Chapter 1413: Marcus Heavenchild’s Three Toys

The club struck first, smashing Marcus down into the golden sea so hard that the whole Soul Realm convulsed beneath the impact. World Essence erupted outward in a vast circular wall that climbed higher as it travelled, until whole sections of the distant horizon disappeared behind gold.

Marcus barely registered any of it before the chains came scraping across the surface after him, and the hooks caught: one buried through the shoulder of his manifested Soul, another tearing into the side of his abdomen, a third found purchase somewhere deeper; the executioners hauled together and ripped him back out of the sea while his scream tore across the endless expanse.

Phei kept walking.

Behind him, the ogres were only beginning.

They did not beat him again, not at first.

One seized Marcus by the ankles and dragged his legs apart across the golden surface, while another pinned both wrists above his head with a single enormous hand, pressing him flat so that the light of his Progenitor outline bent and flickered beneath the weight. The third lowered itself over him, its shadow swallowing the shine of the sea, and Marcus understood a heartbeat before it happened what they meant to do.

The understanding hit him harder than the club had.

He began to thrash, to twist, to pull his Soul inward and make himself small, and the hand on his wrists simply pressed down until the light of his arms cracked, while the one holding his legs laughed, a low wet rumble that rolled across the water.

"NOOOOO!!!" Marcus screamed, and then louder, and then again in a voice that no longer sounded like the heir of an ancient bloodline, and the ogre above him paid it no more attention than the sea paid the wind.

Phei heard the moment it began. The scream was different from the ones before it. It held no defiance and no rage, only a raw, disbelieving horror that cracked halfway through and dissolved into choking sobs.

Marcus convulsed beneath the weight bearing down on it, and the golden sea shuddered in rhythm with something Phei did not need to turn around to see. The chains rattled with each lurch. The ogres grunted to one another, unhurried and unbothered, the casual sounds of creatures doing exactly what they had been permitted to do with something that belonged to them for as long as they wanted it.

Marcus tried everything he had. He tried to scatter himself through the sea and slip away as fragments of light, and the chains dragged every fragment back and forced it into the shape they wanted.

He tried to gather World Essence into a shield, and a hand closed around his throat and pushed his face beneath the surface, holding him there, choking on gold, while what was being done to him went on without the slightest pause.

He tried to retreat into the deepest chambers of his own Soul, the places where his memories lived and where the sacred remnant of his Angel Progenitor heritage burned, the places no one had ever touched, and he found that they followed him there too.

They forced their giant members into him layer after layer in his every hole and through the parts of himself he had always believed were his alone, until there was no inner room left to occupy. His own Soul stopped obeying him:

He was held, positioned, turned and used, and his will had become nothing more than a noise it made.

When the first ogre finally rose away from behind him, Marcus lay shaking in the shallows, curled around himself, his outline guttering like a candle in the wind. Some broken instinct told him it was over.

Then the second ogre that was using his face took him by the hair and dragged him onto his knees, and the one holding the chains pulled them tight enough that he could not fall, and Marcus made a sound that wasn’t a scream when the second entered.

His scream was a small, cracked plea, the sound of someone who had finally understood that begging would change nothing, followed by the wet, hitching sobs of a man who had nothing left to bargain with.

The sea began to tremble again in that same terrible rhythm, and the sobbing broke apart under it, and the ogres took turns, and they were in no hurry at all.

Phei did not want to become the thing he despised just to punish it but he had opened the door, and he had chosen what waited on the other side, and he would not pretend otherwise.

What he wanted was for Marcus to know helplessness so completely that it became part of his Soul, so that the man who had spent years deciding that other people’s refusal meant nothing would finally learn what it meant when his own refusal meant nothing to anyone.

His body was not his sanctuary. His Soul was not his sanctuary. His bloodline could not save him, his family could not save him, and his ancient name was only a word the ogres did not know.

Every time they reached into another layer of him and Marcus found one more thing he could not protect, Phei wanted the realization carved deeper.

Cold? Cruel?

Phei could already imagine some tribunal gathering beneath the heavens to lecture him about morality.

Boo-fucking-hoo!!!

Marcus had drugged Selene, violated her and murdered her, and his family buried the truth and let a dead girl carry the shame of a story written by the people who destroyed her. Phei was not interested in being some spotless hero handing out perfectly measured justice while Heavens nodded along.

He did not need anyone’s approval— all he wanted was for Marcus to suffer, and that truth was ugly, and he accepted it without apology.It would take days if not a week while Marcus was with his beloved three friends. Lucky for him, they’ll not tire!

Selene had not been the first.

Marcus’s history with women stretched far beyond her, and he’d been doing it for years because money silenced people, family power buried evidence, and fear taught victims that fighting back might only make the ending worse.

Brett and Anderson had joined in similar crimes despite their own preferences of each other, and Danton’s history sat beneath an even uglier mountain of secrets.

Phei still remembered confronting him subtly at dinner with the whole family there over the two girls who overdosed and died, two lives thrown away the moment they became inconvenient. Kyle, astonishingly, had kept one line he refused to cross even while supplying the drugs that enabled the others, and Derek had kept such line too.

Phei still never understood how those two had kept at least part of their moral despite the ground they moved with.

The rest had buried every standard somewhere beneath Hell and kept on digging.

They started young, they survived the consequences, and so they continued, because every crime that vanished under family influence taught them the same poisonous lesson: nobody could stop them.

Well, sad truth, time to pay had come.

The sobbing had worn down into something hoarse and broken, a stream of words that had stopped being words, no and please and stop running together into one long, ragged plea that no one answered. The chains creaked together with the clap of thrusts and wet sounds. The water lapped. One of the ogres laughed, short and satisfied, and Marcus went quiet in a way that was worse than any scream, the silence of a Soul that had stopped trying to get away because it had finally learned there was no away to go.

When the second ogre finally let him fall, Marcus collapsed into the golden shallows and curled around himself, knees to his chest, arms wrapped around a body that no longer felt like his, his outline dim and fractured and flinching at the lap of every wave.

For one hollow moment some broken part of him believed it was over.

The chains tightened.

The third ogre that had only held and watched, waded toward him through the sea, unhurried, and Marcus jerked away so violently that the water rippled outward in a ring. He got perhaps an arm’s length before the hooks dragged him back across the surface and a massive hand closed around his ankle. He didn’t scream this time.

He made a small, cracked sound, half plea and half sob— begging changed nothing but now could not stop himself from trying anyway, while his fingers clawed uselessly at a sea that offered nothing to hold.

Whatever arrogance had once lived in the Angel Progenitor’s heir had been torn out of him and left somewhere beneath the gold, and what remained understood only that it was being held, turned and used again, and that nothing he was or had been made the slightest difference.

For the first time in Marcus Heavenchild’s life, the monster on the other side of the story was stronger.

The sea began to tremble again in that same terrible rhythm, carrying the small broken sounds.

***

A/N:I tried to keep this scene as subtle as possible and avoid writing the assault in graphic or overly descriptive detail. The point of it is the horror, helplessness, and punishment involved, not to make the content explicit or gratuitous. I know the subject itself is already disturbing, so I deliberately kept certain things implied rather than spelling them out.