"But those are just the laws of the universe, aren’t they?"

Phei’s voice had shifted — lighter now, almost philosophical, calm in the way a guillotine is calm right before its blade kisses the neck off and ends everything.

"They don’t concern us at all, do they? Because hope or not..."

He tilted his head, those ancient void-black eyes swallowing every last scrap of light in the room until only an endless, freezing abyss stared back.

"It won’t change your fate."

The pause that followed was suffocating. Heavy. The kind of silence that crawls into your lungs and squeezes until your ribs scream and your soul starts to rot.

"So let me tell you something."

Snap.

The sound cracked through the air like the breaking of a condemned man’s neck.

An invisible hand — the wrath of something ancient and merciless — seized Jonathan with crushing, godlike force. It wrapped around his entire body, grinding bones and crushing organs, lifting him as though he were nothing but a filthy, piss-soaked rag.

For one eternal heartbeat he dangled there, limbs flailing uselessly in raw animal panic, eyes bulging from their sockets in soul-shredding terror.

Then it hurled him.

He flew like a broken doll across the room and slammed into the bedroom floor with a wet, sickening CRACK. The impact shattered ribs like dry twigs. Agony detonated through his chest in white-hot explosions. Blood sprayed from his mouth as fresh fractures spiderwebbed through his bones.

Every breath became a razor dragged through his lungs.

The door slammed shut behind him with a final, coffin-like BOOM — sealing him inside this room of horrors with the monster he had created.

Jonathan lay twitching on the cold floor, wheezing, choking, drowning in his own blood and terror. His body shook uncontrollably, not from cold, but from the primal, gut-wrenching realization that this was it.

No escape. No deals. No mercy.

His nightmare had finally come home to collect.

Phei walked forward slowly, each step measured and predatory, drinking in the lavish room that had hidden years of screams. The separate beds. The heavy curtains that had muffled Roxanne’s broken sobs.

The air had grown thick with the stench of fear and old violence.

His gaze settled on the corner.

The golf club.

It leaned there like an old friend — metal head crusted thick with dried blood, some black with age, some still dark and sticky. The same club that had kissed Roxanne’s soft, fragile body night after night.

The same club that had painted her skin in bruises and split her flesh while Jonathan laughed.

Phei picked it up. The weight felt perfect. Righteous. Hellish.

Jonathan’s eyes exploded wide with pure, animalistic terror.

"W-wait— PLEASE—!" His voice shattered into a pathetic, sobbing whimper. "We can talk! I swear on my life— we can talk this through! I’ll do anything—!"

Phei examined the bloodstained club with chilling, detached curiosity, turning it slowly so the dried crimson caught the light like old sins.

"I’ll apologize to Roxanne!" Jonathan scrambled backward like a crippled insect, legs kicking uselessly, tears and snot pouring down his face. "I’ll divorce her! She can have everything— the house, the money, my fucking soul! She can beat me bloody if she wants! I’ll crawl! I’ll beg! Just don’t— please God don’t—!"

Phei looked down at the sniveling wreck of a man.

Then he smiled. Cold. Beautiful. Predatory.

"Oh, you’re such a genius. I hadn’t thought of that."

The sarcasm sliced deeper than any blade.

Snap.

Invisible power seized Jonathan again. This time it arranged him with brutal precision — forcing him onto his knees in the center of the room, spine arched violently backward until joints popped and screamed, chest thrust out, groin exposed in complete, humiliating vulnerability.

His body locked rigid, every muscle frozen by an ancient, merciless force he could neither see nor fight.

He was a living offering. A piece of meat on display.

Phei walked around him once, then took several measured steps back. He bounced the bloodstained club lightly against the floor, calculating the perfect angle for maximum agony.

"You know," he said conversationally, voice smooth as silk wrapped around a razor, "I always found golf an absolute waste of time."

Another lazy bounce.

"Just rich, worthless pieces of shit pretending to matter while the world carried their bags."

He smiled, almost nostalgic.

"Then Maddie and Sierra dragged me onto the course."

A soft, genuine laugh escaped him — the sound of damnation.

"Crazy Maddie made sure we fucked in every hole we found... including right there on the green."

He set the swirling ice ball down carefully in front of him.

"And apart from learning how to swing for very specific targets..."

Phei settled into a perfect, elegant golf stance. Shoulders squared. The bloodstained club raised high behind him like the axe of an executioner ready to deliver strokes of pure hell.

Jonathan’s eyes bulged with soul-crushing, piss-soaked horror. His muffled screams vibrated desperately against the ice muzzle sealing his mouth, tears streaming down his face as he realized the nightmare about to unfold on his own body.

Phei’s smile widened, glacial and merciless, eyes burning with frozen starlight.

"...I learned absolutely nothing else."

The club began its deadly descent.

Phei swung.

The club connected with the void-ice sphere in a perfect, fluid arc — and the ball rocketed forward with merciless, inhuman speed, trailing spiraling wisps of frozen darkness like the tail of a comet dragged straight from hell.

Jonathan watched it come.

Time thickened into suffocating, nightmarish honey.

He saw every razor-edged crack in the ice, every pulsing vein of void-black corruption threading through it, every razor-sharp edge forged to shred and annihilate. He saw his own destruction hurtling toward him, and he could not move.

Could not flinch. Could not close his eyes.

The invisible force held him locked in perfect, humiliating presentation — knees spread wide, spine arched brutally, groin thrust forward like a sacrificial offering on a demonic altar.

The ball struck his groin with a wet, obscene CRUNCH.

The sound was sickening — meat, bone, and manhood shattering under apocalyptic force.

A muffled, high-pitched wail tore from Jonathan’s ice-sealed throat, the sound of a soul being fed alive into a meat grinder.

His eyes rolled back until only bulging whites remained, veins exploding across his forehead and neck like they would burst open. Every muscle in his body strained violently against the unbreakable bonds, desperate to curl inward, to protect the ruin between his legs, to collapse and die — but the ancient power denied him even that mercy.

He remained perfectly displayed. Kneeling. Exposed. Helpless.

Dying in slow, exquisite agony while being forced to feel every single second of it.

The void-ice melted on impact — then instantly reformed into something far worse. Needle-like spikes erupted deep inside his mangled flesh, stabbing, twisting, grinding through nerves and tender tissue with cold, sadistic precision.

The pain was beyond hell — provided he never felt what hell was like — a freezing, white-hot inferno that made his vision detonate with black stars and lightning.

His bladder emptied in a hot, humiliating flood down his leg, piss mixing with dark blood in a steaming puddle beneath his broken body. Tears streamed down his purple face, freezing solid against the ice muzzle as broken, choking sobs leaked through.

Phei formed another ball.

Set it down.

Jonathan’s bloodshot, bulging eyes — wide with pure, animalistic madness — locked onto the new sphere in total, soul-crushing desperation. The begging in them was absolute. The terror complete.

He tried to scream through the ice, tried to offer his fortune, his soul, his eternal slavery — but only wet, gurgling whimpers escaped the frozen gag.

Phei laughed. Low. Cold. Genuinely amused.

"I told you. I learned very well. This is all Maddie’s work actually."

He adjusted his stance, the bloodstained club resting lightly on his shoulder.

"Especially with targets."

He swung again.

The second ball struck harder. Wetter. Deeper. The spikes came from the second ball too and struck straight Jonathan’s already ruined groin multiplied — longer, sharper, crueler — tearing through what little remained intact.

His body convulsed violently in the invisible restraints, muscles seizing so hard that fresh fractures bloomed across his pelvis like shattering glass. Blood poured through his pants, freezing into jagged black crystals before it could drip.

The agony multiplied into something demonic, each spike grinding and twisting on its own, freezing nerves solid only to shatter them again in fresh waves of ice-fire torment.

More balls kept coming.

Phei summoned them one after another with casual, godlike indifference, each sphere crystallizing out of thin air as if the universe itself bowed in fear. Each one found its mark with surgical, merciless precision.