A wave of stunned silence rippled through the hall as the verdict was announced.
Even those who had gathered with thinly veiled hostility froze in place. This was not how such matters were meant to end. In the past, incidents far more severe had been resolved with little more than a formal warning.
At worst, banishment had been deemed sufficient, a quiet removal that preserved appearances.
This was different.
Murmurs rose in hushed fragments, quickly suppressed by the weight of what had just been declared. Faces hardened, brows furrowed. No one had expected the judges to take measures this absolute, this final.
Anthony stood among them, his mouth hanging open, the color draining from his face. He had been the one to set everything in motion, nudging rumors forward, planting suspicion where none belonged.
He had expected inconvenience, perhaps humiliation. Not this. Never this. For the first time, uncertainty flickered across his expression, followed by something close to fear.
Axiros felt his body tremble.
Disbelief and rage clashed violently within him, threatening to tear through the control he had built over countless lives. 'Every single fucking time! Every time. Why do I have to suffer this fate?' Axiros thought of the same line he had thought countless times over innumerable lives.
Every time, there was the same reaction. Anger and Rage.
His breathing slowed by force of will alone, each inhale measured, each exhale deliberate.
As the initial shock faded, something colder took its place.
This verdict had not been born here.
The members present, every elder, every judge seated before him, lacked both the authority and the conviction to push for such an outcome on their own. Axiros knew that much with certainty.
Their hands were too accustomed to compromise, their spines too used to bending.
Which meant the decision had come from above.
From someone whose name did not need to be spoken, whose influence weighed more than truth or precedent.
A higher authority had tilted the scales long before this gathering began, and the judges had merely followed the pressure placed upon them.
Understanding settled heavily in Axiros' chest.
His eyes lowered, shadowed and unreadable, as he locked away the storm raging within. Rage would come later. Grief would come later.
He connected the dots rapidly, leaving behind just a single suspect. It was as clear as day to him. His countless years of experience pointed at a single person, his father.
'Father! You will pay for this!' He screamed, in absolute rage internally.
Emily's head hung low, her life already devoid of life. She mouthed to Axiros, "I am sorry honey, I can't be with you much longer." A single tear slipped from her eye.
Axiros, seeing this, felt a rage he hadn't known in so long rise within his chest.
He controlled it, methodically, mercilessly, burying every flicker of emotion layer by layer, just as he had done countless times before.
Quintillions of times. The process was familiar, almost automatic, like breathing after drowning for eternity.
This was not new to him.
Neither was the pain that clung to it like a leech, gnawing at the edges of his existence.
Rage for Axiros was never explosive. It did not scream or demand release.
It settled instead, heavy and suffocating, sinking into the deepest parts of his being where it calcified into something colder, something enduring.
A silent weight that pressed against his soul, reminding him of every injustice he had survived, every verdict passed without truth, every cycle where mercy had been promised and cruelty delivered instead.
He stood still, unmoving, as if carved from stone.
To the onlookers, he appeared composed, resigned, even. None of them could see the endless graveyard within him, filled with the remains of emotions he had long since learned to kill before they killed him.
Pain was no longer an enemy. It was a companion.
An old, unwelcome friend that had followed him across worlds, lifetimes, and annihilations.
---
The family head himself, John Goldheart, oversaw the execution.
As Emily's life was extinguished, he smirked. It was not a cruel grin nor a triumphant one, but the quiet, satisfied curve of someone finally disposing of an inconvenience. The kind of expression worn by men who believed their hands were clean simply because they never touched the blade.
He knew.
He knew he had instigated everything.
That he had pulled the strings from behind the curtains, orchestrating every step with patient precision. It was he who had driven Emily into despair, cornered her until her mind fractured, until the verdict became inevitable.
The court had spoken the sentence, but the decision had been his long before that day.
That man, standing there without remorse, was wholly responsible for her death.
Axiros had expected this.
There was no shock, no disbelief, no frantic denial clawing at his thoughts. He had already accounted for this outcome, already adjusted the future in his mind. The moment the sentence was declared, his next moves had been set in motion.
Law couldn't protect him nor his mother. It was meaningless before the power of money.
He did not cry. He could not afford to.
Not yet.
Grief was a luxury for those who believed this was the end. Axiros knew better. Pain had followed him across eternity, lingered beside him through endless cycles of loss and rebirth. It was an old companion, familiar, manageable.
He could endure it for as long as he wished.
He could even erase it entirely.
But he chose not to.
Because pain, unlike tears, remembered.
'For now, I need to get out of this family. It has been nothing but a shackle for me.' Axiros thought, his eyes emotionless once again.
He knew how to get out of the family.
---
One day-
Anthony, along with the others were talking about his mother once again.
"Thank god, that bitch died! She wasn't worthy of this family." Anthony spoke.
This was overheard by Axiros, as he passed by. 'Just my ticket to get out here.' He thought.
"So you fuckers don't have respect for my mom, huh?" Axiros said, as he walked up to them menacingly.
"Yeah, so what, bitch boy?" Anthony jeered.
Something snapped inside Axiros.
Not loudly. Not violently.
It was the quiet fracture of a limit that had been held in place for far too long.
He surged forward with blinding, unimaginable speed, so fast it defied perception, so sudden it left no room for reaction.
There was no power unleashed, no supernatural force invoked. He relied solely on flesh and bone, earthly, human, mortal muscles driven to their absolute limit.
And that was enough.
Within seconds, it was over.
Bodies collapsed across the ground like felled statues, the air filling with screams as delayed pain finally caught up to reality.
Every strike had been deliberate. Calculated. Each movement refined by lifetimes of combat, suffering, and repetition beyond counting.
Bones shattered, not wildly, but precisely. Joints destroyed at exact angles. Nerves struck with flawless accuracy to deliver the most pain.
He had targeted places most never even knew existed, points that stole balance, severed coordination, erased the body's ability to obey the mind. Legs that would never support weight again.
Spines that would never straighten. Limbs that would forever tremble at the memory of movement.
They would not walk again.
They would not stand.
Some would never even rise from where they lay for the rest of their lives.
Axiros stood among them, breathing steady, expression unchanged. To him, this was not rage made manifest, it was restraint finally released. He had not killed them. Death would have been mercy and a hassle.
This was consequence.
He had used but a drop of his true capabilities, but that was enough. It would do the job-to get him out of the family.
The guards rushed in at the sound of the boys' screams, but by the time steel boots struck stone, it was already over. Whatever had happened had occurred at a speed too frightening to comprehend, too absolute to undo.
They lay scattered across the ground, writhing, choking on their own cries.
"It was him-Axiros!" they screamed, voices breaking as agony tore through them. "He did this!"
They tried to move.
They couldn't.
From the neck down, their bodies were dead weight, unresponsive, useless. And yet the pain remained. Every nerve screamed, fully intact, fully alive. A deliberate cruelty woven into the technique itself.
Axiros had designed it long ago.
A paralysis that spared nothing of suffering.
The guards froze for a fraction of a second as understanding dawned, then surged forward as one. Shackles snapped closed around Axiros's arms, binding him with practiced force.
He did not resist.
He allowed them to restrain him.
Allowed the cold metal to bite into his wrists. Allowed the shouts, the accusations, the chaos to wash over him. His gaze never wavered, never flickered toward the writhing bodies at his feet.
He had done what he came to do.
As they dragged him away, the screams followed, raw, endless, inescapable. The kind of screams that would echo in memory long after the body learned it would never obey again.
Axiros walked calmly between the guards, chains rattling softly.
Pain had always been his companion.
Now, he had given it new hosts.
He was bought before the jury, guilty and accused. His eyes were unwavering as he planned all of this.
"Liam, you have committed a great sin. You have crippled seven boys, young heirs. You are hereby punished to five hundred whip lashings and are to be put in the salt wash thereafter. You will be stripped of your name, and will be banished from the mansion for an indefinite period." The jury ruled out the verdict, final in their decision.
The punishers dragged him underground.
Axiros did not struggle. He let the chains pull him forward, let the stone corridors swallow the light behind them. He knew this place. He had known countless versions of it, different worlds, different names, same purpose.
He was bound to the post and whipped.
Once. Ten times. A hundred. Several hundred.
The lashes tore into flesh with merciless rhythm, splitting skin, carving deep crimson lines across his back. Muscle was exposed. Blood soaked the stone floor beneath him. His legs were struck until they gave way, until flesh was gored and torn, barely holding together.
Yet his eyes remained empty.
There wasn't a flicker of anger. Not pain. Not even contempt.
He had endured suffering trillions of times worse than this, agonies that unraveled the soul itself, that lasted not hours or days but eternities measured in broken realities. Compared to those memories, this was nothing.
A tickle.
When the punishers were finished, breathing hard, hands trembling more than his ever had, they unchained him and dragged what remained of his body forward.
Then came the salt bath.
They lowered him into it without ceremony.
The moment his ruined back touched the brine, pain detonated through every exposed nerve. It was immediate, absolute, white-hot agony meant to break the strongest wills, to force screams from those who believed themselves unbreakable.
Axiros did not flinch.
He did not gasp. He did not cry out.
He simply endured, breathing slow and steady as the salt invaded every wound, every torn fiber of muscle. His body reacted, tremors, involuntary spasms, but his mind remained distant, detached, far removed from the suffering it inhabited.
To the punishers watching, it was unsettling.
To Axiros, it was familiar.
Pain was not punishment to him.
It was memory. It was proof of his survival.
He merely smirked and said, "Looks like this is all this family can do. A bunch of fuckers."
This angered the punishers and caused to them to grit their teeth in frustration.
They left him to suffer in the salt bath for hours, before deciding to come back.
They didn't realise that it was utterly meaningless to do so as pain was nothing but a close companion for Axiros.
They freed him from the post and let him go, tattered and ruined.
He was immediately escorted by guards outside, to the exit of the mansion. He was thrown out, with nothing to his name.
He simply smirked once he was out. He had time to wear fresh clothes before he was thrown out.
"Looks like all those days of saving and investing saved my ass. It's time to execute Plan A." He told.