Chapter 340 - 332. Ropes
"What is the last memory you have?" Zein asked the esper.
Varion immediately became defensive. "Why would I tell you that?"
Zein raised his hand and Varion winced in reflex, flinching back slightly. The esper stopped when he heard someone scoff and in embarrassment, realized that the guide wasn’t about to hit him. Zein tapped his commlink, and the screen appeared in front of Varion.
On that screen, Varion could see himself mumbling something that couldn’t be caught by the commlink’s audio system. But it was clear enough that he didn’t look like himself, with eyes that sometimes moved wildly and sometimes became void. He was restrained with a chaining spell, but he wasn’t moving in the first place; shoulder dropped and limbs slacked.
That was...him? Varion watched the recording with widened eyes.
As if answering his unworded question, the guide spoke. "This is you when you were brought here," Zein let Varion digest his words for a few seconds before grabbing the esper’s hair and forcing the man’s head to turn toward the small puddle of black liquid on the floor.
Varion belatedly realized that it was the substance he vomited when he came to, just before he received the first slap.
"And that is the cause."
"...what?" Varion looked at the guide incredulously. What kind of nonsense was that? In the first place...what was that black substance?
Zein let go of the hair and grasped the man’s jaw with a crushing grip. "That’s what made you act like you lost your mind, a malice in your brain," he spoke flatly, like someone simply reading the news. "You’ll probably lose yourself completely by tomorrow and...well, you wouldn’t die, but you’d never wake up again."
"Lies!"