The golf club bent grotesquely on the fifth swing — metal warping like cheap tin from the weight and hardness of the fragile-looking void-ice balls — but Phei kept swinging, the deformed head making every impact even more brutal, more crushing, more final.

The ice never stopped reforming.

Every ball was the weight of an iron ball that melted for a heartbeat, then reshaped into fresh clusters of razor spikes that burrowed deeper, twisting, grinding, freezing his nerves only to explode them apart with the next strike.

Jonathan’s groin had become a pulsating slaughterhouse of shredded meat, crushed testicles, splintered bone, and endless regenerating agony.

Every heartbeat sent lava-ice pain radiating through his pelvis and up his spine like lightning from hell itself.

He was sobbing now — broken, animalistic whimpers leaking through the ice muzzle like a dying dog. His face had gone purple. Veins stood out like ropes. His eyes, bloodshot and insane with pain and terror, begged silently for the death that would not come.

From the bed, Roxanne watched.

Her once-beautiful face was a ruin of deep purple and sickly yellow bruises of yesterday, one eye swollen nearly shut, split lip still crusted with dried blood. Dark fingerprints encircled her throat like a permanent collar of ownership.

She trembled violently, tiny pitiful shivers running through her fragile body as phantom echoes of every impact rippled through her own memories of beatings. Years of hiding under blankets, years of curling into a broken ball while this monster laughed and swung.

But there was no sympathy in her glassy, shattered eyes.

Only cold, exhausted, profound satisfaction.

Phei smiled the entire time — calm, beautiful, terrifying. He bounced the warped club once more, those void eyes gleaming with ancient, merciless delight.

Roxanne saw that smile and understood the terrible truth.

He was enjoying this.

Not as justice. Not as cold retribution.

He was enjoying it the way a predator savors the final, twitching moments of its prey. The way a devil enjoys dragging a soul into eternal damnation.

Her eyes drifted back to the pathetic, piss-soaked, groin-shattered wreck that had once been her tormentor. The man who had spent years beating her, choking her, breaking her until she believed she deserved every bruise and every broken night.

He looked so weak.

All bullies were, in the end. Cowards who only felt strong when they stood over someone smaller, someone helpless, someone they could crush without consequence.

They convinced themselves their fists made them gods.

Now they saw what real power looked like.

And it was smiling while it destroyed them.

And Phei’s smile was the last thing Jonathan ever wanted to see in this life or the next — the smile of a devil himself, ancient and merciless, the worst nightmare his shattered mind would ever know. That calm, beautiful expression would haunt whatever fragments of sanity he still possessed for as long as Phei allowed him to draw breath.

And the pain — gods, the pain.

Before those void-ice spikes even stabbed in, the sheer force of ball was enough to shove a car backward.

The golf club had bent on the very first swing, metal warping like cheap tin under impossible strength, yet Phei had never slowed for a single second. He poured every ounce of his awakened 300+ stats into each savage swing, concentrating godlike power into one single, pathetic target with methodical, almost loving precision.

Eira watched from her unseen vantage, small body hovering, unable to believe how completely Phei had made peace with this cruelty. The awakening had tripled all his stats he’d got after the molting — and every ounce of that multiplied power was now directed at one man’s groin with surgical, almost affectionate brutality. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

And the void-ice — it wasn’t like normal ice.

It was a thousand times more lethal. A thousand times colder. A fundamental corruption of the element that went beyond temperature into something metaphysical — something that hated life itself.

When the coldness spread from his ruined groin outward in creeping waves of black-white frost, it should have numbed him. Should have granted the mercy of reduced sensation, of blessed unconsciousness.

It did the opposite.

The sharp spikes stabbing into his flesh went deeper than muscle. Deeper than bone. They stabbed straight into his soul. They stripped away all numbness, removed every shield the cold might have offered, and left behind only soul-ending pain in its purest, most undiluted form.

Because void-ice didn’t just hurt the body. It hurt the soul.

When those three Legacy boys had tried to rape Emily — back when Phei hadn’t yet gained full control over his emotions — he had touched them with that same cruel, devilish indifference.

That merciless detachment.

They had created a monster without knowing it. And even after he had gained some control... that monster was already there. Already growing. Already hungry.

On the twenty-second ball Jonathan was bleeding from every pore of his body. His skin had become a grotesque canvas of burst capillaries and frozen wounds, dark blood seeping through the ice that coated him in a crystalline shell of agony.

A thick wall of spikes had formed around his groin — a nightmarish crown of frozen razors that would open just wide enough to admit each new projectile before closing with fresh, internal penetrations that shredded him from the inside out.

By every measure of biology he should have been dead. The trauma alone. The blood loss. The systemic shock of sustained, catastrophic damage to the most sensitive nerves in the human body.

But death was a mercy Phei would not grant.

Eira made sure of that.

She nourished Jonathan’s soul with just enough energy to keep him conscious. Enough to keep him aware. She flooded his body with vitality — enough to keep his heart beating, his lungs working, his brain functioning at exactly the capacity needed to experience every single second of his punishment.

He would not be allowed to die. He would not be allowed to pass out. He would suffer every second.

Phei smiled and finally dropped the club.

It clattered to the floor with a dull, anticlimactic sound — just bent metal hitting polished wood, nothing special after the symphony of agony it had conducted.

Roxanne stood frozen in place.

Phei studied her for a moment, trying to read her expression. Was she scared of him? Horrified by what she’d witnessed? Uncertain if the monster that had saved her might turn on her next?

There was nothing.

No fear.

No sympathy for Jonathan.

Just... waiting.

He extended his hand to her — an offer, a choice, a way out of this room and everything it represented.

She looked at his hand. Then at him. Then she took it, there was no hesitation.

Her fingers slipped into his without a moment’s pause, without a flicker of doubt, without any of the fear Eira had expected.

The fairy frowned slightly from her unseen vantage. She’d anticipated at least a few moments of terror — some natural human response to witnessing that kind of brutality.

But Roxanne showed none.

Guess that’s how hardened she’d been by years of being beaten.

Phei felt it too. The calluses on her soul. The places where normal human reactions had been worn away by sustained trauma until nothing remained but quiet, exhausted endurance.

"We can go now," he said softly.

He glanced toward Eira, invisible to Roxanne but present nonetheless. Jonathan’s nightmare was nowhere near done. The rest would be up to Eira now. Hours of torment. Days, maybe. The mission had demanded fear that lasted two days or more, and Eira would deliver.

She always delivered.

But Roxanne shook her head.

Phei paused.

"Nope," she said quietly, voice steady and calm and certain. "I have something in mind. One last punishment for that asshole."

Oh. Eira’s interest sharpened. This ought to be interesting.

Roxanne released Phei’s hand.

She turned toward the bed and her fingers rose to the strap of her silk nightie.

She pulled it off her shoulder.