Kyle did not remember how he got to the middle of the room.

He had been propped against the cratered drywall like a broken doll, held up only by Phei’s fist in his dressing gown and the quiet promise of more to come.

An yet, right now, he was floating — suspended in the exact centre of the room at perfect eye level with his tormentor, limbs wrenched into a perfect, obscene X by four long, living tendrils of black-and-violet Void-Ice that had grown straight out of floor, ceiling, and walls like the room itself had decided to devour him.

The Void-Ice chains did not feel like metal.

They felt like the absence of everything good in the universe wearing the cruel shape of restraints... a cold so absolute it had burned straight past pain, past numbness, and into a soul-deep wrongness that made his bones scream inside his flesh.

The cuffs were elegant — twisted black frost fused into cruelly beautiful bracelets that encircled each joint — but they had already sunk glacial hooks through skin, muscle, and straight into bone, anchoring deep in the soft marrow where they drank greedily.

His own weight was slowly, relentlessly tearing his shoulders out of their sockets.

The left one — already dislocated — had gone far beyond that; the ball of the humerus had been dragged a full three inches down, creating a grotesque, rolling lump beneath the blood-soaked silk.

Both wrists had split open around the cuffs in neat, glossy rings of raw meat.

The cold radiating from the ice was turning the flesh at every anchor point black and necrotic, the rot spreading in lazy, patient rings as the Void-Ice slowly ate him alive from the inside out.

He wanted to scream.

His face no longer permitted it.

The lower jaw still hung loose in a direction jaws were never meant to hang. His tongue — what remained of it, bitten through in three places during the earlier beating — lay thick, swollen, and useless in the wreckage of his mouth.

What came out of him was a continuous wet, broken hum, a keening that fractured every few seconds when his diaphragm hitched uselessly, trying and failing to draw a real breath through lungs that were already drowning in their own blood and terror.

Phei stood a few feet away, examining the Void-Ice dagger in his hand with the idle curiosity like he was choosing a wine.

He had manifested it during the transit — he rotated it, inspected the razor edge against the light from the floor-to-ceiling windows. The blade drank every photon whole, its glacial blue line so impossibly sharp that faint violet sparks danced along it where the air itself recoiled in protest.

He looked, for all the world, like a man preparing to carve Sunday roast.

Cassiopeia had relocated without being told.

She now sat on the one surviving couch she had dragged herself into the perfect viewing position, heels kicked off, legs tucked beneath her, a fresh tumbler of Kyle’s abandoned Macallan resting loosely in her right hand.

Her eyes had not left the centre of the room since the chains had grown. Her thighs remained pressed tightly together. Her free hand rested on her own knee in a posture that looked almost casual — but the slow, rhythmic clench of her fingers and the wet heat soaking through her underwear told the real story.

She was there to bear witness. She was also, she had long since accepted, there to drip slowly and shamelessly for as long as her Master chose to make this last.

Phei moved in for the first cut.

He did not explain... he did not warn.

He simply stepped inside the reach of Kyle’s twitching limbs, lifted the dagger, and drew a single long, deliberate diagonal line across the bare chest — from the point of the left shoulder all the way down to the floating ribs on the right.

Four inches deep. Clean. Excruciatingly slow.

The blade met no resistance as the skin parted like warm butter. Fat parted. Muscle parted. The rib cage beneath gleamed white for one frozen heartbeat before the Void-Ice cold slammed into the wound like liquid nitrogen from hell itself.

Capillary bleeding died instantly; the raw meat steamed but did not gush. Instead, black frost crackled along both edges of the gash, turning living tissue necrotic and dead-black in spreading rings while the nerves inside the wound kept screaming long after the flesh had frozen solid.

Kyle’s entire body tried to convulse in a single, violent full-body seizure.

The chains held him exactly where he was — immobile, displayed, helpless.

The sound that tore out of him was higher and more inhuman than anything he had produced before — a thin, pure, airless shriek of pure damnation.

"HHHHHNNNNAAAAAAAHHH —"

Phei waited patiently for the scream to die into wet, choking gurgles.

Then, without hurrying, he drew the second line — the perfect mirror, right shoulder down to left floating ribs. A large, lazy X carved across Kyle’s torso like a signature from hell.

"HHHHGGGH — P-P-PLEEEE —"

Phei tilted his head slightly, almost curious.

"Mm."

He moved to the left arm. Drew a long, bone-deep line down the inside of the bicep — eight full inches, the blade gliding through muscle until the white of the humerus gleamed wetly at the bottom of the trench.

Kyle’s fingers on that hand spasmed wildly, then curled into a claw, then went completely slack as the nerves were severed and frozen in the same merciless instant.

The right arm received its identical, loving cut.

Kyle’s keening had dissolved into wet, gulping sobs by now — broken, animal, punctuated by involuntary hitches every time a new frozen wound opened and the cold sank its teeth deeper into his soul.

Phei dropped into a light crouch.

Drew a long, slow line down the outside of the right thigh, deep enough that the blade kissed bone.

Stood.

Matched it perfectly on the left.

Kyle produced one long, unbroken howl from somewhere beyond the capacity of his ruined mouth — a single sustained "AAAAAAAAAH" that pushed out through his nose, through the torn slits in his cheeks, through the hanging ruin of his jaw, exiting his body from three separate bleeding holes at once like the voice of a man already in hell.

Phei waited for it to taper into wet, bubbling silence.

Then he circled behind the hanging, crucified body with the unhurried grace of an artist examining his canvas.

He paused.

Drew another deep line across the lower back just above the hips — deep enough that the white of a lumbar vertebra showed through the red ruin, the Void-Ice immediately freezing the exposed spinal nerves into black, screaming ice.

Kyle’s legs spasmed violently in their chains, the hooks tearing fresh meat inside his shins as the cold raced up his spine and straight into his brain.

Phei came around to the front again.