After a brief respite, before Erika could recover from the unnatural sensation of the icy thorns within his body and the residual agony in his shoulder, a new development descended.
The blindfold pressed tightly against his face was gently lifted away.
Light.
Violent, concentrated, a white glare so intense it bordered on brutality, like a spear of solid radiance, pierced straight into his utterly unprepared pupils.
"Ngh!"A short grunt of pain escaped Erika. His eyes instinctively squeezed shut, his head twisting to the side in a futile attempt to escape. But immediately he realized that even this feeble reflex of avoidance was impossible—
His head was securely locked in place by some solid, ice-cold apparatus gripping him from behind and both sides. His neck and the back of his skull were pressed tight against a curved metal brace, utterly immobile, forcing him to face the light source head-on.
His vision dissolved into a searing chaos of blood-red and blinding white. Even with his eyes closed, the intensity of the light burned straight through his eyelids, bringing relentless stabbing pain and involuntary tears.
"Open your eyes."
The voice was flat and emotionless—not a mind-link, but spoken plainly into the air.
Erika kept his eyes clenched shut, his body's instinctive self-protection resisting.
Then the hands came.
Not the large hands from before, but another pair—more dexterous, colder, gloved. They pressed against his cheeks without the slightest gentleness. Thumbs forced down along the edges of his upper eyelids while the other fingers hooked beneath his lower eye sockets.
With an unyielding precision that felt closer to surgical instrumentation than touch, they pried his eyelids open and fixed them in place.
His vision was once again drowned in a sea of blazing white. The sudden stimulation sent knifing pain through his eyeballs, tears bursting forth in torrents as his sight warped and smeared.
This was only the beginning.
The hands did not withdraw. Instead, he felt cold frames with fine metallic structures fitted snugly around his eye sockets, followed by the faint, unmistakable click of a lock engaging.
Some kind of auxiliary device had been mounted.
It perfectly secured his upper and lower eyelids, rendering it physically impossible for him to close his eyes.
All physiological defense mechanisms were stripped away.
Now he could only stare, eyes forced wide, directly facing the light that continued to scorch his retinas.
Tears streamed like a breached dam, spilling uncontrollably down his cheeks. Some dripped onto the metal apparatus pinning his head in place; others slid down his neck. At first they still blurred his vision, but under the constant evaporation of the intense light and the device's rigid hold, even a stable tear film failed to form.
The surface of his eyes began to burn with dry, abrasive pain, as if sand had been rubbed directly into living tissue.
He could blink—but only weakly, incompletely. Each attempt brought no relief at all, only fresh torment.
Behind the blinding glare, vague human silhouettes could just barely be made out. They stood beyond the light source, swallowed by the halo of brilliance and the distortion of Erika's tear-soaked vision—reduced to nothing more than blurred outlines.
Silent. Motionless.Like statues observing an experiment. Or a ritual.
Then, that familiar weight—carrying an absolute sense of power—descended once more.
The large hands settled steadily, almost gently, upon Erika's shoulders. There was no crushing grip this time, only light contact, palms resting directly over the still-throbbing areas that had been brutalized earlier.
That touch alone was enough to make his entire body lock rigid. Within him, the icy thorns trembled faintly, as if responding.
Compared to the torture inflicted upon his eyes, this seemingly "gentle" contact was a deeper threat—a reminder that greater pain and absolute control could return at any moment.
Physical agony and psychological terror intertwined.
What little will Erika had left began to crumble under the scorching light and the constant flood of tears. From his throat came broken, trembling breaths edged with a sob—a plea born purely of instinct, drowning any remaining calculation or dignity.
"Stop… please… I beg you…"
His voice was hoarse, shaking, mixed with tears and saliva spilling from his mouth he could no longer close—utterly undignified.
There was no response.
The light remained.The figures remained.The hands on his shoulders remained.
His pleas sank like stones into a bottomless sea, stirring not even a ripple. The others seemed certain he could not resist—and that his cooperation was unnecessary.
Or perhaps watching his physical collapse and the stripping of his dignity was itself part of the objective: a cold, observational form of cruelty.
From prolonged exposure, dark spots and warped color smears bloomed across his vision. The edges of his sight dimmed. The pain within his eyes deepened into something internal, as though his eyeballs themselves were being slow-roasted from the inside.
The tears had dried up, leaving only searing, raw pain. Every weak, incomplete blink delivered a fresh spike of suffering.
He felt like an insect pinned to a specimen board, roasted beneath a spotlight—every struggle exposed, every vulnerability magnified.
The metal fixing his head, the device prying open his eyes, the hands on his shoulders, the blinding light, the silent observers—together they formed a precise, merciless ritual, one designed to reduce him to an object and dismantle him piece by piece.
Time lost all meaning in the pain. Each second stretched into an eternity of torture.
Just as his optic nerves seemed on the verge of burning out entirely, his consciousness shoved toward the brink of chaos by sheer suffering—
The light went out.
No gradual dimming. Just instant, absolute darkness, as if his eyes had been violently torn away.
But the darkness brought no relief.
The extreme contrast—plunging from relentless brightness into sudden black—sent violent vertigo crashing through him. His vision filled with madly flickering afterimages, shapes and colors exploding and collapsing in the void.
Those phantoms writhed like ghosts in the darkness, accompanied by the persistent internal pain, as if his eyes had been branded with a hot iron.
Erika's eyes, still mechanically forced open, could not close. They stared blankly, uselessly, reflecting this grotesque inner hell conjured by his damaged visual system.
The hands on his shoulders gave a light pat, almost casual.
As if to say:Phase one complete.
Then the hands withdrew.
In the darkness came the faint rustle of fabric, followed by steady footsteps receding into the distance.
Erika remained bound to the cold chair, eyes held open by machinery, tear tracks streaking his face.
His eyes burned—dry, raw, agonizing. The afterimages clung to his vision like a curse, replaying their silent madness. The memory of the hands on his shoulders lingered, like something alive, pulsing faintly in time with his still-racing heart.
He did not know where he was.He did not know the purpose of the "light interrogation."He did not know what awaited him next.
But one thing was unmistakably clear:
He was being dismantled. Systematically. Step by step.
From body.To power.To dignity.Down to the most basic senses.
And this was only the beginning.
The extinguished light was merely an intermission—perhaps to let him "adjust" to the darkness, or to prepare him for the next, even more precisely calculated deprivation.
In the darkness he could not escape——Erika lay like a hollowed-out, restrained, and displayed shell.
Only the searing pain deep within his eyes, and the madly flickering afterimages, reminded him that something called the self was being stripped away—thread by thread.
"Damn it all…"
Erika gasped in the absolute darkness and the whirlpool of madness from visual afterimages, trying to grasp a coherent thread of thought to combat the pain ravaging his entire being. The burning pain in his eyes, the dull ache deep in his shoulder blade, the sensation of icy thorns slithering slowly within his torso… they wove together into a dense web of agony, binding him tightly. For a fleeting moment, an absurd thought surfaced—perhaps it would be cleaner to have his remaining left arm removed too, if only to find some peace amidst this all-encompassing torment.
But this ravaging pain, beyond being mere torture, also acted like burning red needles, piercing through the foggy perception caused earlier by weakness, drugs, and emotional shock, bringing a cruel clarity.
It was precisely this clarity that made him suddenly realize a previously overlooked detail—or one obscured by subjective fear.
This place… was wrong.
Deeply wrong.
This wasn't the Sanctum. At least, not the Sanctum he had known before.
In the Sanctum—that place ruled by the Auric Creed, where everything ran on the cold logic of the Eternal Circuit Law—efficiency was paramount, order rigid. Methods for dealing with 'anomalies' or 'retrieved assets' might be cruel, but the purpose was clear: either 'utilize' or 'process'. The entire procedure carried a systematic, almost inhuman simplicity.
But here…
This absolute darkness and restraint… all of it felt less like 'processing' and more like a display, an experiment, or a ritual aimed at dismantling senses and will. Pain was a means, a test, a punishment, but rarely an end in itself, and even less so imbued with… ritualistic flair and observational intent.
Unless… Wolfgang had lied? Were there layers to the 'Sanctum system' he had spoken of that Erika knew nothing about?
Then, where could this be?
Erika didn't know.
The pain remained, but beyond fear, a different kind of cold—born from the unknown—seeped deeper into his marrow.
This wasn't the end. Perhaps not even a prison.
This was another beginning.
And he, fixed to this chair, unable to close his eyes, unable to move, could only be consumed by the darkness while using every pain-wracked cell in his body to perceive, to speculate, to await—
The next beam of light. The next touch. The next… act of dismantling.