Five days. Five days since the lights went out, since the screams started, since Kavi ceased to be a person and became… theirs. His body, a landscape of fading lipstick smears and fresh bruises, moved on autopilot. His mind, however, was a fractured landscape of static and phantom sensations. He began hallucinating. The emergency lights, always flickering, would sometimes morph into leering eyes. The rhythmic sloshing of the ocean against the hull became the sound of a thousand whispering voices, chanting his name.
His hands shook constantly, a fine tremor that intensified whenever a girl approached him. He flinched at every touch, every sudden movement, every breath too close to his ear. The constant demand, the relentless pressure, the sheer volume of desperate, hungry women had worn him down to a raw, exposed nerve.
Some girls, a few of the "Softcore Delusionals" like Élodie Marceau, the French watercolorist, tried to console him. Élodie would draw his profile in her sketchbook, her eyes filled with a mournful pity. Heather Rusk, the former Christian rock hopeful, would offer to pray over him, her voice soft and earnest, even as another girl tugged him away for her scheduled "turn." Kavi just stared, his eyes vacant, unable to process their fleeting kindness amidst the overwhelming madness.
Mona Cho, however, found his breakdown amusing. She laughed, a low, guttural sound, when he stumbled during a session. She made him kneel naked on the cold, grimy floor of what used to be a beauty salon, while she meticulously applied eyeliner to his inner thighs, turning him into a living canvas for her perverse art. "Such a pretty little toy," she'd purr, her touch surprisingly gentle, yet utterly humiliating.
Sloan Vega, ever the pragmatist, saw Kavi's deteriorating state as a threat to her carefully constructed system. She slapped two girls, hard, for touching Kavi while he slept, her eyes blazing with a possessive fury. "He needs to rest!" she hissed, her voice cutting through the humid air. "You'll break him before we're done!"
Jada Valentine, the tactical cynic, held a secret vote among a small, more pragmatic subset of the women. Some, like herself, wanted to let him rest, to preserve their "resource." Others, driven by a desperate, superstitious fear that Kavi might stop producing his "miracle," called it "wasting the miracle." The debate was fierce, hushed whispers punctuated by angry glares.
Kavi heard fragments of it, the words swirling around him like flies. Rest. Miracle. Waste. Break. He raised his head, his voice a hoarse croak. "Please," he begged, the word barely audible. "Just… peace."
He got an hour. An agonizing, torturous hour where he lay curled on the floor, listening to the whispers, the shifting bodies, the hungry anticipation of the women around him. He closed his eyes, praying for sleep, for oblivion, for anything to silence the relentless noise in his head.
Then, a hand touched his shoulder. A voice, soft but firm, said, "Your time, Kavi."
And it resumed. The endless cycle. The desperate cries. The suffocating weight of fifty women's desires. His body, his mind, his very essence, dissolving into the fevered, unyielding chaos of the Arkangel.