Felt the blades shifting within him, ripping through tissue and muscle in ways that his brain could not fully process because the pain had moved past the point where pain functioned as useful information and had become something closer to white noise - a constant, screaming static that drowned out everything else.

Blood gushed from both wounds now, running down his chest and soaking into his clothes and dripping onto the floor in steady streams.

One of the men reached into a bag at his side and withdrew something long and metallic.

A nail.

Not a small one. Not the kind used for hanging pictures or assembling furniture. This was industrial - ten to fifteen inches long, thick and brutal and designed to penetrate materials far harder than human flesh.

The second man produced a hammer.

Lovi’s brain processed what he was seeing approximately half a second before it happened, and in that half-second his entire body went rigid with a terror so absolute it felt like drowning.

"No," he gasped, the word barely audible through the pain and the shock. "No, no, no, please don’t - don’t do this - I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please don’t - "

The first man positioned the nail against Lovi’s right wrist, pressing the sharp tip into the skin just hard enough to hold it in place.

"Don’t - "

The hammer came down.

The sound of metal striking metal rang through the warehouse, sharp and final, and the nail drove through Lovi’s wrist and into the concrete wall behind it with a force that pinned his arm in place completely.

Lovi screamed.

Screamed in a way that went beyond anything he had produced before - a sound that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his lungs, deeper than his body, tearing its way out of him with a violence that left his throat raw and bleeding.

The pain was indescribable.

Not sharp. Not clean. It was tearing and grinding and absolute, radiating outward from his wrist in waves that made every nerve in his body light up simultaneously. He tried to pull his arm free and found that he could not move it even a fraction of an inch - the nail had gone all the way through bone and flesh and embedded itself so deeply into the wall that his arm was now part of the structure itself.

The second nail was already being positioned against his left wrist.

"Please - " he sobbed, but the word was cut off by the hammer falling again.

Another strike. Another explosion of pain. Another scream that left him gasping and choking on his own breath.

Both of his hands were now nailed to the wall.

Crucified.

Held in place by metal driven through bone, his arms spread wide in a grotesque parody of religious imagery, his body suspended partly by the nails and partly by the daggers still buried in his chest.

He tried to stay conscious. Tried to hold onto awareness despite the fact that every signal his nervous system was sending was screaming at him to shut down, to pass out, to escape into unconsciousness where the pain could not follow.

But he could not.

The pain was too much. Too overwhelming. It kept him awake with a vicious, unrelenting clarity that refused to let him slip away.

One of the men grabbed his pants and stripped them off in a single motion, leaving him exposed and naked against the wall.

Master Bushman stepped forward, looking up at Lovi’s crucified form with an expression that was almost contemplative.

"You are very, very lucky," he said quietly, "that it was not Master Oliver who decided how you would be crucified. Because if it had been him - if he had chosen to design your punishment personally - I am certain that by the time he was finished, even the dogs and pigs would have rejected your body as too destroyed to consume."

At that moment, all Lovi could manage were the words "I’m sorry."

They came out barely above a whisper - fragile, broken, carrying almost no weight because his body no longer had the strength to push sound through his throat with any real force. His head hung forward against his chest, blood still dripping steadily from the wounds in his torso and wrists, and the effort of speaking felt like it was drawing from reserves that had already been completely depleted.

"I’m sorry," he repeated, even quieter this time. "Please. I’m sorry. I’m... sorry."

The words dissolved into nothing, swallowed by the pain and the shock and the absolute certainty that whatever he said now would not change what was happening to him.

Master Bushman stood in front of him for a long moment, looking up at the crucified figure with an expression that was difficult to read - something between disappointment and resignation and the particular sadness that belongs to watching potential waste itself completely.

Then he shook his head slowly.

"I am sorry too," he said, and there was something genuine in his voice despite everything. "But sorry does not solve the catastrophic mess you have created for yourself. Sorry does not undo what you attempted to do tonight, and it certainly does not erase the damage you have already caused to innocent people with the knowledge I gave you."

He paused, letting the silence sit between them for a moment before continuing.

"You were one of my brightest students, Lovi. One of the sharpest minds I have ever trained when it comes to understanding systems and leverage and how to navigate complex situations. You had real potential - the kind that does not come around often." His jaw tightened slightly. "I was thinking about you for succession. I was seriously considering recommending you to this organization when the time came for me to step back. You could have had a position of real authority, real responsibility, doing work that mattered."

Master Bushman’s voice dropped lower, colder.

"And what did you choose to do with all of that potential? You chose to let your greed overshadow every piece of reasoning and judgment you possessed. You chose to take the tools I gave you and turn them into weapons against innocent people. And then - as if that were not catastrophic enough on its own - you chose to target the one person in this world I was going to recommend you to serve."