Hero Academies

Chapter 19: On Our Way

Liam refused to scream as the nameless minion crushed his bones, the grip on his arm tightening by the second. He let out rapid gasps of pain when he had finally finished, releasing his iron tight grasp on him before walking away without so much as a twitch of his face that would hint at emotion. Within seconds his bones quickly healed themselves, but that didn’t make the pain he endured any better.

Sullivan, after letting him regain his stamina a bit, went straight away to testing out his powers. He had been serious when he said he wanted to study him. He was dragged out of his prison by two other minions and into a lab which was as equally white as his holding cell. The only color that adorned the room was the occasional red from the stray blood drops that occasionally dripped onto the floor.

The middle aged man called them “sessions,” but they should have been called torture.

               They had started off small. Sullivan, behind a glass wall to keep himself “clean,” explained that in order to properly study his powers, he had to observe them at work. The only thing about him that travelled to the other side of the room was his voice. His piercing eyes never left Liam, and once again he had to hold back the urge to shudder under his gaze.

Liam was strapped down to a chair, and for a moment he was afraid they would electrify him. Instead, Sullivan ordered his minion to grab a dagger and leave a sizable cut on his body. The result was a bleeding gash on his face. It didn’t hurt much, having been made too quickly to leave any noticeable pain, and as swiftly as it was made, the wound had closed up, his face unmarred by any scars.

“Hm… Interesting. I wonder why you don’t get scars. Do it again. Same place, same level of severity.”

               Once again the minion made an identical gash on his face, running along his cheek. He hissed in pain, the expectation of the wound making it hurt than more than it should have. And once again the wound rapidly healed itself.

               The “experiments,” as Sullivan had called them, only got worse from then on. From scalding burns to broken bones, he was relentless. Just like he knew they would, the injuries eventually healed on their own, but when Sullivan noticed the difference in time it took to heal that occurred the more he got hurt, the more he insisted he needed to conduct more experiments.

               It wasn’t just physical torture that he had been inflicted on him. Wanting to test out his ability to heal others, he was forced to watch innocent minions get forcibly injured for no reason, and then had to endure the pain of having to heal them on his own. During the entire ordeal he could hear Sullivan mutter something to himself and writing something down on a clipboard, and he could only grit his teeth as he waited for relieve.

               He tested his ability to heal others’ emotional pain as well. He finally figured out what the older man’s power was, or at least one of them. Sullivan was an ESPer, and he had the ability to implant memories and thoughts in other peoples’ minds. It was frightening almost, the amount of power he had in his hands because of that one ability. With it, he could reduce a man to nothing but a whimpering mess, or completely control his mind with fake memories or thoughts.

               He would take an unsuspecting minion and implant some horrible thought in his mind, whether it be a mentally scarring image such as a person being gruesomely killed, their mutilated corpse leaving raw and unsettling images in his mind, to mind numbing, depressing thoughts that could easily drive a man to suicide. As he was forced to take away their mental anguish, the repercussion of doing so hit him like a tidal wave, reverting him to the depressed and lonely person he once was, but this time much worse.