Chapter 82: Saint Hilarius Hospital (14)
— Valisera’s POV —
Valisera, who was lying completely paralyzed on the cold, debris-covered ground thirty meters away, desperately tried to lift her heavy head.
Thirty meters.
In her prime, she could fold that spatial distance in a microsecond.
Now, that short stretch of ruined concrete felt like an infinite, impassable ocean.
Thick, hot blood was violently stinging her eyes, blurring her vision into a hazy red nightmare.
She viciously bit her own tongue, trying to use the sharp spike of physical pain to jump-start her failing nervous system.
She desperately tried to twitch her broken fingers, attempting to force the ambient ether to weave just a single, fragile gravity field.
Just a momentary push to save this insignificant, cowardly pawn who had foolishly sacrificed his only chance at escape to distract the monster from her.
Move... she screamed to herself, her mind a raging storm of denial and fury.
Move, you damned Ether!
But her body absolutely refused to respond.
The intricate ether circuits running through her veins—the metaphysical pathways that allowed her to command the universe—were completely burnt out, fried like overloaded electrical wires.
Her ether reservoir was as dry and barren as a dead desert bone.
Trying to cast a spell now felt like trying to draw water from a well filled only with dust; it only brought a hollow, scraping agony to her chest.
She was utterly helpless.
For the very first time in her long, arrogant life, the "Superior" was tightly bound by the pathetic limitations of mortal human flesh.
She was forcefully pinned to the floor by her own physical trauma, forced to watch the impending massacre without having a single drop of power to stop it.
The crushing feeling of total helplessness was a million times worse than the searing, melting pain of the acid that had eaten through her leg.
It was systematically shattering her towering pride into microscopic atoms.
The Surgeon mechanically advanced through the dust.
It did not rush.
It had already calculated that its primary target was incapacitated and the secondary target was cornered.
It raised one of its heavy mechanical arms, which ended not in a blade, but in a massive, thick industrial hydraulic clamp.
The steel clamp shot forward through the dark air like a striking metallic viper and violently snapped shut directly onto Aiden’s right ankle!
Craaaaaaaaaaack!
The sickening sound of Aiden’s tibia and fibula bones simultaneously shattering under the immense pressure was sharp, loud, and absolutely disgusting.
The heavy steel clamp didn’t just break the bone; it ruthlessly crushed the bone marrow, muscle tissue, and skin together until they violently fused into a single, mangled pulp of red ruin.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"
Aiden’s scream was no longer human.
It was a raw, primal howl of absolute, mind-breaking pain.
The sheer volume and frequency of the shriek literally tore his own vocal cords, filling his throat with the metallic taste of his own warm blood.
The Surgeon did not care.
Its programming did not possess the capacity for empathy or sadism; it only understood efficiency.
It began pulling the heavy hydraulic clamp slowly, relentlessly dragging Aiden’s thrashing body across the rough, uneven concrete floor that was heavily littered with sharp chunks of debris and thousands of shattered glass shards.
Aiden’s fingernails desperately dug into the solid concrete, scraping and breaking against the floor as he tried to cling to any crack, any piece of rebar.
His fingertips tore open and bled profusely, leaving ten bloody streaks on the ground as he was dragged backward like a slaughtered animal being pulled toward the butcher’s hook.
"No! No! Let me go! Please! I don’t want to diiiiiie!"
He was gasping frantically, violently choking on his own salty tears, thick mucus, and saliva.
A heavy stream of dark blood poured continuously from his completely crushed ankle, painting a long, horrifyingly thick red trail behind him across the white tiles.
The Surgeon stopped precisely in the dead center of the laboratory.
Its hydraulic arm lifted high, hoisting Aiden entirely into the air by his pulverized ankle, leaving him hanging completely upside down, swaying like a pendulum of meat.
The sudden rush of gravity caused the blood from his mangled leg to flow downward, heavily washing over his terrified, intensely reddened, and tear-soaked face.
"Target restraint complete.
Vital signs optimal for extraction.
Beginning live exploratory dissection," the Surgeon stated in its calm, flawlessly polite artificial voice.
"Valiseraaaaa!" Aiden screamed at the top of his ruined lungs.
He looked at her with bulging, bloodshot eyes completely filled with absolute, unfiltered terror.
He was begging her with his gaze, pouring every ounce of his shattered soul into that single look.
"Save me! Commander, please! I don’t want to turn into a piece of meat! Please!"
Valisera was looking right at him.
A single tear—boiling hot and filled to the brim with intense cosmic oppression, burning humiliation, and absolute helplessness—slipped from her crimson eye and slowly tracked down her horrific, acid-burned cheek.
She gritted her teeth until they cracked, raising her trembling, blood-stained hand an inch into the air in a desperate, pathetic motion.
But the weight of her broken bones was too much.
Her fingers fell weakly, uselessly, back onto the cold tiles with a soft thud.
There was no magical energy.
There was no heroic salvation.
There was only the cold, mechanical reality of the slaughterhouse.
"Heart rate: 210 beats per minute.
Blood pressure spiking.
The patient is fully prepped and ready," the Surgeon droned.
The mechanical monster’s six surgical arms moved simultaneously in a blur of terrifying, programmed precision.
The first set of arms, carrying thick steel vice-clamps, violently grabbed Aiden’s flailing left and right arms.
Without a millisecond of hesitation, the hydraulic pistons engaged, forcefully pulling in opposite directions, and brutally ripped both of his arms completely out of his shoulder sockets with terrifying industrial force!
Craack!
Squelch!
Pop!
The horrific sound of the thick rotator cuff joints dislocating, and the dense muscle tendons violently tearing apart under extreme tension, echoed through the vast basement like muffled gunshots.
Aiden could no longer even scream.
The sheer, overwhelming spike of neural shock completely short-circuited his brain.
He merely opened and closed his mouth like a suffocating fish, his eyes rolling entirely back into his skull, exposing only the whites as pure, unadulterated pain drowned his remaining consciousness in a black sea of agony.
Then, the mechanical arm holding the blazing white laser scalpel rapidly descended.
The intensely bright, 5000-degree light blinded Aiden’s tear-filled eyes even as they rolled back.
The tip of the plasma scalpel gently touched the very bottom of his soft abdomen.
Tssssssssssssssssss!
There was no chemical anesthesia.
There was no swift, merciful death.
The laser scalpel, utilizing its terrifying, cauterizing heat, began to slowly, deliberately, and surgically cut an upward line directly through Aiden’s abdomen and deep into his chest cavity.
Because the extreme heat instantly cauterized the blood vessels as it sliced, Aiden did not rapidly bleed out.
He was forced to remain biologically alive to feel every single millimeter of the incision.
Skin melted away.
Dense human flesh was systematically separated.
Yellow subcutaneous fat literally boiled and popped, and the heavy, sickening, and distinct smell of roasting human organs rapidly filled the stagnant, heavy air of the laboratory.
The extreme, burning shock of the heat momentarily violently dragged Aiden back into the waking world.
His eyes snapped forward, wide and unblinking.
"M... m... Mom..."
Aiden whispered broken, fragmented, and breathless words.
Thick, bloodied saliva dripped heavily from his trembling lips, pooling on the floor beneath his hanging head.
He was no longer calling for his commander.
He was no longer a Magical Intelligence agent.
He had completely regressed, returning to being nothing more than a terrified, innocent child desperately searching for the warm embrace of his mother in the pitch-black darkness of hell.
The Surgeon did not pause to listen.
The rotating, diamond-tipped bone saw activated next.
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!
It descended and ruthlessly touched the newly exposed, bloody ribcage.
The rusted, serrated metal teeth began violently cutting through the thick sternum and ribs one by one.
The immense friction scattered a horrifying shower of white, powdered bone dust and sprayed thick droplets of bone marrow directly onto the Surgeon’s glowing red laser lenses.
Aiden was still physically looking...
his dying eyes forcibly watching his own insides being completely exposed to the cold air.
He was looking at his own, rapidly beating human heart, contracting and expanding hysterically inside his violently opened chest cavity.
He was violently twitching, his leg trembling in the clamp.
Hot, fresh tears were still continuously streaming from eyes that stubbornly, tragically refused to die.
"I... don’t... want... to diiii—"
Before he could push the final, muffled syllable of his final scream through his ruined throat, the main mechanical arm carrying the massive, heavy-duty hydraulic clamp lunged upward like a striking snake and clamped firmly onto his entire head.
Craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaash!
It was the sickening, wet sound of a ripe watermelon being completely obliterated under a massive iron hammer.
The human skull offered absolutely no resistance to the industrial hydraulics.
It was completely and instantly crushed.
Gray brain matter, sharp fragments of white skull bone, and a massive geyser of dark blood scattered violently across the room like a sudden, horrific red rain.
The brutal decapitation instantly and permanently extinguished the very last, flickering spark of life in the cowardly, ordinary young man who had only ever wanted to live a quiet life.
Aiden’s completely torn, brutally opened, and headless body immediately stopped its violent twitching.
It simply remained hanging heavily by its crushed ankle in the cold air, dripping a continuous, macabre waterfall of blood, fluids, and loose entrails directly onto the sterile white tiles.
It looked exactly like a grotesque human sacrifice, methodically offered on the bloody altar of the Foldrizers.
In the dark corner of the room, lying completely paralyzed on the freezing concrete floor.
Valisera was watching it all.
Utterly helpless.
Entirely silent.
Completely broken.
Hot tears were freely mixing with the blood on her face, soaking the dust beneath her cheek.
The weak, pathetic coward she had openly despised and constantly belittled had just been brutally disassembled and torn apart right before her eyes.
And she—the mighty Transcendent "Superior" who arrogantly claimed to possess and command the very fabric of the universe—could not even lift a single, broken finger to grant him a merciful death, let alone save him.
In that cursed, blood-soaked basement, beneath the relentless, sickening buzzing of the Surgeon’s still-spinning bone saw, Valisera realized one absolute, terrifying truth:
Elysium does not kneel to Superiors.
Elysium skins them alive.