Chapter 25: 25 – The Serpent Squirming in the Trap

“Just following orders,” the Dragon Knight parroted emotionlessly, taking one of the rib-racks off of the fire, sticking it in a tarnished military mess tin, and tossing it over to Victor such that it landed right next to him. Vic glanced at the meat, then up at the knight, allowing his distrust to bleed through.

“It’s not poisoned, doesn’t need to be. Any foodborne paralytic I could use is worthless compared to my own venom. Look, see?” Burgghusen pleaded, walking over, taking the rib rack, breaking it in half, and biting off a huge chunk of meat which he swallowed without even chewing. Vic finally noticed the telltale stench of organ meat wafting from the knight.

He was obviously trying to be nice on false pretenses, but… Why? To come across as anything other than the subhuman slaver that he was and reduce the risk of a captive trying to break free? Perhaps to placate his own guilty conscience? Didn’t matter. Vic took the food, pulling out the bone and putting the meat aside. At the Dragon Knight’s raised eyebrow, he lied: “What? I have to eat bones. I’d crumple like a fucking crouton if I didn’t. But, er… This is too big. Can you break it up?”

After staring him down for a few seconds, Burgghusen just nodded and took the whole mess tin, breaking up the bones in his hands into smaller fragments and allowing them to mix in with the meat. Since he couldn’t exactly carve breakdown glyphs into these still quite large fragments and absorb them that way, Vic had no choice but to actually swallow the bone fragment by fragment, chewing up some meat before putting a fragment in his mouth to help it go down without getting stuck.

As he struggled his way through the meal, Victor pondered why Burgghusen hadn’t taken his Black Marble Tablet. While aetherwave comms were a new and not widely-known feature, there was no way he wasn’t aware of the device’s ability to store and thus conceal weapons. It was one of the, if not the oldest feature of such objects, with even ancient examples from pre-Ankhezian ruins possessing Fog Storage functionality. The Dragon Knight must’ve been terribly confident in the effects of his own venom… And rightly so, much as Vic loathed to admit it.

The whole scene felt more creepy than serious. Burgghusen just kept staring at him with those dead, emotionless eyes, which made the knight’s apparent normalcy all the more impressive in retrospect. Vic couldn’t help glancing up at him as he cautiously chewed a mouthful, as to not cut his own gums or break any teeth by biting down hard on a bone fragment. He could see the gears turning behind Burgghusen’s eyes, the emotionless, sociopathic automaton in his skull cautiously laying out a course of action.

Pick a stick out of the fire, stoke the embers, look aside for a moment, cough awkwardly, then a look back at Victor.

It was bizarre. Burgghusen almost came across like he was actually trying to be compassionate, but only almost. He even nearly came across like a real person in public, and in this very moment, he’d nearly fooled Victor as well. If it weren’t for the constant, unceasing demand from within to put that human trafficker down where he stood, he may have very well fallen for the deception. Vic knew that he didn’t have the means to kill Burgghusen, of course. Not now, not here, not in the state he was in… But that was all he could think about. Time slowed around him, as if in a continuous state of fight-or-flight, his every mental resource dedicated to devising some method to kill or at least cripple the Second Strongest Man in Arches…

…And the plan relied on what he’d done to Burgghusen previously. The scales on the side of the Dragon Knight’s neck had fallen away, the flesh beneath them calcified and crumbling with even slight movements, exposing bare meat underneath, pulsing with the Dragon Knight’s mighty heartbeat. Just puncturing the artery wouldn’t suffice; if Vic wanted to take the man down and survive doing the deed, he would have to also sever the spinal column. With how tough Dragon Knights were, that meant he would have to slip a blade between the vertebrae.

A knife in the side of the neck and a sharp tilt of the blade would likely do the trick, severing the trachea and arteries as well as the spinal cord, thus crippling the Dragon Knight regardless of how strong he was… It was only a question of where to get a knife and how to get it done.

“You’ll probably be fine, just…” the knight began talking. It was almost natural, but Vic could discern a pre-prepared speech, one that had been repeated before in one form or another. How many times had this scum-sack used this to lull his victims into a false sense of things not being as bad as they seem? “Think of this as a ransom situation. You’re a noble, they ought to have taught you how to behave as a prisoner getting ransomed. That Newman woman doubtlessly has enough money to outbid Lord Adalbert for your bill of ownership… However, you’ll still have to get bugged.”

“Bugged?” Victor questioned. His mind went back to the novels, their descriptions of bright-red insects on the backs of people’s necks that turned them into blubbering mind slaves, as well as the purple variant he’d seen in Zel’s mnemonic record.

“Hey, chin up, it’s not so bad. I had a Compliance Gu for a little, after I refused to follow Lord Adalbert’s orders once. Only lost a couple months’ memories.”

“...A little while?”

“A couple hours or so. As I said, you don’t have much to worry about; there will be at most two, maybe three hours between you getting your Compliance Gu and the auction, after which point your new owner can choose to just have the bug kill itself… Though you’ll feel that as if it was your own death, unfortunately.”

Von Burgghusen stood up again, dumping a bucketful of dirt onto the fire to put it out and continuing: “Right…”

He jabbed Vic in the side of the neck again, in the same exact spot. This time it took him two attempts to actually get through, a bone plate having already grown over the spot due to the large amounts of Ossum Vic had recently consumed and his own desire to obstruct the slaver-knight’s efforts. Was he just acting out some strange retribution for what Victor had done to him in self-defense?

The last of the numbness and weakness finally began to fade, and just as it did, Burgghusen pulled out a pair of manacles, shackling Vic’s hands behind his back before he could react.

“You’ll have to walk the rest of the way to make sure the venom dissipates properly. It’s a good two hours’ trek, so you’ll have plenty of time to get the stiffness out,” he continued, pulling him up to his feet. “Don’t try anything funny.”

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Letting out a sigh, Victor began walking in the direction he was ordered to, not an iota faster than the bare minimum speed that made his captor stop glowering at him in a vaguely threatening manner.

His head began to ache. The Tablet was drawing from him to charge for another broadcast pulse.

“Look, regardless of what I do, I have no way out of this predicament. That means using Fog-breathing to make the march easier for myself shouldn’t be an issue, yes?” Victor asked as innocently as he could. The slaver-knight, confident in his own abilities, didn’t even think to doubt the motive behind the question, giving an affirmative nod and grumble.

So it was that Victor went into a steady pace of Fog-breathing, drawing Pneuma from the air. Though the manacles were tight around his wrists, they were built for an adult man, likely being the self-same manacles used on regular criminals. With pain, effort, and magical grease, he was certain he could slip his hands free. Now he just had to build the rest of his course of action before doing anything.

A Devilbone blade grown from his own nails, imbued with Bonefire. Yes, that would do… No, it wouldn’t. What was he thinking? Entering into a contest of physicality with Burgghusen would be playing into his cards, it would be a roll of the dice that Victor could only win if he rolled sixes and Burgghusen rolled snake-eyes.

No, he had to think outside the box. What if he didn’t need to slip free of his manacles at all?

What if he used a Devil’s Tooth, grown from the nascent bone plates on his back?

No, Burgghusen walked behind him and would thus notice the bulge…

The bulge…

The pieces clicked into place.

Just as his mutation turned replaced facial hair with bone, it did the same to all other body hair; combined with the spacial enchantment of his new garments would allow him to create a Devil’s Tooth in a place where it wouldn’t be detected, paying only the cost of discomfort from having a bone rocket down his pants. With this long a trek, he figured he’d be able to pack it full of propellant and ensure it was both tough and sharp enough to bite through Burgghusen’s flesh.

He already saw it playing out in his mind’s eye: He would ask to relieve himself, using kineticism to align the Devil’s Tooth, and then launch it into Burgghusen’s neck with as much raw power as he could generate through his crude grasp of the kinetic arts, the projectile’s actual propellant serving to ensure it drills its way through the bastard’s neck.

With this plan in mind he began his opus, somewhat regretting his choice by the time he finished the main body of the construct, given that he could feel it chafing his leg as he walked, and not just his leg. At least it really couldn’t be seen as anything more than a curious outline that didn’t exactly bring to mind the image of a bone missile… At least not in the true sense of what it was. He breathed and worked to fill out the tooth’s hollow with propellant as densely as possible before he would, before its use, finally alter the shape to give its fins their sharp edges, but that time didn’t come: They rendezvoused with a group of bugmen and other Dragon Knights, at what Vic estimated to be the halfway point by the passage of time. There were two other captives just like him, also being chaperoned by Dragon Knights, who also happened to be good-looking men; one was a recent graduate of the Duma School who had joined the local Slayers’ Guild, and the other was some rando that he didn’t recognize.

The Dragon Knights were more or less homogenous, each clad in well-made plate armor with small draconic flourishes, but nothing so kitschy as what the knight-captain insisted on wearing. Vic wagered a good number of them weren’t even subhuman psychopaths, just cowards too afraid to put themselves at risk by going against their corrupt commanding officers. Conversely, the locust-men, numerous as they were, differed greatly one from the other, being entirely unlike the homogenous brown horde described in the pulps. Every single locust-man had a unique, complex pattern of plates, a subtly different silhouette, different antennae and facial features, they fit the descriptions of the Red Mantis more than locusts; they were clearly actual individuals, which only made Victor hate them and desire their deaths all the more. The fact they were individuals with agency places the onus on them, rather than their leaders, be that a Locust Queen, Von Wickten, or some other, unknown slaver.

They were using a farm tractor to tow a cargo wagon, loaded with various crates and boxes alongside cages that held two False Drakes, one green and one blue, both in much better physical states than the one Zelsys had killed back in the forest. A significant portion of the space on the wagon was taken up by something nearly as tall as those two cages, draped over with a tarp. Metal glimmered underneath whenever the wind blew.

As he walked, and as Burgghusen’s dead-eyed, apathetic glower was by far preferable to the lecherous eyes of these others, but something inside Victor enjoyed the attention; it was a part of him that didn’t demand violence the way the animal self did, but rather reveled in the idea of inflicting harm upon those who had wronged him in the same way one reveled in the idea of a succulent meal. He didn’t care to question whether this was a healthy mental outlook, and just took what he could get to keep himself more or less calm and focused in this grave circumstance.

“What now, what now?”

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