Read Novel Full Chapter 613: Inhumane Screams
Chapter 613: Inhumane Screams
Mika’s condition was beyond brutal.
Marcus had hacked away at the stumps until not even a fraction of his limbs remained—just four gaping, ragged holes pumping thick, dark crimson onto the floor.
His entire chest had been carved open; his shattered ribcage exposed his lungs, which were still steadily expanding and contracting.
His spleen and internal organs lay mangled and displaced, visible through deep, jagged gashes across his stomach.
The stench of iron, raw flesh, and open viscera filled the room.
Charlotte couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“BLERGHHHH!”
Her stomach convulsed violently, and she doubled over, vomiting bitter bile onto the floorboards. Tears streamed down her pale, sweat-streaked face as her body retched over and over again.
And then, cutting through her retching, came Mika’s voice.
“It’s alright, Charlotte. It’s alright. Let it all out.”
She looked up, tears blurring her vision, and saw him looking at her. His face, the only part of him that remained unmarred was turned toward her, and he was smiling.
A gentle, reassuring smile that seemed entirely out of place given the state of his body.
“You know.” He continued, his voice strained but steady. “Vomiting can actually be quite good for you. When you vomit, certain endorphins are released in the brain. It helps you feel better, no matter what pain or discomfort you’re going through.”
He chuckled weakly. “So vomit it all out. You’ll feel much better afterward.”
Charlotte stared at him in disbelief.
Here he was, reduced to a limbless torso with his internal organs exposed, being systematically butchered by a madman, and he was lecturing her on the health benefits of vomiting.
“Mika…” His name came out as a broken whisper. “Your body…he’s…he’s destroying you…”
“This is just a dream world.” Mika said calmly, despite his body being utterly mangled. “No matter what happens here, it won’t affect my actual body.”
“When we get back to the real world, everything will be fine. I’ll be whole again. You’ll see.”
“Will we…Will we really go back?” Charlotte asked softly, desperately holding onto his gaze, terrified to look even a millimeter below his chin.
Before Mika could answer, a dark, heavy shadow fell over them both.
Charlotte turned her head slowly, her heart dropping into her stomach.
Marcus was standing over them once more, but the panic in his eyes was gone. In its place was a slow, terrifying, sly smile—the look of a predator that had just spotted the flaw in his prey’s armor.
“You’re…lying.” Marcus said, his voice dropping into a smooth, sinister purr.
“You’re lying right now, boy. There’s no way you broke my domain’s laws so easily. Haha! For a moment, I was actually fool enough to believe you.”
“But in truth…there’s no way a brat like you could do something like that without me knowing.”
“He bypassed it!” Charlotte snapped, screaming at the killer with pure rage.
“Can’t you see it, you lunatic?! He’s not feeling anything at all! Why can’t you just accept that you lost?! Are you really that much of a sore loser?!”
She shouted, hoping to force Marcus to back down. But Marcus merely sneered, looking down at Mika with a cold, knowing glare.
“He really can’t feel any pain, huh?” Marcus chuckled softly. “Well…We’ll see about that.”
Marcus raised his butcher knife into the air. He didn’t alter the blade physically, but he dragged his index finger down the flat of the steel, a faint, dark aura flickering along the metal as he wrote a silent rule into the fabric of his domain.
Then, with a sudden, vicious thrust, he slammed the knife straight into Mika’s lower abdomen.
Charlotte flinched, but she held her breath, telling herself Mika wouldn’t feel it.
He had promised her he was immune.
But moment the steel pierced his skin, Mika’s entire face contorted and—
—he screamed.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
It was a sound Charlotte had never heard before. A sound that should not be possible from a human throat.
“ARGHH! AHHHH! ARGHHHHHHH!”
Mika thrashed against his restraints, his torso convulsing wildly despite having no limbs to aid his struggles.
His eyes, which had been so calm and composed, were now bulging with unimaginable terror. His back arched off the table as the knife carved through him.
“Mika! MIKA!” Charlotte screamed, her voice piercing the room in total panic. “Mika, what’s happening?! Why are you screaming?! You said you couldn’t feel pain!”
“Talk to me! WHAT’S HAPPENING?!”
“ARGHHHHHH!”
Mika couldn’t answer. He could only thrash and scream, his vocal cords tearing under the force of his own agony.
Charlotte turned on Marcus, horror choking her words.
“Did you…Did you bypass what he did?! DID YOU BREAK HIS PROTECTION?!”
Marcus stood back calmly, placing one hand behind his back while tossing the bloody knife casually in the other. He looked at Charlotte with an arrogant, triumphant grin.
“Oh no, Lady Charlotte.” Marcus said smoothly. “I didn’t bypass anything. I didn’t crack any code he set up.”
He sneered, his eyes dancing with cruel amusement.
“Because from the very beginning…he didn’t set up a single restriction.”
Charlotte froze. Her breath caught in her throat.
“What…?”
“There was no pain-cancellation.” Marcus declared grandly, pointing his knife at himself. “After all, nothing happens in my domain without my permission!”
“It’s my territory! No normal person—no matter how strong—can change the rules here! Only I, the king of this realm, command what is felt! It was utterly absurd for him to claim he disabled his pain!”
Charlotte’s head snapped back to Mika, who was now panting raggedly, his face pale and dripping with cold sweat as he fought for breath.
“Then…then why…?” Charlotte whispered, her mind fracturing under the weight of the realization. “Why didn’t he scream before?! Why was he so quiet?!”
Even Marcus had a flicker of genuine shock in his eyes as he looked down at the trembling boy.
“Because.” Marcus said slowly, his voice carrying an uncharacteristic weight of awe. “He was hiding it. The entire time.”
Charlotte stared in absolute horror.
“The whole time I was chopping off his limbs.”
Marcus continued, his eyes wide as he analyzed Mika. “The whole time I was carving open his chest, pulling out his organs, and mincing his flesh…he was feeling every single bit of it.”
“And he held it all in. He didn’t let out a single tear. Not even a whimper.”
Charlotte felt as though the earth had collapsed beneath her feet.
She was someone who cried over a tiny paper cut.
And here Mika was, having his body butchered into bloody pieces, bearing the most unimaginable agony known to humankind…and he had swallowed it all.
“Why…?” Charlotte sobbed hysterically, looking at Mika’s blood-soaked face. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT, MIKA?! WHY WOULDN’T YOU JUST SCREAM?!”
“SCREAMING MAKES IT HURT LESS! WHY WOULD YOU HOLD IT ALL IN?!”
Marcus paused, looking at Charlotte with a strangely soft, unnatural smile answered for Mika,
“It was because of you, Lady Charlotte.”
Charlotte blinked through her tears. “What…?”
“Think about it.” Marcus’s voice was almost gentle now—an obscene parody of kindness. “He knew you were scared. He knew you were already terrified by the situation.”
“If he had screamed, if he had shown even a hint of the agony he was going through, what do you think would have happened to you?”
Charlotte’s mouth opened, but no words came.
“You would have broken completely. He knew that. So he decided to take the suffering onto himself—all of it—and pretend like nothing was wrong.”
“He smiled…”
“He cracked jokes…”
“He comforted you while his body was being torn apart…”
Marcus looked at Mika with something approaching awe.
“He cares about you so much that he’s willing to bear all the pain silently just so that you don’t suffer any heart break.”
“It seems as if he truly loves you with all his heart…or atleast what’s remaining of it.”
Charlotte’s legs gave out.
She collapsed to her knees with fresh tears streaming down her face.
‘He truly loves you with all his heart.’
The words echoed in her skull like a funeral bell.
All this time, all this suffering and he had been doing it for her. He had been keeping it all inside.
Every cut. Every slice. Every moment of excruciating, bone-shattering pain.
He had smiled through it, so that she wouldn’t have to see the truth.
And the worst part?
She had believed him. She had felt relief while he was being butchered.
She had thought, “At least he’s not in pain.” while his nerves were screaming in silent, invisible hellfire.
“I-I’m sorry.” Charlotte sobbed, crawling toward the table as best she could with her chains. “Mika, I’m so sorry. I’m so—”
But Mika wasn’t listening to her anymore.
Through gritted teeth and the trembling that wracked his ruined body, he forced his eyes open and fixed them on Marcus.
“How…did you do that?”
Marcus raised an eyebrow.
“The last strike.” Mika’s voice was barely a whisper, but it held an edge of desperate curiosity. “The other ones—I could handle them. They hurt, but I’ve trained myself to handle pain.”
“But that last one…something was different.”
Marcus’s smile returned, devious than before.
“Oh, that? I simply added a rule to my knife. A small modification.”
He held up the blade, letting it catch the dim light.
“Whenever this knife cuts someone, the pain they experience is multiplied by ten.”
Charlotte’s heart stopped.
“Ten…times?”
“Indeed.” Marcus’s grin was predatory. “So the strike he just felt wasn’t just a normal cut through skin and flesh.”
“Every sensation—the breaking of skin, the tearing of muscle, the shattering of bone, the splitting of organs was amplified tenfold. It’s my favorite modification!”
Marcus leaned closer, inspecting Mika like a fascinating laboratory specimen.
“Which brings me to my next point…what you just did is physically impossible.”
Mika spat a mouthful of blood onto Marcus’s boot, forcing a weak, arrogant smirk onto his pale lips.
“What’s…impossible…you bastard?”
Marcus didn’t take offense. His eyes were filled with pure, academic fascination.
“You see.” Marcus explained. “In this domain, if a soul experiences pain so extreme, they die here—and their real body dies in the outside world too.”
“My previous toys always broke so easily. They would scream, their minds would break, and they would die, leaving me bored.”
He looked at Mika with something approaching admiration.
“And yet, despite that…you only screamed. You didn’t die. You didn’t pass out. You endured.”
He eyes burned with intensity.
“Do you understand how impossible that is? I’ve killed men with less. Soldiers. Warriors. People who have trained their entire lives to withstand pain. They died from a single strike of this blade. Their minds simply couldn’t handle it.”
“But you…” He laughed, a sound of pure amazement. “You didn’t even pass out! You screamed—yes, you screamed—but you’re still here! Your consciousness is still intact!”
His eyes gleamed with manic curiosity.
“How is that possible!? How can a child like you endure something that would destroy a grown man?!”
Mika’s eyes, still glassy with pain, focused on Marcus with surprising clarity.
“I’ve…had practice.” He said.
“Practice?” Marcus’s eyebrows rose. “What kind of practice?”
But Mika didn’t answer.
He was thinking about the cave.
About the darkness.
About the days and weeks he had spent cutting off his own legs, stripping his own flesh, feeding himself to monsters who would have eaten Anya otherwise.
He had felt pain then too—unspeakable pain, the kind of pain that rewired the brain and remade the soul.
But he had learned to push the pain down. To lock it away. To build walls around it so high that even he couldn’t see over them.
So, it wasn’t that he couldn’t feel pain.
It was that he had felt so much of it that pain had become…familiar. Manageable. Just another sensation to be endured and then set aside.
But the knife that Marcus was using now had broken through those walls. It had found the cracks in his armor and exploited them ruthlessly.
But even then with agony beyond anything he had felt before coursing through his body, Mika hadn’t died.
His mind hadn’t shattered. His consciousness hadn’t dissolved.
He had just screamed.
“You really are remarkable.” Marcus said, and there was genuine admiration in his voice. “I came here expecting to play with a princess…”
“…instead, I found a treasure.”
He straightened up, twirling the knife between his fingers.
“You know, I was going to kill you quickly. Break your consciousness, release Lady Charlotte, and get on with the main event. But now…”
He smiled cruelly.
“Now I want to see how far you can go! How much you can endure! I want to find your limit—if you even have one!”
“No.” Charlotte said. “No, please—”
“I’m going to break you, boy! Not quickly. Not mercifully.”
“I’m going to take my time! I’m going to explore every nerve! Every synapse! Every pain receptor in your body!”
“I’m going to push you to the absolute edge of what consciousness can endure! And then..hehe…I’m going to push you further!”
He raised the knife.
“AND WE’RE GOING TO FIND OUT, ONCE AND FOR ALL, EXACTLY WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF!”
The knife came down.
“ARRGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!”
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Illustrations have been posted in the comment section…Check them out!