SAVE OUR SOULS

 14: Mental Torture

 It was hard to find this technology again. For a long time, he debated setting himself free from this nightmare, but then he realized — this wasn’t a nightmare! This was fun as hell!

 But it would be a nightmare for anyone he dared subject to the technology.

 It was Hajime, gullible as she was and constantly hungry for food, he lured into his warehouse. “It’s a game. You’ll get food.” And the moment she realized something was off, it was already too late and to the chair she was strapped, surrounded by the bodies of the foolish before her.

 ”You know,” he pouted, faking his attempt to draw on her kindness. “I’ve always wished for someone to share my pain. I’m stuck like this, you know? I can’t turn this off. I have to hurt people, just as I was hurt.”

 He chuckled and grinned at her. “But I can’t find it in my heart—” He suppressed a chuckle. “—to brutally torture a young girl like yourself. Not physically, anyway.”

 Wires were stuck into the back of her neck, onto her temples, along her forehead and the crown, injected by a needle that transmitted signals to her brain and back into the wires.

 ”Do you know what this do-hicky does, Hajime?” he asked, flipping on the machine of dials and switches. “This thing was what created me. Who I am. I suppose to could say it’s sort of like my mother! She taught me how to feel everything, Hajime. And she’ll teach you, too.”

 He looked over the dials with a smile. “Hm, I don’t see you smile often enough. At least, from what I know, you hardly smile.” He turned up a dial, turned down others. Any tension, anxiety, worry was suppressed and she was relaxed, even joyed, and she smiled.

 Unbirthday looked over at her face, then frowned in disgust — though his reaction affected Hajime none. “Never mind, I hate seeing you smile. It’s a horrible look on you.”

 He flipped a switch and turned a few dials up or down and her emotions began to change. Panic arose in her chest, all former pleasant emotions vanished from her mind and anxiety — no, fear completely took over her expression.

 ”Ah, ha!” Unbirthday grinned at the look on her face, taking the look at her for the moment. “A look more suitable. This is why I do what I do. You truly fear me, Hajime? Do you know what I can do to you? What I can make you? What you can become?”

 He turned back to the panel and adjusted the waves sent to her brain. Panic and fear left, and she felt absolutely nothing. Emptiness. No hope. Nothing to live for. Pure emptiness. Depression.

 ”Nice is dead,” the torturer said, attempting to remain serious. “Murasaki is dead. Koneko is dead. They’re all gone. Takahiro, too, and he was sad you couldn’t save him.” He turned to her, and she burst into tears as though she believed what he was saying.

 She did.

 He could make her believe anything. “The rest of them hate you. The ones that survived. They hate you and they’ve left you. Ah, but don’t worry. I’m here for you. I love you.”

 Slowly, he turned up a dial. A feeling in her heart. A light, perhaps. Her eyes widened and while her chest ached and the tears kept on coming, she seemed almost enlightened. She believed he truly loved her, that he was the only person left in the world who would accepted

 Then he smirked and turned up a final dial — betrayal. “No, actually, I hate you, too.”

 As Hajime fell into another bout of tears, her heart ripped from her chest in the small span of time — yet it seemed so real. Everything he said, everything she felt. It was all so real.

 ”Do you know how I felt?” he started. “Those scientists I trusted. They said they gave me life. A gift. No, they said that I was a gift to the world. I would save thousands upon thousands of lives. They said I could end some of humanity’s greatest problems.”

 He turned back to the dial. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy. They told me so. But they made me cry. They made me hate. They gave me something to love then ripped it from me forever. And the best part was that it was all nothing.

 ”And so, they forced me to feel something I was overjoyed to feel.” He turned up two dials. Slowly, her expression changed. She was no longer crying. Tears were no more. Instead, she glared…and grinned. “Lovely feeling, isn’t it?”

 He made his way over to Hajime and ran a hand through her hair. “Imagine, you and I. We could make quite the team. We could force people to experience a level of agony no one could achieve. Sadism and psychopathy, isn’t it nice?”

 Unbirthday stood back then and returned to the board. “But, there’s only enough room for one of us. Even if I let you go to be such a being, I would kill you. Or you would kill me. Either way, it wouldn’t be beneficial.”

 He reset all the dials back to their proper place. Unbirthday stared for a moment, then moved one last dial down to only half way. “I won’t let you go without some sort of payment. No one here has left exactly as they came in, and I will keep it that way.”

 Undoing her binds, he was confident she would not attack him — for she would not be able to find it in her heart. Yes, the last thing he had taken away from her was her will. Her will to fight. Her will to live. Her will to love.

 It would slowly eat away at her, driving her to the brink of insanity, pushing her over the edge she didn’t know existed — or was well aware of. “Bring me Nice’s heart and I will fix you,” he whispered, gesturing to the door. “Only I know how.”

 And after she left, he collapsed into the chair with evil laughter because if she did as he had asked, he would not “fix” her. He would force her to live with the ugly truth of what she had done. He would make it only worse for her.

 He turned to the machine, his mother, and grinned. “Have I made you proud?” he whispered. Damn, he was so horribly evil.

 9: Abacination

 The room was incredibly hot from the furnace that burned in the corner. The poker for the logs was stuck in the fire, marshmallows roasting on the end. Ratio had been awake for an hour now, bound to a table in Unbirthday’s Torture House. They had been talking.

 It wasn’t hard for Ratio to figure everything out, from the stream of blood that seemed to flow endlessly and many mangled bodies littered the floor; among them, Ratio’s imposter and pieces of Art’s body.

 ”You thought that people like me couldn’t exist, didn’t you, Ratio-cchi?” he said, breaking the silence. “It isn’t natural in human kind to be so sadistic, right? Psychopathic? No, I’m a monster. I’m not natural. I’m not human.”

 He stood up from the furnace and ate the marshmallows off the stick, making his way back to Ratio. “I’m not! Oh, don’t give me that look.” Unbirthday grinned and tapped Ratio on the nose. “But, you did find me out. I’m afraid I can’t let you go. Not alive.”

 Unbirthday held up the hot iron, still red from being stuck in the fire. “I think I’ll start…with your Minimum. After all, that’s the only way you could tell the difference between us, right?” He grabbed the eye patch and ripped it off, tossing it aside.

 Out of the drawer, Unbirthday pulled a small metallic device and placed it on Ratio’s face. There were two metal rods, and he placed one under the lower eyelid and the other under the upper eye lid, pulling them away from each other and hooking them into Ratio’s skin, forcing the eye to stay open.

 He held then the iron in both his hands and trained the tip for the center of Ratio’s pupil, the iris glowing as the Minimum activated on it’s own against Ratio’s will. Slowly, he lead the iron forward, inching closer and closer to the eye as Ratio tried his best to avoid it, without effect as the straps on his forehead and chin kept him to the table and the metal device forced his eye open.

 Finally, the iron met the cornea and penetrated the thin layer of water that protected the pupil. “Did you know,” Unbirthday began, managing to still be heard over Ratio’s screaming. “that if you stuck a hot iron, as such, into the eye, the cornea seals around the iron and the liquids in the eye boil. Do you know what happens then?”

 As on cue, the eye exploded and thick fluids shot in every direction. Unbirthday laughed. Ratio screamed. The torturer removed the metal from Ratio’s face, only to move to the other eye and replace the metal rods there, forcefully. “How do you think the world looks blind, Ratio-cchi? You would know how half of it seems, right?”

 He burst into another round of chuckles, then returned to the furnace to heat up the iron again. Slowly, Ratio quieted to groans of pain and Unbirthday began to speak again. “Stripped of your power, Ratio-chan. How does it feel, huh? It was a pathetic power, anyway. To see what’s wrong with another’s body. Eh. Could you see what was wrong with your own? Well, I guess you know!”

 After the iron was heating to a satisfying temperature, he returned to Ratio. He mounted the table and straddled the doctor’s chest, holding up the hot iron again in attempt for the second eye. Slowly, the iron pierced the cornea, making slow way into the retina. The liquids began to simmer, evidence of pain bubbling out of Ratio’s lips in the form of a hard cry as the eyeball burst.

 Unbirthday flinched and laughed, face and hair spotted with the liquid from Ratio’s eyes. He smacked the iron against his hand, mocking-threatening him with it. “Hm, I forgot to take in how beautiful your eyes were before I destroyed them. Oh, well~.”

 He stared at the other for a moment, admiring his handiwork, when he suddenly changed his mind. “No, I am going to let you live.”

 Jumping off the table, Unbirthday made his way to a nearby table and picked up a knife, then returned to his straddling position again. He placed his fingers gingerly on Ratio’s neck, then slowly and carefully cut a vertical slit down one side of his throat. “Now, I’m no doctor,” he began, poking his fingers into the slit and feeling under the skin. “but I do believe this is where the…vocal chords lie.”

 He felt around a little more, then back handed Ratio across the face so he made a sound. Feeling the vibrations of the chords, he grasped the muscles and ripped them out through the slit in a gory mess without accidentally removing the jugular, the windpipe, or the colon.

 No sound could be made. Words formed with no voice to back them. Lazily, he brought his red fingers to the mouth and placed them against his lips, taking delicious taste of Ratio’s blood. He sighed, almost dreadfully, then leaned down and ran his tongue along the slit where blood was pouring. “I should have been born a vampire,” he mumbled.

 The knife was again put to use, this time to cut the tongue from the doctor’s mouth. Once the wet muscles had been snipped from it’s place, Unbirthday tossed it aside and met his lips with a final burst of vigor.

 Once their lips parted, Unbirthday got off the doctor and began to undo the binds. As soon as Ratio began to struggle, he would strike him with the iron. Once all the bounds were gone, he grabbed Ratio by the collar and threw him to the ground, onto his stomach.

 Iron in hand, he stepped on Ratio’s shoulder, keeping his balance, and raised the iron over his head. With a wide grin, he dropped the iron on Ratio’s spine and crushed the vertebrae at the base of the neck.

 Blind, muted, and paralyzed, Ratio laid still on the ground.

 Unbirthday howled then in laughter and kicked the doctor in the ribs. “How pathetic you are! God, I could pity you — if I was capable of feeling such weak emotions.”

 —

 A series of alleys lead them into the city, both a means of escape to his Torture House and an unsuspectable way in. And Ratio couldn’t retrace their steps without eyes, and no way to speak of them or even to write them down.

 Unbirthday dropped the doctor on the floor of an alley and stared at him for a while. “It won’t end here,” he said suddenly, threateningly, kneeling down beside the other and grabbing a fistful of hair. “I’ll come back for you, and your friends. You will listen to them scream, and I won’t even kill you then. I will make you suffer for the rest of your miserable life.”

 He released the hair and the head hit the ground with a thud. The sadist walked to the middle of the alley and cried out, “Someone, help! There’s something horribly wrong with him! Please, help him!”

 Turning on his heel, he sprinted back to Ratio, stopping only once. Without looking down, he chirped with a cheerful grin and innocent eyes, “Welcome to hell!” then disappeared down another alley before those he had called for arrived to the scene.

 4: Amputation

 The inspector was tied down to the chair and Unbirthday held a miniature saw in one hand. “Good morning, Inspector Arto-chan!” He grinned and when the Inspector struggled against the binds, he slammed the smooth end of the saw into Art’s skull. “Don’t struggle.”

 However, he had barely a time to explain the situation to the uninformed Art when he felt spit against his face and a demand to be released was made. Unbirthday wiped the spit from his face and sighed. “That’s not good behaviour. Now I have to punish you.”

 When he met Art’s eyes again, he could see the growing alarm. The realization. No, he was not Birthday. He was someone else. Something else. Something unnatural. Something that shouldn’t exist. Perhaps the last thing he saw.

 ”Hm, how should I punish you, Arto-chan~?” he chirped, as though he were asking a simple question. Was the sky blue? Why, yes it was. “Oh, how do you think Nice would react if he were to find an ear in the mail. An eye? Oh! I know. A hand. Or maybe, your head.”

 He grinned sadistically. “No, no, no. I know the perfect punishment for you.” He held up the saw, eyes wild with excitement and bloodlust. “I’ll cut you up into little pieces, place you into a little gift box with a bow, and give it to Nice for his birthday. And then I’ll murder him. Oh, irony!”

 Unbirthday burst into a round of laughter, then stopped suddenly. “Ah, I don’t know when his birthday is, or if he even has one. No matter.” He held up the saw. “I will enjoy punishing you.”

 The tiny saw glinted in the light of the naked bulb above them and he circled around Art. “Where should I begin? Oh~.”

 He reached over and grabbed one of Art’s delicate fingers. “I will make this slow and painful for you. You will be begging for me to kill you before I’m finished with you.”

 The teeth of the saw dug into the ring finger, slowly cutting through the flesh and the bone. The finger came off quickly, easily, but painfully and blood was staining the concrete floor already.

 ”Such a soft fingers,” he mumbled, kissing the end of the finger, then tossing it aside. “I would have loved to have had sex with you before I killed you, but you’re too loyal to Nice. I bet those soft fingers make for a good hand job.”

 He chuckled and moved off the subject. He readjusted the grip on his little saw, then grabbed the hand of the finger he had cut off. Again, he pressed the saw against the wrist and the teeth bit in, drawing blood and cutting through flesh and slowly grinding through the bone until the limb was disconnected from the rest of the arm.

 The screaming sent shivers down Unbirthday’s spine and he burst into sadistic laughter. He ran a hand through Art’s lavender hair. “It won’t be over soon. Not until you beg for me to kill you.” Slowly, he worked his way up the arm, driving the saw into the elbow and removing the entire forearm and tossing it aside.

 Blood poured down from the elbow and stained over their clothes. “You bleed a good colour, inspector.”

 A few threats of arrests were uttered, something along ‘you won’t get away with this’, and Unbirthday laughed again. “My, you have quite a tongue on you.”

 He leaned forward and grabbed Art’s chin, pulling him into a kiss and trying to slip his tongue passed the teeth when Art bit down hard and Unbirthday yelped in surprise, jumping back. At first, he was shocked, then came a look of absolute excitement. “I think I will enjoy tearing that thing out of your mouth.”

 A hand snapped forward and grabbed a hold of his jaw, sticking fingers and the small saw into Art’s mouth. There was a struggle as Art screamed in horror, trying to pull away to the best of his ability, but once the saw found the slick muscles, the tongue came out quickly, effectively, and gore spilling out between his lips with a cry of pain.

 Unbirthday wasted no time in pressing the saw against the limbs again, ripping apart skin, scraping through bone, tearing away at the body until most of the limbs had been removed from the body.

 All that remained was the head and the body.

 It was a miracle Art was still alive, if he was. Gore had gathered all at the legs of the chair. Yet, he was still breathing, though barely. “Aw, Arto-chan. I haven’t heard a sound from you since I started on your legs. That’s not fun.”

 Unbirthday sighed and walked around behind Art. “You’re boring. I’m going to end this now.” He pressed the saw against his neck, holding his hair in a tight fist. Quietly, he leaned down and whispered in Art’s ear, “Nice never loved you, anyway.”

 Then he began to saw through Art’s throat, cutting in large motions. The last of Art’s blood flowed from the new wound as he continued to saw off the head. The saw cut through the spinal cord with a nauseating crack and the head was free, though Unbirthday struggled with a few tough neck tendons, but they snapped with some pulling.

 Holding the inspector’s head in his hands, he gently kissed the dead lips then walked to the table. He opened the cardboard box and placed the head inside, closing it, typing it up in a purple bow, and he wrote, ‘To; Nice-kun' on the top of the box.

  11: Bone Breaking

 Having the dark doctor strapped down to the bed was a difficult task, but Unbirthday knew the reward of his efforts would satisfy the craving.

 ”My, you put up quite a fight,” he sighed, sitting on the bed beside Ratio and wiping off his forehead. “I could kill you now, but I could’ve kill you a few hours ago, too.” He looked to the ceiling of the warehouse and sighed, leaning back on Ratio’s stomach lazily. “What to do, what to do? So many ideas.”

 They were alone in an abandoned warehouse, where Unbirthday had set up a Torture House for his own amusement. For when he was bored, he could easily lure any being back and torture them until he grew bored of them and left them in the warehouse until they died on their own.

 No one came around anymore.

 There was a moment of silence, then a sadistic grin spread across his face, eyes widening as an idea came to mind. “I have a great idea!” He jumped up from the bed and out of the warehouse.

 Finally, he returned with a thick sheet of metal and a bag of tools. “We’re going to have a lot of fun, Ratio~ You’ll see.”

 Unbirthday laid the sheet under Ratio’s legs and pulled out a large, flat-headed hammer out of the bag. “Do you know that if heavy pressure is applied to both side of the bone by unbreakable objects, it will snap dead in half? Oh, of course you know that.”

 Lifting up the hammer, he admired it, almost appearing normal for a moment. “If I drop this hammer on your leg, will it be enough to break it? I wonder.”

 Without delay, he lifted the hammer above his head and dropped it down on the limb with a sickening crack. The screaming was ringing to Unbirthday’s ears and he laughed almost innocently. “That made such a beautiful noise!” He bit his index finger lightly and offered Ratio a flirty look. “That might have turned me on, Ratio-cchi. You make the hottest noises when you’re in pain.”

 Again, he laughed innocently and picked up the hammer again. “Let’s do that again!” And he dropped the mallet on Ratio’s other shin. Again, the bone snapped. A horrific crush and another cry of agony. Unbirthday laughed another time, almost moaning.

 However, he didn’t stop to talk. He lifted the hammer and dropped it again and again and again and again on his shins, howling with laughter until an edge of a bone pierced the skin and blood splattered into the air, on the hammer, on Unbirthday’s face.

 He stopped then, grinning wildly — proudly — at the shattered bones and bloody mess. Slowly, he looked up at met eyes with the doctor, then slowly walked around the bed with the mallet still in his hand. He ran a hand across Ratio’s chest, grabbing the fabric and yanking on it roughly so the dress shirt ripped.

 Steadily, Unbirthday straddled Ratio’s chest and ran a bloody hand through his hair. “Are you enjoying yourself? I sure am.” And he slammed the hammer down on one of Ratio’s arms.

 Both bones in the arm cracked from the pressure of the mallet and the mattress. Then he did the same to the other arm, cracking the bones with a satisfied smirk. He undid Ratio’s binds then, finding them no longer necessary with the doctor’s handicaps.

 He grabbed Ratio by the collar and threw him off the bed, tossing him to the ground with a heave. He stood over the bloodied doctor. Then, with melancholy sugaring innocence into his voice, he whispered, “I love you, Ratio-cchi.”

 Then he lifted the hammer and dropped it repeatedly, beating the doctor with the metal head. The femur snapping, the pelvis breaking, ribs shattering with the force.

 High on the screams, the blood, on lust and gore, he continued to beat the doctor over and over with the mallet until he was lying in a pool of his own blood, reduced to a mangled mess of broken limbs and sheer agony.

 Unbirthday stopped suddenly, almost completely expressionless — from his psychotic laughter to a straight deadpan — and dropped the hammer by Ratio’s body. “You’re boring. I’m done playing with you.”