren walls, no source of light but the dim flicker of a hanging lamp situated in the middle of the room, and an iron door settled quietly in the corner of the room. The masked man, the judge, the ragged man, the guilty.
The masked man, annoyed with the lack of a satisfying answer, grabbed 2 peculiar tools, both being a structure of 2 small hooks and a small arm connecting them allowing them to lock in place.
"This tool," the masked man starts, "will be very helpful soon enough." The man slowly walks towards the ragged man still strapped to the table, making sure each step rings clearly throughout the stale room.
"The first step to this proper scream, making sure both hooks go through the eyelids, next step locking your eyes wide open." As the man follows what he says.
The man strapped to the table uses what little energy he has left to struggle, yet he does not beg. As the masked man moves in and inserts the first hook into the upper eyelid he makes sure it lasts, "Do you feel it? The point entering into the soft fragile flesh of your inner eyelid. Do you feel as it tunnels its way through your tissue and skin to reveal your eye to the open air? What about the bottom eyelid? Do you feel the pain as this hook is pressed effortlessly yet precisely through the frail cover of your eye? Does it hurt yet, because you're not allowed to scream, not yet, you didn't let them scream, afterall."
The man in question tries his hardest to move to counteract this horrible itching and pain beneath his eyelid, yet to no avail or possible escape.
The masked man continues this process for the next eye, making sure both are nice and secure, held wide open not allowing him to even blink.
The masked man stares for a moment, "Ah! I know what it's missing." The man walks over to the table of rusted devices and puts on a pair of gloves, grabs a chainmail sheet, and a handful of barbed wire.
He walks over menacingly to the man strapped to the table and wordlessly places the chainmail sheet over the ragged man's eyes, "To make sure your eyes are protected for now" the man in a suit says as he places the barbed wire over the body of the man.
"To a wonderful symphony," the man says cheerfully with slight hysteria in his voice. He begins by slowly lowering the barbed wire in his hand till the cold rusted metal of it slightly pierces into his skin.
The man now with small amounts of blood trickling down every portion of his body releases a slight whimper foreshadowing what may come. As the masked man hears this he chuckles a little then begins to slowly but with increasing speed drag the barbed wire back and forth across the man's skin leaving cuts and slashes across the thin skin and flesh of the man.
The blood once trickled, now pouring almost as if a small rain had begun. The oni masked man hearing a satisfactory cacophony of screams from the bloodied man stops and places back the bloodied wire and gloves.
"You didn't get anything on my suit, good job" The masked man says with a belittling tone, checking his suit for any new stains he could possibly use to induce more agony onto the subject.
"Now we can begin," the masked man says.
He reaches for a thin needle and slowly starts to insert it into the edge of the pupil of the rugged man's now red and teary eyes. He slowly drags the needle around the edge of the pupil making sure each agonizing pop of a blood vessel is fully felt by the man under his mercy.
Each pop of a vessel reddens his eye ever so more than the last eventuality leading to a stream of blood rolling down his cheek. "Does it feel good?" the masked man asks, "This is what they felt when under the same tools and techniques, only, I suppose they didn't deserve this as much as you."
The masked man continues until there is a small pool of crimson blood where his pupil once was. Then starts on the other eye as he flicks the pupil away, "you won't be needing that," the oni masked man says with a slight smile, chuckling at his own little joke.
"You know this isn't as fun as I thought it would be, though I do suppose I'm not you, sit up!" the man says when the second pool of blood forms, and as the table begins to shift forcing the man strapped to it into an upright position the pools of blood begin to drain down to face and into the screaming mouth of the man as his now overly sensitive eyes scream in agonizing pain as they are forcibly revealed to the open air.
"I think replacement eyes are in due" the masked man says quickly grabbing a pair of tweezers and with no hesitation rips the eye straight from its socket with enough force that the muscles and optical nerve holding it in place make a sickening tearing sound ring out through the room, then follows the second.
This time, however, a small mistake led to a dangling eye and a screaming man. "It seems I didn't quite get that one, oh well" the man in a suit said, chuckling to himself.
The man then walks back to the table grabbing a pair of thick gloves and tongs then to a furnace coming from the ground. From the furnace he grabs a small metal ball burning a bright yellow, "y'know" the man starts, as he strides back to the now shallow-breathing man sitting up with blood raining from the cuts across his body, "There is a lot planned for you, after all, what you did to those people, and what you created, not even the god of violence, chaos, and misery would wish what you did upon any person or thing."
The masked man holds the burning metal ball close to the man's face and plops it into where the eye once was, and as the man subjected to this awful judgment screams in horror the masked man walks back to the furnace to grab another burning ball of flames.
He walks towards the table while looking away from the screeching man, not wanting to see the painting until it's finished. Slowly he plops the second metal ball into the socket with a still hanging eye.
He steps back to watch in all its glory the painting he has created. The man in said painting, is screaming in agonizing horror as he feels the nerves and flesh in the socket of his eye as the flaming ball slowly makes its way downwards creating a hole from the socket to the mouth, melting the flesh and bone for the man to taste before his saliva his evaporated and the side of his mouth burned away allowing the metal ball to fall to the floor, strangely not leaving any marks, or burning through thet hick gray concrete.
He looks over to the other side of the man's face where the flaming ball of metal has finally severed the eye from its socket allowing the ball of tissue to hit the floor with a dry flop barely audible under the man screaming in agony.
The ball this time continued at an angle burning through the meat and blood provided by the layers of flesh between the upper roof of the mouth and the eye socket. The ball fell through the tongue and the bottom of the mouth allowing what's left of the now charcoal-burnt bottom jaw to be connected by straps and strings of tissue and slight bone to the skull.
Allowing the last, nearly unintelligible, words to be heard from the now disfigured blood fountain writhing in agony, "This isn't supposed to be the outcome, their lives were unneeded, none of them were useful to you, why do you all care what I did to a few people and creatures, in the end they went to a good cause."
"A good cause!" the oni screamed in overwhelming anger, "A beast of stitches and flesh is a good cause? A beast of gargantuan heights and agonizing screams, is a good cause!? The last time I checked the world was going to hell but not this fast this badly, what you did, what you did was beyond worse than anything the gods could have done when they betrayed us, those creatures you made are screaming not in rage of human life, but in agony, each and everyone of those creatures contains the souls, thoughts, and emotions of each and every being forced to meld and move together in these abominations of a creature you have created. What you did can never be undone, and for that each and every trial, experiment, and test done to every living being you conducted on will be done ten times worse to you. And don't think this is that simple, this room your in," the oni chuckles with slight insanity creeping into his voice, "can change into anything your judgment desires, whether it forces you to undergo the exhausting and grueling task of Sisyphus to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity, to something so small as strapping you down and covering you in honey and milk to let the maggots and flies feed off of your open flesh, to something like the viking's blood eagle, or even allowing you to experience the rapid growth and mutation of radiation allowing bubbles and cysts of blood and fluid to cover and pop on your skin allowing you to suffer just a tiny piece of the pain you put those people through."
With a no longer hysteric tone, and a now calm voice the man speaks, "And with just a thought Judgment can will it that you will not die in this room and for your flesh and blood to regenerate to experience everything over, and over again until your blood can outweigh the scale that is ruthlessly weighted against you."
*****
This is and will be the first and only chapter of The Scale. The story was written for a competition between me and a few friends to create a short story, this was my short story. I uploaded it here incase anyone was interested and to take any pointers people might have.
Also I'm curious, do you think the man deserved the torture he is and will be facing?
P.s. anything that seemed a bit unclear or vague was more than likely done on purpose, I believe that the human mind can create so much worse than reality, so allowing your mind to create what horrors the man could have done helped add to the book's ambience of hysteria and insanity.