In… out…In… out…
Erika forced himself, with the last dregs of his will, to steady the chaotic rhythm of his breathing. His lungs felt like broken bellows, each expansion bringing the taste of blood and pain. But he had to latch onto something, even if it was just the beat of his own breath. Gradually, that heart which had hammered wildly against his ribs seemed to grudgingly follow this artificial rhythm, settling—unevenly, reluctantly—into something less frantic.
Settling? No.Just… not exploding. Yet.
Aftermath. The cold, delayed terror of it finally washed over him now, more chilling than the suffocation had been.
Lynus.
That name, that face that shifted between brilliant and contorted, that inhuman interest in the pale blue eyes… Fear. Yes, fear. Fear of that obviously unhinged mind, fear of that burlap sack in his hands, fear of those cold, hard metal things inside it, whose purpose he couldn't guess.
What if…What if he got bored with the sack?
His gaze swept over the items Lynus had thrown aside, now scattered on the floor—metal boxes, strange rolls of tape, tools gleaming with a cold light… Which one would be next?Pulled over his head? Pressed into his skin? Inserted… somewhere?
No…Or maybe… after he got bored with those too…
Erika shuddered, cutting off the thought. A faint whimper caught in his throat, and he bit his lip to stifle it.
It couldn't be… right?
Maybe he'd be the one who got boring first.His consciousness would scatter like it almost did just now.Or… worse.
Become like Lynus… like that?
A mind filled with incomprehensible shrieking and cries of "Faster!", going mad pounding walls, treating agony as a game…
Was that what he wanted?To turn others into… that?
He didn't know.
Erika didn't know. His mind felt like it had been bagged and shaken; only fragments remained. Fragments of pain, of cold, of darkness, and echoing shards of Lynus's laughter.
The knocking…That sound. Knock. Knock. Knock.
What did it mean? A savior? Something worse? Or just another procedure?
Impossible. Couldn't count on it.
Counting on something unseen, something unknown—that kind of thing… was probably beyond what he could imagine.
More likely… it would just drag him somewhere deeper… somewhere he couldn't even conceive.
His trembling gaze drifted past the cold clutter on the floor, finally landing on the sister still standing motionless not far away—Sela.
Her eyes were downcast.As if nothing had just happened.As if his terror, his suffocation, the blood and tears on his face, were just air.
No response.There never had been, from the start.
Erika shut his mouth, then squeezed his eyes shut too—only to snap them open again instantly, the darkness triggering bad associations.
He slumped in the wheelchair. His gasps gradually weakened into stifled, hitching breaths.
The places on his face scraped by metal burned. His head still spun. The taste of iron coated his tongue.
The room was large, empty, cold.
He was utterly alone in his fear.
Waiting for the next round of "play" to descend—who knew when, or in what form.
"Sela."
Erika mustered all his strength, forcing the sound out, low and hoarse, a dying animal's whimper from his dry, aching throat.
No response. Sister Sela remained with downcast eyes, a statue devoid of hearing.
"Sister Sela."
He raised his voice a fraction, a thread of desperate hope woven into the attempt.
Still no response. Her silence was a cold, smooth wall, absorbing and extinguishing his feeble call.
Despair, cold as tidewater, instantly drowned that pitiful scrap of hope. Erika pushed out the words with the last air in his lungs:
"Lord Sela!"
The sound bounced faintly in the vast, empty room before fading.His desperate cry shattered against that invisible wall of silence, crumbling into dust.
Still. No. Response.
When would Lynus return? To continue his jerking, manic "game"?The thought coiled in Erika's heart like a cold viper.
But he quickly realized that dwelling on it didn't matter anymore.
Thinking, guessing, fearing—all these internal activities felt utterly pale and powerless now.
Because he had lost everything—strength, freedom, dignity, even clear, coherent memory.
He had lost any remaining capacity for resistance, whether it was physical struggle, verbal argument, or even defiance in his gaze. All of it seemed to have been ground to nothing in the suffocating torment and the complete indifference that followed.
He was just a breathing, pain-feeling object, strapped to a wheelchair.
A wave of unprecedented exhaustion washed over him.
He reopened his eyes—which had been trying to focus on Sela—and let his gaze fall emptily on the cold air before him. A nameless, almost unconscious irritation and extreme revulsion toward his situation coalesced into a weak surge of strength.
He pushed back hard against the wheelchair, within the limits allowed by the restraint garment, twisting his bound torso in a purely venting, mindless wriggle.
However, this tiny, impulsive motion triggered an unexpected consequence.
The wheelchair beneath him, at the moment of his shifted weight and twist, lost its delicate balance.
A sensation of weightlessness seized him!
The wheelchair didn't tip sideways.
It went backward—in the direction his back was facing—irreversibly tipping over.
"Uh—!"
Erika didn't even have time to cry out. The instant he felt the imbalance, he instinctively squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the searing pain of his back or skull hitting the hard floor—and whatever worse might follow.
The expected impact and pain didn't come immediately.
There might have been a rush of air by his ear. Or maybe not.
Time seemed to stretch in that moment of weightlessness and darkness.
Trembling, he opened his eyes.
The cold ceiling he anticipated wasn't there.
Instead, filling his vision was an inverted—yet unnervingly clear—face.
The face of Sister Sela.
Somehow, at some impossible speed, she had appeared in the path of his fall. Now she was kneeling on one knee, one hand bracing the top of the wheelchair's backrest, the other hovering at its side.
With inconceivable speed and precision, she had stopped the chair's complete backward crash at the last possible instant.
The wheelchair hung at a dangerously suspended angle, neither upright nor fallen, its balance maintained solely by the force of her grip.
Erika lay nearly supine in the tilted wheelchair, his view from below meeting Sela's downward gaze head-on.
Her face still held little expression.No alarm.No strain.Not even reproach.
Her breathing wasn't disturbed in the slightest.
Only those pale eyes—at this close distance, from this inverted angle—looked directly into Erika's own, wide with terror and disbelief.
In the inverted world, her face seemed unreal.
Erika could see each of her lowered lashes.Could smell the familiar, clean scent of soap on her, mixed with the cold air of the room.
She didn't speak.
She simply held.And watched.
The precarious tilt of the wheelchair left Erika rigid, even his trembling forgotten.
He lay there, staring up at Sela's inverted face, his mind utterly blank.
This accidental loss of balance hadn't ended in pain.
Instead, it had frozen into something far more unnerving—a suffocating, impossible still frame.