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I gritted my teeth, determined not to let a scream escape, not to give Ikhax the satisfaction.
My knuckles turned white as I gripped onto the edges of the cold, metal chair, each groan of pain suppressed deep within.
Sweat beaded on my forehead, trickling down the side of my face, but I barely noticed.
The only thing that mattered was the excruciating void growing inside me.
When we feel pain, we usually have distractions.
You stub your toe, and you curse or hop around.
You get a papercut, and you focus on the sting.
But this?
This was relentless, raw, and unabating.
There were no distractions from the emptiness being etched into my core.
With every surge of fear and anger I felt, the machine seemed to greedily draw out more power, as if feasting on my heightened emotions.
I had never felt so vulnerable, so exposed.
And each second felt like an eternity, every tick of the clock echoing in my ears.
A whimper slipped past my lips, and I hoped Violet hadn’t heard.
The last thing I wanted was for her to feel my pain or to be burdened by it.
But truth be told, this wasn’t just a physical ordeal.
It was psychological, emotional.
Every fragment of power that the machine drew out felt like a piece of my identity, my history, being stripped away.
The moments I laughed, the times I cried, the day I met Violet again, all were being ripped from me.
But then, there was a moment, just a fleeting second, where amidst the torment, a thought pierced through the fog of pain:
Violet.
I mustered the strength to open my eyes, if only just a fraction.
Through blurred vision and from the corner of my eyes, I saw the crystal receptacle.
The first thing I noticed was the faint glow, shimmering and pulsating like a living entity.
At first, the flow was slow, little droplets of plasma accumulating at the base of the receptacle.
But as the seconds passed and my torment continued, those droplets turned into a stream, and then a torrent.
The liquid plasma looked dense, like molten magma, each bubble and churn a haunting reminder of what was being taken from me.
The container, once so ominously empty, now glowed brighter with each passing moment, filling up steadily, casting eerie luminous patterns on the walls.
The machine hummed louder, its rhythm synced to the rhythm of my heart, each beat becoming more laborious than the last.
A numbing cold began to spread from where the machine connected to me, creeping further and further, like icy tendrils wrapping around my body.
