Challenge Accepted

It feels like I've been here for ages. How long has it been since she first pinned me down? A day? A week? I genuinely can't tell anymore. At first, I begged. Then I tried force. Nothing worked. She just kept smiling with her eyes closed, mumbling to herself. Just when I was about to give it all up, she opened her eyes and looked at me—red eyes, glowing red eyes, sharp as daggers, piercing my soul.

I felt so dejected. What was I even going to do now? Would I become her pet, her plaything? What will my life become?

"My Akoni," the lady said, breaking the deathly silence.

"Why are you so quiet? Are you bored?" she continued.

Having no strength left to give a genuine answer, I spoke only four words.

"Please kill me, Eliza," I said weakly, as tears soothed my dried-out eyes.

Her face grew concerned as she rushed to clear away my tears and comfort me.

"Why would you say that? I'm here for you. You're safe. I won't hurt you anymore, I promise. Those were just tests."

I let out a strong sigh, realizing I couldn't reason with her being this indirect. Staying on this bed so long, I started to fear starvation—but it never came. Having to bear her weight so long, I started to fear fatigue—but it never came. Why?

From the moment I left the cave, my life has been shrouded in darkness. It's about time she did me a favor and cleared things up.

"Eliza, do you know how long I have been laying here?" I asked, not expecting a sensible answer. Nothing about her makes sense.

She grumbled, turning her gaze to the window before answering in a melancholic tone.

"Six whole days. You have been laying here... for six... days," her eyes widened with morbid curiosity.

Just as she realized something, she leapt off the bed and ran to her desk, throwing papers all over the room, searching for something with an urgency I never thought this woman could possess.

A bit scared of the truth starting to unfold before me, I spoke for what I hoped would be the last time.

"Eliza!" I shouted, my throat burning, my voice hoarse from all the crying. She kept searching, paying me no mind.

I got up—each movement stiff and uncoordinated. Barely able to keep upright, I used all my focus to let out these next few words.

"I passed your tests. I entertained you. If that means anything at all to you, then please answer my next question. What did you do to me?"

She finally paused, holding two papers with unrecognizable scribbles. Gracefully, she made her way to my side, blew off the dust, and threw them onto my lap, over the covers she had just lain on.

The room fell silent as the papers she had tossed into the air began to settle around me—each one a piece of the much bigger mystery this woman presented.

Struggling to make out the faded inscriptions, I focused instead on the more intact drawings. They looked like human figures, mutilated and missing several important pieces—eyes, hands—in various combinations. Strange symbols and markings denoted some sort of incantation using these parts.

This was obviously witchcraft.

Eliza chuckled, probably entertained by my confused thoughts. Then she spoke.

"To think you would take me for a witch, Akoni. As sad as it is, it seems you are quite uninformed. What you're looking at are several charts of the human body I made through my years of study."

I couldn't make sense of them. The complexity of the notations gave me the impression of a mage's diary. Concerned by what such terrible illustrations had to do with my current situation, I asked her:

"You did this to me?"

She laughed and responded coldly.

"Yes. I dissected you, Akoni. I took you apart and studied your body."

My stomach instantly turned. A sudden rush of strength filled my limbs as I leapt out of the bed, furiously attacking the lady before me. Mustering every bit of strength I could, I grabbed at her neck and tried to strangle her—a pathetic attempt at avenging all the pain and sorrow she had caused me. All the ways she had violated me and taken advantage of my weakness.

Unamused, she swatted me away like a fly and resumed her talk.

My head throbbed. I hit the floor hard and rolled back—so far away it was hard to believe it was a mere wave of her hand that sent me flying. Reeling from the pain, I closed my eyes and wished to wake up from this nightmare.

My mother had always comforted me in times like this. I felt an immense wave of guilt building inside me over her death. We would have been living happily in Jeki, but I... No, that's not important. It's a dream I can still accomplish for both of us. I just have to kill this monster. Even if I'm ruined, I should still be able to get there. I'll work for some money and see a priest to heal whatever she broke.

The lady interrupted my thoughts with a deep sigh. She shook her head and called out to me.

"Could you have a little more faith in my surgical skills? I didn't break anything."

"In fact, before I dissected your body, I picked apart your brain. To say what I found was interesting would be a massive understatement. I'll get to that eventually, but first I need to explain what originally fascinated me so much about that body of yours."

She brought up one of the papers and a pen and started to draw.

"Your heart has four chambers, Akoni. Each of them holds and moves blood to various parts of your body with the help of veins and arteries."

I couldn't understand so many things she was saying. What right did she have to use me as a test subject to study meaningless things like this?

In my anger, I unknowingly started to talk too much.

"You dirtied my body for this? You ruined my life for this?! Do you not know that broken bodies will not be accepted by any gods? My soul will rot after death because of you!"

She rushed a hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh before continuing.

"How much are they hiding from you people? You seriously believe that? Well, it's not like you're at fault."

Before I could ponder the meaning of her words, she continued.

"I didn't dissect you to figure this out—it's basic knowledge. I dissected you for a much more entertaining reason. If you would allow me some time, you will have all your questions answered."

Nodding slowly, I affirmed my willingness to learn.

"Good. You might have a bright future as a scholar if you remain this obedient," she mockingly remarked.

"Anyway," she continued, "the blood does one thing: it transports several essential components around the body—the most relevant right now being mana. Being human, you don't have a mana core to store and build up mana like, say, a dragon or elf. Knowing that, why then would you suppose your blood is so densely packed with mana? So much so that the chambers in your heart gave off so much mana decay it broke many of my mana-reading instruments when I first cut you open?"

Mana? Is she mad? I haven't been able to use magic my whole life.

"You're wrong!" I shouted.

"No master would employ a servant capable of using magic. I would have been executed if the slightest bit of mana was detected in my blood."

She smirked wickedly and remarked:

"So you do know? If I'm understanding you correctly, you were bled the moment your master took you in, right? My guess is whatever instruments they used to test your blood were unable to read the mana decay in your blood."

"Remember how I said you should have gone mad being this close to my house with the defenses up? Turns out your strange blood had something to do with that as well. A pity I hadn't found you earlier—you would have been of great use to me."

Unwilling to drag on this conversation, I knelt down and begged.

"Please just tell me what you did. I can't take it anymore. What did you turn me into?"

Her expression grew cold. Her eyes narrowed in a death glare.

"Turn you? I didn't turn you—I simply fixed you."

My eyes widened. Fixed? Does that mean...?

"Yes, Akoni. Despite having such mana-enriched blood, you couldn't use magic a day in your life. Didn't that bother you? Your peers joyfully practicing spells while you and the other rejects were forced to watch from afar. Did that not fill you with rage? Well, I solved everything."

My ineptitude... There’s no way. The doctor told my mother it was incurable. He said I was born with no magic aptitude whatsoever.

"What did you do?" I asked, cowering in fear.

She smiled and brought up the paper she was drawing on, showing me the picture.

"Mana travels through the body via the bloodstream. Irregularities in blood flow would obviously make it difficult to use magic. But your case was something I never saw coming. Your inability to use magic isn't physical—it's one hundred percent mental. You put limiters in your own mind to stop your body from using any of your mana over the years. That's why it's so densely packed in your blood. Your body, unable to process the mana like normal, grew better suited to storing it in your blood—ultimately raising your base mana conversion and storage rates fifty times more than a normal person

She stopped and looked at my confused expression, sighed, then rephrased her sentence.

"Because of something in your head, you lack the ability to process mana normally. To make up for it, your body went through many changes. To put it simply—you are a monster. To fix that, I simply did some work on your brain."

Looking back at all the strange situations I had gotten into so far, it started to make sense why I had managed to survive as much as I did. If I was truly different... However, I couldn't shake the feeling that she knew a little too much—even if she had experimented on me.

Growing tired of my stunned silence, she spoke more.

"I don't even know if you'll understand this. Your people are so backward. Anyway, I took some of my cells and put them in your head."

Cells? What is she talking about now? She put something in my head? Is that why she can read my thoughts?

"Wow, that is actually correct, Akoni. Good job. The cells I'm referring to are bits of my own body, cut from me and transf—"

"Enough!" I interjected, sickened by the horrific description.

Losing balance and restraint, I fell to the ground and began to vomit.

"You're beyond sick. What kind of animal are you? Not only did you tamper with my body—you mixed our blood? Are you mad?"

She blinked slowly, as if reeling from the shock of being directly insulted. Tilting her head, she put a hand to her temple and spoke again.

"Mad? What I did was the most logical solution. It took me a while, but I was able to remove the block by destroying and rebuilding your mind with my own cells acting as scaffolding, and your brain as reference. You see this as a bad thing? You're better than ever."

"My brain?" I asked in confusion.

"Yes," she responded ecstatically.

"This one right here," she said, as a bright light began to shine from her palms. Her hands collected a strange energy I had never seen before, materializing a ball of bloodied pink mass in her hand, shielded by a thin, veiny skin that seemed to be living.

The sight scared me. I jumped back in fear as she cackled lightly.

"Afraid of your own brain? Now I understand why you're so stupid," she mused, laughing even louder.

Looking back at the grotesque mass, my stomach sank as I came to a horrid realization.

"You removed my brain," I said, clawing at my head, an unbearable itch settling at my temple as the skin all over my body began to crawl.

"Not just that—I took apart all of you," she said, as more organs and various components of my body began to materialize out of thin air, floating around her as she walked toward me, grotesque display in tow.

Feeling my head lighten, I fell back on my butt, eyes wide open and mouth agape.

"Recreating you took a few tries, but I finally fixed the compatibility error. Using my own cells to aid your gestation also gave you a similar build to my own. I wasn't sure how that would affect you initially, but you managing to go without food or drink tells me that things are progressing quite smoothly."

A monster. She really made me a monster.

Am I now like her? Does that mean I have a chance at freedom? Who am I even going to become now?

I could feel my skin itch more and more as I thought of becoming similar to the disgusting woman that stood right in front of me. Scratching at my skin harshly, I began to feel my flesh burn as blood dripped down my face and onto my body.

Eliza lunged forward to stop me, her hands wrapped tightly around my wrists as she yelled insults at me. But I didn't care—I just wanted to burn my skin off. It felt so disgusting being trapped in somebody else's flesh.

To my astonishment—and hers—the deep red wounds on my face began to close up. Little by little, they stitched themselves back together as if nothing had happened.

Eliza grabbed my still-itching face and shouted:

"Incredible! In just two weeks, you've progressed far enough to unconsciously correct minor wounds!"

I pushed her aside and leapt onto the floor, scrambling for the pen she had drawn with and using it to stab all over my body and maim my own flesh. The cold metal tip seared both flesh and bone as I used all my strength to destroy the monstrosity she engineered—first my left eye, then my hands. Everything had to go.

She only stood there in shock as the whole scene unfolded—too stunned to mock my pathetic display of rebellion.

Exhausted, I dropped the pen and began to sob. The only good eye punished me as salty tears stung my body, drop after drop.

"Why would you do this to me? Why would you make me a monster, Eliza... why?" I called out.

Was I truly asking, or did I simply need answers to comfort my ruined soul? I didn't even know. All I knew was that my life was over. All the hopes I had of leaving the forest and making a new life for myself—destroyed by the actions of this monster.

Even if I hid, it would only be a matter of time before I was found and executed. Looking at my maimed hands, I even began to wonder if I could be executed.

"I won't lie to you and say that I had doubts about it. I knew immediately what I was going to do to you the moment I noticed your overly mana-enriched blood. Whether or not you had a choice is not even up for debate. I told you before—I will never let you go."

I simply bowed my head in defeat and laughed exhaustedly.

"Why not just kill me then? Can't you just do me that kindness?" I mumbled, as she began to pick up the blood-soaked papers spread all around us.

"My name isn't Eliza the Benevolent Demon Queen. Consider it a great misfortune that you ended up in my hands. Those gods you're so worried about, the life you wanted in Jeki, and even the state of this extraordinary body of yours—not a single bit of consideration toward any of that crossed my mind as I tore you apart and desecrated your corpse. I simply did that because I was curious. Why I was so fascinated remains even a mystery to myself. Although, I'm certain I'll find out once I spend more time with you."

Unable to find the words to counter her bluntness, I closed my right eye and simply responded:

"I see."

Resigning all will to resist, I accepted my fate as her new companion, looking out to my new master as the wounds on my body mended themselves.

"It won't be long till I become like you, right? Maybe that is a good thing. No matter how long it takes—even the most dangerous beasts can be hunted."

She smiled warmly, looking down at me as she floated into the air and spread her arms wide, accepting my hostility.

"Challenge accepted. I'm glad to see you feeling more yourself. Watching you cry and beg like a cub was beginning to get boring."

I shrugged off her taunting and confidently shot back:

"Don't worry. You will never hear me cry again."