Oh, the other guards and masters wouldn't do anything; they knew they didn't have to. When you train children in the arts of dealing death, diddling them was bound to end badly sooner or later. That lead to the second way kids broke in this place. Someone pushed them too far and snap! A burst of rage ending in bloodshed. Even the strongest masters were vulnerable in situations like that, and the kids were taught to play dirty.
Interestingly, the masters and guards didn't even punish the kids that managed to kill such people, provided that those kids didn't go on a rampage afterwards. Dee's theory on the thoughts of the other masters was that if a master got sloppy enough to be killed by one of the kids, then that master deserved to die and the other masters would simply enjoy it. It resulted in an instant promotion to everyone below that person and one potential threat gone for everyone above him.
In general the masters didn't punish you for killing their own. This was a school for assassins after all and killing one of the masters showed your ability. They did however punish you for getting caught, mostly because that result would be the same on real jobs as well. Simply killing your target was not enough, it was perhaps even more important to get away without being discovered. Of course, all that didn't do much for the kids that the bastard had diddled before one finally snapped.
Dee considered herself lucky in that respect. Masters and guards into kids were rare enough, but someone who was into females and whatever furry being Dee was supposed to be, at the same time? That's like finding a needle in a very nasty pile of scum. There had been one that had tried to approach Dee, but that person changed his mind very fast after she showed a snout full of very sharp teeth and hands with claws that would make birds of prey jealous, as well as the willingness to use them.
That master had lasted only a week in this place. Apparently he had wide tastes, but wasn't very good at discerning his targets. The kids weren't the only ones that had a high death toll in this place. Only the strong would surface from this nest of vipers and became proper members of the assassin order. Even the masters of this place were considered to be acolytes. Good enough to teach and do missions in the lesser circles, but not good enough to deserve a full place in the order.
Despite her luck with the scum of this place, Dee's luck was not as strong in other places. She had been in this hellhole for about five years now, and most of that time was spent in excruciating pain. The odd part was that none of the other kids went through quite the same treatment, though Dee knew the reason for that. At least one of the reasons. Unlike her, the others didn't have her regenerative abilities. Still, someone really seemed to have a bone to pick with her.
The training was the easy part. She was already skilled with chemicals thanks to observing mother for so long, which mostly excused her from lessons involving alchemy, although she still learned some things. Unsurprisingly the alchemy lessons focused on poisons. She also knew better ways of cultivating her power, although her insistence on building her strength slowly and steadily earned her several beatings and even floggings. She was also skilled in stealth and camouflage. Surprisingly the masters didn't have too many complaints on that department, mostly just being content at teaching some little tricks to blend in and to avoid certain mistakes that usually required experience to weed out.
The hardest part of the training, and what most often left her bruised and bleeding, was the weapons training and unarmed combat training. It wasn't that she wasn't a quick study, she could beat most of the masters at this point actually, it was that whenever she reached a level that they required of her, they raised the stakes and made things even harder. "Oh you can beat a master in unarmed combat? Well now you get to fight two, and still return bloody. Oh you can beat two with daggers? Well congratulations, now you get to fight four unarmed." and so on. She had once considered not doing her best since she wound up beaten black and blue anyway, but the look on the master's face had made it obvious that the result would be even worse.
The masters were big believers in beating the lessons into their students. They showed how to do something and then forced you to use it in a real combat situation. If you didn't learn that parry or that method of deflecting with that precise angle immediately, you got hit by an attack that could have been parried or deflected with the move shown before. And then you got hit again, and again, and again. You either learned, or you got carried back to your bunk beaten black and blue. Or you did learn and got beaten anyway for being too slow.
Most kids couldn't handle it and became apathetic like the kid that got carried away just now. Then they got discarded. It had occurred to Dee to also give up and just lie down and die, but that just wasn't in her nature. Eventually there would be an opportunity to get out of all this. Also the beatings didn't so much make her despair as they made her angry and vengeful. And she did get some small measure of revenge against some of the masters on occasion, when they underestimated her. She had killed her fair share of the masters, disguising them as training accidents.
Dee learned fast, but unlike the others, it wasn't enough that she learned the move. She also had to be able to adapt the move into different situations, and come up with variations by herself to defend against new attacks. That was too much for her as well. But she did learn eventually, and next time she needed the extra variations, she had already figured them out while regenerating. Or she got pummeled again. Both happened just as often, but every time she did eventually get there, and she never made the same mistake twice. The masters may have been brutal but they were very effective.
The combat training wasn't the worst part though. All the children got beaten bloody, although her case was even more intense. What made things really hard was the part that was reserved just for her alone. It seemed the scientists and researchers had set their eyes on Dee in particular. Almost immediately after she had been brought here, they had started making changes to her body, both surgically and magically or often at the same time. That wasn't the bad part. Even Dee could tell that the changes were generally positive, although the exact extent of the changes was still a mystery to her. No, the problem was that she had to be awake and conscious during the process.
The reason they operated on her specifically, was because healing magic would return things back to how they were before, removing most of the work done by the researchers. The explanation for that was that you couldn't really aim healing magic precisely enough, unless the healer was a real expert beyond the rejects found here. If healing magic was capable of fixing the person, it was usually a sort of an all or nothing deal. So if someone were to cut you open and carve magical runes on your ribs, the symbols would be considered an anomaly and be healed as well. Regeneration of her Beowulf heritage worked similar, except it was even more aggressive. However, it could be controlled to an extent. The only way to do that was when one consciously suppressed that portion of the regeneration, and you had to be fully aware and awake to do that.
After the first time an operation had failed, the man leading the whole effort, a guy the others called Lord Malik, had told Dee that they would simply repeat the process until it worked, so she better get it under control unless she wanted it to continue forever. The thought of going through such pain without anything to alleviate it was too much for Dee, and she had almost given up, driven insane by the pain. Even now the question of her sanity was open to some interpretation. She thought she was relatively sane, but then again so did every other person who lost their sanity, right?
Luckily, during the second operation she stumbled on a solution. Psions had the ability to separate their conscious mind from their bodies, leaving only the animal part behind. She didn't really feel the pain, she was simply aware of it. It was like she only kept a toe of her consciousness within her body while the rest of her observed from the outside. The animal part of her still screamed and attempted to trash out of the restraints, but that was partially an act. She needed some of the pain to trigger the transformation to her werewolf form and thus boost her regeneration, because she couldn't control the transformation herself. Thus she had to feel at least a small portion of the pain.
She also had to suffer a little of it because that was required to control the regeneration in order to avoid undoing the work the researchers and scientists did. The order was also big on causing pain to their acolytes. According to them, the acolytes had to learn to ignore all pain in case they were ever captured and interrogated. So the animal part of her screamed to keep up the act even if her conscious mind calmly observed the process. On the plus side, that saved her from the training against interrogations since they were already causing her more pain than any interrogator would.
The operations went on for about four and a half years, though there were some significant stretches of time between operations as they let the previous changes settle in while they planned for the next one. It had become obvious to Dee that whoever was planning these operations was playing the long game. They exchanged immediate gains for the good of the long term result, as most of the changes were things that would only show their full effect with time, instead of a boost of power right now.
While the body of a psion could not gather mana or ki, that didn't mean it couldn't utilize either. Most of the bones in her body were now decorated with elaborate magical runes that absorbed minute traces of power from the surroundings and used it to strengthen those bones. The important words were minute amounts and used. If the power gathered was too much, then that gathering of power would make her ability to avoid spells that detect mana and magic useless.
For the same reason the power was used right away to strengthen her, instead of storing it. Stored mana could be detected, but bones that had been reinforced with the help of mana could not because they weren't actually magical. They were still just bones, even if in time they would grow in sturdiness to rival dragons. In a similar fashion, those same runes gathered ki and used that to reinforce her organs and muscles.
An added benefit was that because her body stored neither of those energies, she could use her psionic powers to strengthen herself normally, as any psion could. That was one of the only abilities she had learned as a psion. This added effect was mostly thanks to the powers being complementary instead of trying to do the same thing. The changes made by the operations rebuilt her, while her psionic power empowered her. At least that was the theory. She might have a powerful body in a dozen to a hundred years, but for now she wasn't that different from the other children.
The one operation she hated the most was the one done to improve her fur and skin. The bastards pretending to be scientists mixed the blood of various beings that had fur strong enough to rival darksteel and had her submerge in the combined fluid. One of the mages among them would use magic to make sure she wouldn't drown in the liquid as she screamed. As for the reason for the screaming, to get the best effect out of the liquid, it had to be heated to a point of boiling.