Flesh, Bone, and Regeneration
"Now, it's day one of the experiment. If you die, your lover is next, so please hang in there, okay?"
I was tightly bound to a chair—arms, wrists, legs, ankles, torso, and neck all locked down. I spat at them, but there was no way it would reach.
I didn't really plan on resisting too violently anyway. I had survived, and it was better to play nice and wait for an opening.
Especially with Meria's safety on the line.
"I'm not dying until I've slaughtered every last one of you bastards."
"Someone else said that before, too. Though they died after we injected them with Orc blood—their whole body turned blue, then red, and they expired. Blood was literally gushing out of every pore on their skin. Even we found it rather horrifying. Don't worry, though. You're practically a masterpiece."
And so, the "light sensitivity test" began. It was nothing major at first—poking with fingers, feathers, needles, scratching with a knife, stabbing with a knife...
*Thuck!*
"Ah, fuck!!"
Ah, that motherfucker! He suddenly drove a knife straight into my arm and scared the absolute shit out of me!
"Was that a scream of surprise, or a scream of pain?"
"Both, you crazy bastard!"
It felt more like being struck hard with a baseball bat than the agonizing, near-death sensation of a knife wound.
But still, it hurt like an absolute motherfucker...
"It seems you've become somewhat desensitized to pain. I wonder if it's because of the slime, or the succubus."
"Probably the slime, don't you think? I've never heard of succubi being particularly numb to pain or touch. Also, her blood has drifted quite far from a human's. It looks just like a succubus's blood now."
"Hmm, indeed. Transplanting the heart as well was definitely the right call. If we had only transfused the blood, her human heart would have just kept pumping ordinary blood anyway."
"Still, it's hard to pinpoint the exact cause with just this. The slime, the succubus blood, the succubus heart, the curse... which one was the key?"
"Maybe we haven't reached the answer yet. Won't we only know for sure once we slice her throat open at the very end?"
Slice my throat? What the fuck...
"Hmm, let's save that for later. It would be a waste of a subject to go that far so soon."
"Hey, my arm is going numb, so how about you—gack!"
Endel, that piece of shit, cut me off by plunging a knife into my other arm.
"Minimal bleeding... What do you think about amputation?"
"Wait, wait, wait! I might die of blood loss, you—gasp!"
Endel smoothly pulled the knife out of my arm, stared at the wound, and began scribbling furiously on a piece of paper.
"I've verified the bleeding rate. If we hesitate over every little risk, our research will never progress."
"Hold on, please, please, please, please—hngh! Heff... gasp!"
Without a shred of anesthetic, the motherfucker started sawing right through the joint of my left arm.
"Stop, please, please!! No, it hurts...!!"
As the saw teeth tore and bit into my flesh, the pain of being stabbed felt like absolutely nothing. An indescribable agony flooded my mind, making my vision blur and spin with overwhelming dizziness.
Above all, the sheer psychological horror of having a limb severed multiplied the pain tenfold.
A terror and agony I had never experienced before slammed into my brain, squeezing my heart and choking the breath from my throat.
"AAAAAAHHH!! Ah, hic. Cough!Gasp... No! It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, AAAAAHHH!!!"
Feeling as if my brain were on fire, I thrashed my body wildly back and forth, stomped my feet like a maniac, and completely forgot that my right arm had just been stabbed as I swung it frantically.
My vision went blurry. I didn't even realize my face was a mess of tears and drool; I just kept screaming.
Crunch.
I couldn't tell exactly when or how it finally came off. But as the sensation that should have been on my left side—the feeling of my left arm—turned into a hollow void, my screams began to fade.
"Ugh, hic... No..."
Should I feel relieved that the hellish pain had stopped? Or should I panic over the fact that my arm was actually gone?
Watching those bastards chatter amongst themselves while holding my severed arm, I could only pray that it would grow back.
A slime's regeneration, a succubus's... whatever the fuck, surely something would help...
My bound body slumped forward. Unable to wipe away the tears and drool, I panted heavily.
Once my vision cleared a bit and the panic subsided, I looked down at my arm. Contrary to my expectation of blood gushing out like a geyser, the stump looked like a clean cut of butchered meat, with the bleeding reduced to a mere trickle.
...Or so I thought, until I saw the floor drenched in a massive pool of blood and quickly took that back. It was a miracle I hadn't died, and a miracle it had clotted so fast.
"Since the scars took some time to heal, regenerating an entire arm will likely take a while. Let's monitor her condition for a bit before we proceed. For now, wrap the stump in bandages."
"This is quite fascinating. At this rate, I'm becoming more interested in the experiment itself than the welfare of humanity."
"Holding someone else's arm... gasp... and talking like that... you sick fucks..."
"Seeing how little you bleed, looking like a piece of butchered meat even after having your arm severed, washes away what little guilt I might have had. It's like the difference between slaughtering an animal and plucking a fruit. How is the pain?"
"Were you asleep when you sawed my arm off, you crazy bastard?"
A brief silence.
"Considering I felt like I was going to die of pain while you were cutting it, it got better pretty fast. Now it just throbs like I slammed it into something really hard, and it feels like shit. Satisfied?"
My arm still throbbed as if the saw were grinding through it, and my head was pounding, but it was at a level where I could actually grit my teeth and bear it.
"Ah, ugh..."
The guy who looked the most harmless of the bunch wrapped my bandages, but he barely slapped any ointment on the wound before wrapping it, making it hurt like absolute hell.
Just this morning, I had been hyper-sensitive from a massive surge of lust, but right now, I was in so much pain that I actually wished my libido would explode instead.
"Still, you're being treated much better than the others. We're taking care of you because you're a precious specimen. Before this..."
He kept babbling beside me, but none of it registered. A different, darker thought dominated my mind.
If my arm regenerated completely, they would only do even worse things to me. I had to endure things even more horrific than this? If they actually sliced my throat or gouged out my eyes, I might die of mental shock rather than physical pain.
I supposed it was better than not regenerating at all, but my thoughts spun in an endless, agonizing loop. The abyssal pain radiating from my left arm made it impossible to reach a conclusion.
At the very least, as long as I was alive and the experiments weren't finished, they wouldn't touch Meria.
I didn't know anything besides swordsmanship, and Meria was just an ordinary girl. The chances of us escaping on our own were slim to none. Our only real hope was for this place to get raided and for us to be rescued.
"Unni! Your arm! Your arm!!"
Lost in thought, it was only when I heard Meria's scream that I realized I had been thrown back into our cell. I lifted my head.
Her eyes wide with horror, a tearful Meria reached out to touch my left arm—
"Argh! It hurts, it hurts!!"
"I-I'm sorry!"
I had never had a limb amputated in my life, so I didn't know the first thing about the lingering pain of a severed limb. But one thing was for sure: if I were in her shoes, I would have still been passed out.
Even if my pain was somewhat dulled, having someone suddenly grab the stump like that was enough to make me lose my mind.
"I'm sorry... I just panicked..."
"No, it's fine. I get why you panicked. For now, I'm just going to lie down—ugh!"
Out of habit, I tried to support myself with my left arm as I went to lie down, only to faceplant stupidly onto the floor.
Ah, fuck my life...
It had been hurting this whole time, but now that I was lying down with nothing else to distract me, my entire focus shifted to my left arm, driving me absolutely insane.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Hoping to disperse the concentrated pain, and driven by the agonizing throbbing and the sheer stress of our situation, I began slamming my right fist against the wall. It felt like venting a fraction of the heavy burden weighing on my chest.
Meria, feeling guilty about her mistake and frightened by my angry wall-punching, shrank back and watched me warily.
I wanted to tell her that it wasn't her fault, that I was just in agonizing pain, but the sheer stress and agony left me with zero energy to comfort her.
"Ah... did I fall asleep?"
My groggy mind snapped awake. I hurriedly grabbed my left arm, but the squishy, gelatinous texture of it startled me so badly that I bolted upright in terror.
Perhaps they wanted the test subjects to sleep well, because there was only a single torch lit. Unable to see clearly, I scrambled toward the iron bars.
My heart hammered wildly with the same sickening dread I felt when my arm was sawed off. I looked down at my left arm. There, hanging from my shoulder, was a green limb that looked like melting, rotten flesh.
It was shaped like my arm, but it felt as if it would dissolve and drip away at any second. It wasn't normal, flesh-colored skin, but a green, slime-like limb.
With trembling hands, I squeezed my left arm, and the green slime mass detached, sliding down and splashing onto the floor like water.
"Ugh, AAAAAHHH!!"
"Are you okay, Unni?!"
A... dream?
Seeing myself lying on the cot, it seemed like it had been a nightmare...
Just like in the dream, I frantically felt my arm. Sensing the solid, proper texture of flesh, I sat up and stared at it.
"It's... completely healed?"
"We watched you for hours and saw no sign of it growing back. It must have regenerated while you were asleep."
Thank fucking god...
"Excellent. Now we can chop it off as much as we want without any issues."
"You piece of shit."
Knowing my severed arm would grow back lessened the terror slightly, but that didn't mean I was looking forward to experiencing yesterday's horrific agony again.
"To be honest, a single arm would have been plenty, but since it grows back this quickly, we have no reason to refuse a few more. We'll see you later."
"...Meria."
Realizing something, I waited until I heard the door click shut before turning around to look down at Meria.
"Yes?"
"Don't take this the wrong way."
She shrank back slightly, then gave a tentative nod.
"I'm horny as fuck right now."
"Huh?"