Journey of the Son of Ares

Amadeus thrashed, teeth clenched against the pain. It was no good. He was tied with hyperwire.

When he realized, he put his head down and relaxed his whole body. Soon the raw pain faded into his subconscious and it became like an out-of-body experience.

'This isn't real," Amadeus thought in desperation, his eyes hollowly looking down at his sorry physical state. 'I wasn't caught. How could I be caught?' The question gave rise to anger and made him try to enhance before ripping through the hyperwire that tied his forearms to the chair. It was a hopeless effort. Hyperwire could only be broken with compression and without immaculate control, one would blow their arm off in such a position.

"Quite the roar for a servant." A remark from the dark.

Amadeus raised his head in surprise and turned his head, to find Uzbec's dark figure in the dim corner of the room, sitting with one leg over the other and a hand on his chin.

Amadeus cursed his idiocy and tried to play it off. "My leg... What did I do?!"

Uzbec snorted and stood up, proceeding to walk around Amadeus and come into sight on his right side. He looked down at Amadeus and seemed about to answer when suddenly a knife appeared in his grip and he slammed it down through Amadeus' right hand.

Amadeus gasped before a scream escaped his mouth. He could've stopped, but he kept screaming if only to keep up the act. He didn't know what else to do.

Uzbec leaned in close and watched him as he suffered. "What did you do? That is what you want to know?" he asked with intensity in his voice. Then he straightened up and spoke with an eerie calmness. "Nothing in particular."

His erratic behavior was likely just an interrogation tactic of some sort, but awareness of that made it no less unnerving. A man who would so willingly act a maniac for an advantage was to be feared even more than a simple maniac.

"Then why am I here?" Amadeus cried. It was easy to act by amplifying already existing emotions. "Whatever I did, I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"

"You are here because you are a spy. Or because I am here to find out if you are one," Uzbec explained as he gripped his knife more tightly.

"W—what?" Amadeus muttered, confusion on the outside, rage on the inside.

Uzbec pulled the knife out of his hand, sending another surge of intense pain through his body. Amadeus screamed out only briefly before he stifled it. He knew what this meant.

Uzbec let the knife disappear and grasped Amadeus' bleeding hand tightly, causing even more pain to surge out. "So let me ask you to save us both time. Are you a spy?"

Amadeus gritted his teeth and seethed. To be done in by a hunch acted upon loosely was more punishment than failing on his own. All because a servant's life meant nothing. Uzbec could take his chances and get off scot-free.

Now, Amadeus had a choice.

He put on a sour expression and tongued his teeth. It was still there. He could've done it right there, however, he refrained.

Uzbec's question was a simple one. If he was a servant, he would be killed straight away. If he was a spy, he was in for a world of pain. But in that pain, there was a chance of Aurelius coming to his rescue. The 12th was 7 days away. If he was rescued before that, he could relay the information and the plan would go ahead.

In other words, the question was: die a painless, worthless death or live in pain to see justice be done. To Amadeus, it wasn't even a question.

And so he spat in Uzbec's face as he leaned in, squeezing his injured hand. "Fuck you."

Uzbec didn't blink. He only stood straight again without letting go of Amadeus' hand and said, "Good." There was satisfaction in the word. One could imagine a slight smile on the man's face.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" Amadeus asked. "Are we here to torture and be tortured or are we here to hold hands?"

"I can see that you know pain," Uzbec observed a hint of respect in his tone. Then he squeezed more tightly, making Amadeus grumble with deep annoyance.

"You say that like you are an authority on the matter," Amadeus spat, beginning to shiver and grow pale by the second. "Easy to act like it when you're not the one with a headache, stab wound, and a fucking amputated leg!"

Uzbec glanced at Amadeus' left leg as if only now remembering it again. "Right. It was a necessary precaution. I hope you understand." Amadeus heard a slight mocking in the voice and raged.

Then Uzbec's eyes gleamed and he pressed Amadeus' bleeding hand on the metal chair's armrest with his hand on top. Then, a knife appeared in his free hand and he raised it high before stabbing through his own hand as well as Amadeus'.

Both their eyes went wide, but it appeared for different reasons. Amadeus repressed his scream and seethed before gaining control of his breathing again. Uzbec simply watched him closely, showing no sign of having been stabbed in his hand.

When he finally withdrew the knife and took his hand off, he showed a slight frown as he walked behind Amadeus to get a metal cart with medical supplies. Then he took some bandages and walked around Amadeus while he calmly spun the bandages around his own hand.

"When I was a child, I was taken to rooms like this often. It wasn't a happy time, but for some reason, I've grown sentimental about it. There is something so exciting about youth. The potential one had and the progression one made. Thinking about it is reinvigorating."

Amadeus just kept shivering. The room temperature was fine, but the cold metal chair against his naked body wasn't very comforting, and the blood loss was getting to him. Soon, however, Uzbec would mend his hand as he did with his leg and feed him. Then it would go on.

Amadeus leaned his head back and sighed with the pain. Suddenly he took part in the conversation Uzbec was having with himself. "So now you torture others. Because it reminds you of your youth?"

"Hmm, not quite," Uzbec said, stopping in front of Amadeus and glancing at him before focusing on finishing the bandaging on his hand. "I'm simply good at it."

"And why are you telling me this, huh? Did your torturers talk this much as well?"

"No. They gave instructions."

"Why do you talk then?"

"To establish a baseline. I get a sense of how people act to see irregularities."

'But you won't see mine when I spin you a story,' Amadeus thought in the depths of his mind where the pain didn't reach.

Uzbec finished the bandages on his hand and turned his attention fully to Amadeus. "I also feel that this is the only time when I can be truly honest with others. It's my way of showing the world who I am. Yours is..." he glanced at his fingers. "the piano. Is it?"

Amadeus nodded sluggishly at his deduction. It was a lie. 'I only ever tell lies,' Amadeus thought.

Uzbec brought his skinny metal chair from the corner to Amadeus' side and began to wrap up his hand in silence. Uzbec was giving him time to think. That was for a reason. He likely depended on Amadeus thinking up something incoherent in the midst of his pain and exposing something on accident. However, Amadeus intended to expose nothing.

Nothing except for what would get him out of Orpheus' castle and give Aurelius a chance for a rescue.

That's why for the first day he said nothing as Uzbec began his brutal procedures accompanied by inquiries into the identity of the liveD and his organization. Not until the salve wore off and his birthmark showed itself. That's when he spoke again.

"Bring Orpheus and I'll talk."

It was time for him to properly introduce himself.