I watched as Kouyou's car disappeared down the street, melting into traffic, while waiting for my own. When he finally arrived, the driver hopped out of the car as fast as normal, however there was the stink of panic surrounding him. It only got stronger the closer that I got to the man. I got in the car and wait for him to sit down in the driver's seat again and buckle up before asking the obvious question:
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
I didn't need a distracted driver taking me home. While dying from a car crash sounds nice in theory, the actuality is quiet painful if I remember correctly, and obviously not as fatal as one would think.
The driver froze on the spot, but began to stutter annoyingly once he started to regain his senses.
"Spit it out," I growled.
"The boss has given me orders to bring you back to headquarters, and to tell you to report to the basement."
"...Ah, I see."
The 'basement' is where we keep prisoners to interrogate and torture them down there. It's the real reason that the Port Mafia building had so many stars that you have to go up to in order to reach the lobby. There's at least two layers of soundproofing between the basement ceiling and lobby floor so that no outsiders can hear the screams.
He probably thinks that I'm about to be tortured by one of our inquisitors... Too bad, the bastards already done his mental scarring for the week. As the boss once said, 'you don't always have to engrave a lesson into someone's skin for them to remember it.'
"Let's go then."
—-
I walked down the basement stairs slowly, too slow in fact, but it hurt too much to move the way that I'm used to. There was a cold looking man standing at the bottom of the stairs, impatiently waiting on me to finally make it to him. His face looked like someone had carved it out of the side of a glacier with the amount of the warmth that it held. A trait fitting of a torturer I suppose.
I could tell that he didn't want to waste his time on such a pointless endeavor as teaching me how to torture and interrogate people.
Good thing I'm a fast learner.
The man jerked his head, beckoning me to follow him as he strode down the dimly lit hall, deeper into the endless darkness. There was no point in avoiding the inevitable, so I did as told and followed the man.
We went down a set of stone stairs, down into the older part of the building, stopping outside of a cell door a few doors down from the entrance. The interrogator turned and looked at me, looking me in the eye for the first time since I got here.
"I don't care who you are, or why the boss himself assigned me to do this, but I'm supposed to teach you how to extract information, so either learn through practice like this, or being practiced on," the man growled. I thought about a snarky reply I could give the man, but fought back the urge.
Torture is a useful skill after all.
"Right."
He nodded, pleased with my easy compliance. "I want to see what you know first, so they'll be your test subjects for today," he said, pointing through the one way glass in the door. There were five men in there, each of them either roaming the small room or sitting down and staring at nothing.
"Here." He handed me a small dagger not much shorter than the one Annabeth has.
I took it, experimentally twirling the blade in my hands. It felt... nice. It wasn't Riptide, but it was a feeling that I didn't hate. The interrogator had a weird look in his eyes when he looked at me doing this, it was as if he was reappraising my worth.
"What information do you need?" I asked, turning my attention back to the five, studying them while tucking the blade away.
The man clicked his tongue, annoyed at my useless question. "We already got everything out of them that we need. Like I said, they're your test."
Cause as much damage as possible, got it.
I asked one last question before going inside:
"Do you have any handcuffs?"
—-
Third person POV
The door slammed open as a boy no older than fifteen was shoved harshly inside the room, falling onto his side with a loud smacking noise. The men in the cell began to smile cruelly to themselves, something that they were sure that the boy on the ground didn't know they were doing.
All of them had one thought on their minds:
This is going to be fun.
"Here, let me help you up," one of the men sneered, going to the boy and pulling harshly on his arm. It'd been a long time since he had any entertainment.
"Looks like we have a brand new plaything," one of the other men added, smiling like the Cheshire cat. He walked up along his friend, enjoying the way that the boy flinched away when he dragged the back of his hand along the boy's cheek.
The boy tried to pull away from the two of them, that was when the five prisoners heard the clinking of metal on metal. The boy was in handcuffs, something none of them had to deal with. Something that made him much easier prey.
"If this is a prize for talking, then I think we should have caved in earlier," a third man said, all but licking his lips as he joined the other two.
The boy shook in the man's grasp, seemingly too scared to move a muscle. This made the men in the room laugh.
"He can be our little freak," the fourth man said, joining the growing circle around the boy.
The first man let the boy go, knowing that he had nowhere to go. Not that there was much space in the first place, the cell was just bigger than a large bathtub.
"Freak...?" The boy whispered brokenly as he finally looked up at the men surrounding him. "I-I can be your freak show, just don't hurt m-me," the boy pleaded, his voice shaking with fear.
The men in the circle all smiled like a four headed demon.
"I like this one," the third man said.
The boy looked at him, the fear in his eyes overwhelming, but the boy still stepped towards the third man when he called him over. The boy stopped just a step or two away from the man, looking away once again.
The man opened his mouth to say something to the teen, but the sound of metal was heard instead. The noise was loud enough to draw everyone's attention away from the boy to the object laying at the boy's feet: the handcuffs.
Using this moment, the boy moved like a blur, pulling out a small blade out of nowhere and stabbing it into the man's chest in the same move. The dagger was angled carefully, piercing the heart. The man looked into the boy's eyes as he went into shock, but there was only one that he could see, but there was nothing in the eye as the teen twisted and pulled out the dagger, watching the man crumple to the ground.
"Creep," the boy cursed, all hints of fear and any other emotion gone from his voice.
Two of the other men in the circle stumbled back, away from the boy with blood dripping from his hands. The logical part of their brains told them that he was just an underweight teen with a knife, but when they looked at him, all they could see was a monster pretending to be a boy.
The other man in the circle, the one that first grabbed the boy, surged towards the teen without fear. The boy had killed his friend, the least he could do was kill the small bastard.
What the man didn't know was that he was up against a boy that'd been taught to kill since he was twelve, a boy that hates pain and will do anything to avoid it.
The man raised his fist, pulling it back as far as he could in the tight space that he was given, and swung at the slender teen. He was ready, his weight distributed in a way that would allow him to dodge to either side, following the direction that the boy dodges to. However, the boy didn't move, he stayed rooted where he was, only raising his hand as if to block the man.
The man continued forward, not caring if the boy was suddenly acting cowardly. He didn't notice the way the boy moved just slightly to the side so that the fist would go over his shoulder, or the way the boy flicked his wrist as he got closer. He didn't notice any of this and that was the reason that he ended up with a knife through his neck, drowning in his own blood.
One of the other two remaining from the circle lunged at the boy, trying to take him by surprise like he took them, but the teen only sidestepped the man. He let the man trip over the bodies behind him, even went as far as to help the man down by grabbing his head and knocking it into the wall.
The last of the four men that made the circle saw the boy's back turned to him and tried to do what his friend had failed to and surprise the slender teen. He latched himself onto the boy's back, weighing the malnourished teen down. But the boy had fought creatures bigger and stronger than the man latching himself to the teen's back.
The boy let them fall to the ground, using the momentum to roll out of the man's grasp. There was a sickening crack as the man's head hit the ground. The boy looked at the man, noticing the way that his eyes were still moving and the way he seemed to be attempting to stand. The boy surged forward and grasped the man's face, lifting it and bashing the man's head into the ground until he stopped moving.
The teen leaned over, grabbing the dagger that had fallen in the struggle, slamming it into the soft spot where the head connects to the neck, killing the man that had been knocked out earlier.
There was blood all over the boy when he stood up and looked at the fifth man in the room, the only one that hadn't moved or said a word the entire time that he'd been there. He knew what the man was going to say before he even spoke.
"What are you, some kind of demon?"
The boy wiped away the blood that was on his lips with the back of his hand while stepping over the bodies around him. "Do you really have the right to call me that when you just stood there this whole time, watching them die?"
There was an inhuman smile on the boy's face, it was what convinced the man that the being before him wasn't human. There was no way that a human could look like that, not while still being able to call themselves human.
"You little freak," the man growled, stepping towards the boy.
The boy only smiled at the man's show of anger. "Now now, you've gotta come up with something better than that, I've been called worse by seventh graders."
The man watched as the boy seemed to kick his feet uselessly, but he didn't notice the hand cuffs that flew into them, not until they were on the man's wrists.
"I think I'm going to have some fun with this," the boy said, putting a finger under the man's chin. "You're my test subject after all."
Outside the room, a man was watching this all through the one way glass. Watching the boy that he had dismissed as useless tear through the five men all taller than him and each easily double the boy's weight.
It was beautiful destruction, but what was better was what came after.
The boy strung the handcuffed man up on one of the hooks that he found nailed into the wall. The man fought against him, but a dagger pressed deeply into his throat was enough to keep him docile. The interrogator outside the room watched as the boy sliced away at the older man. The boy handled the blade with practiced hands, knowing just where and how deep to slice so as to not kill the victim. The interrogator's eyes fell on the bandages lining the boy's body, knowing the reason for this level of knowledge.
The boy smiled cruelly at the man hanging in front of him. "You called me a demon... I think I like that title, mind if I use it?"
The boy didn't wait for a response as he moved to the man's chest and began carving through the man's screaming.
D
The man let out a blood curdling scream as the boy started carving the letter into the man's chest.
E
The interrogator smiled, enjoying the efficiency of the slender teen that he's been given the responsibility of teaching.
M
The boy laughed like a man possessed by something sinister.
O
The man on the wall cried and began begging for it all to stop, going as far as to give up information that he and his followers had refused to give up before.
N
The teen dropped his hand, stepping back to admire his handy work. In the boy's mind, the person on the wall was a very different man. The boy grinned as he slit the man's throat, enjoying the thought of watching the other man's death.
The boy stood in the room, the only living being left in a room of corpses. There was blood covering the boy's clothes and skin. It was the same blood that covered the dark stone walls, floor and ceiling of the small room. He looked like a monster, something less than human. If you were to cut the boy's skin, one couldn't help but wonder if he would bleed black. The boy resembled nothing of the one that'd been brought into the mafia building last year, nothing of the boy that left camp in the middle of the night.
He left the room before the bodies were even cold.
The interrogator smiled proudly at his newest student, a boy with much more potential for their art than he originally thought possible. A prodigy.
A demon prodigy.
"Come on, we'll get some fresh clothes," the interrogator said, leading the boy back down the hall.