Esper Harem in the Apocalypse

Chapter 1125: SRLE (25) | Fool’s Fate

The Eastern Ruins were a sprawling graveyard of pre-apocalypse skyscrapers, now claimed by scavengers and rogue tech-guilds. At the center of the sector stood a fortified, retrofitted broadcast tower. It was heavily guarded by Awakened mercenaries and automated mana-turrets.

Rudy walked in a straight line toward the tower, completely ignoring the layout of the streets. When a concrete wall stood in his path, he simply walked through it, the molecular structure of the stone dissolving into dust around his shoulders.

When a patrol of mercenaries raised their magic rifles to stop him, Rudy didn’t even look at them. A wave of localized gravity crushed them into the pavement, flattening them into smears of blood and shattered bone before they could pull their triggers.

He moved like a silent god of death. No grand entrances, no dramatic speeches. Just a terrifying, unstoppable force of nature heading straight for the broadcast tower.

Deep inside the tower’s fortified command center, Scott sat in a leather chair, his feet kicked up on a console surrounded by glowing holographic screens. He was watching the stolen data from Reina’s servers trickling in with a smug, arrogant grin plastered across his face.

The heavy steel blast doors of the command center suddenly imploded.

Thick metal tore like wet tissue paper, the shrapnel flying past Scott’s head and embedding deeply into the concrete walls.

Scott jolted, knocking his chair backward. He scrambled to his feet, his eyes wide with shock as the dust cleared.

A lone man in a dark, perfectly tailored suit stepped over the ruined threshold. His face was entirely devoid of emotion.

"What the fuck?!" Scott yelled, his hands instinctively glowing with his B-Rank Technomancer mana. "Who the fuck are you?! How did you get past the wards?!"

Rudy didn’t say a single word.

He just raised his right hand.

Scott opened his mouth to shout for his guards, but the words died in his throat. An invisible, telekinetic vice clamped around his entire body, lifting him three feet off the ground. The smug arrogance vanished, instantly replaced by sheer, suffocating panic.

"Hey! Put me down! Do you know who I am?!" Scott screamed, struggling violently against the unseen grip. "I run this sector! Let me go!"

Rudy’s expression remained deadpan.

Then, he flicked his wrist.

Scott’s clothes were instantly shredded into ribbons, leaving him completely naked and exposed in the center of the room. The B-Rank mana he tried to summon was crushed back into his pores by the sheer, crushing weight of Rudy’s aura.

Scott thrashed frantically in the air. "What are you doing?! What do you want?! I have cores! I have data! Just tell me what you fucking want!"

Rudy ignored the pathetic bargaining.

He didn’t even view Scott as a person.

With a slow motion of his fingers, Rudy reached out with his telekinesis and began to dismantle the massive server racks lining the room. Heavy copper cables, strips of sheet metal, and thick fiber-optic wires ripped themselves free from the walls, writhing in the air like mechanical snakes.

"No! Wait! Stop!" Scott shrieked, his confusion morphing into pure terror as the metal snakes turned toward him.

Rudy clenched his fist.

The wires and metal violently pierced Scott’s flesh.

Scott let out a bloodcurdling, inhuman wail. The thick copper cables drove straight through his forearms, wrapping tightly around the exposed bone. Fiber-optic lines slithered into his open wounds, burrowing deep into his nervous system, directly linking his pain receptors to the ruined technology of the room.

Rudy worked in absolute, terrifying silence. He manipulated the metal and flesh with the precision of a master surgeon and the cruelty of a demon. He forced Scott’s body into a grotesque, kneeling posture.

The posture of a beggar, a fool forced to eternally grovel.

"WHY?!" Scott sobbed, blood pouring from his mouth and eyes. "I don’t even know you! PLEASE!"

Even though Scott hadn’t done anything yet, Rudy had no intention of sparing him. He had tried sparing him in the previous timeline before and nothing had changed. Even if Scott’s intentions were different in this timeline, it didn’t matter..

’He still has to pay for his sins in this life and every life.’

Rudy snapped Scott’s femurs, bending his legs backward so they fused perfectly with the steel grating of the floor. He took the jagged husks of the server racks and drove them straight through Scott’s back, bolting his spine to the heavy machinery.

The pain was beyond anything a human mind could comprehend. Scott’s vocal cords tore as he screamed, his cries turning into wet, guttural gargles of pure agony.

But Rudy wasn’t finished. The original Statue of Fool’s Pride was just a prison. This was a masterpiece of the post-apocalyptic era.

Rudy tapped into the localized mana grid of the tower. He wove a complex, S-Rank healing array directly into the metal grafted inside Scott’s body. The spell would constantly regenerate Scott’s torn flesh, bone, and blood, perfectly matching the speed at which the metal tore it apart.

He was essentially turning Scott into a living, screaming battery. The agony generated by his linked nervous system would power the neon lights of the ruined tower above them for the next hundred years.

Scott’s eyes rolled back into his head, his body locked in a state of eternal, seizing torment. His mind was utterly shattered, reduced to nothing but a continuous broadcast of absolute pain.

Rudy lowered his hand and stepped back, his expensive shoes crunching on the broken glass and blood pooled on the floor.

He looked at the grotesque biomechanical sculpture.

"The Monument of the Siphoning Fool." Rudy named it.

It was far more visceral, far more permanent than the one he had built in the previous timeline. Scott was no longer a threat, but just a piece of screaming furniture.

Without uttering a single syllable from the moment he arrived to the moment he finished, Rudy turned around and walked out of the command center.

He left the ruined tower behind, the muffled scream of the living statue echoing faintly in the zone. It was time to head back to Reina’s pool and collect his real reward.