The Solitary Cell of Truth
A long time had passed since I was locked in solitary.
Yet the anxiety never once let up.
— Click… click. Click.
“…!”
In a terror so sharp it felt as if my breath itself might stop, the only thing I could do was clamp my mouth shut and endure the Stimulation Spores.
“Nngh… uh…!”
[Bitch. Heh! Sniff sniff!! This is it… yeah, this has to be it!! Sniff sniff!!]
Whenever a moan slipped free despite my efforts, the frenzied howls of the Male Dogs in heat answered from the other side.
They were right next door to the solitary cell that held me.
— Click. Click… click.
“…!”
The endless rattle of a suitcase lock tumbler never stopped.
The first day I had seen Yejin, she too had been locked in solitary and freed only by dialing the correct combination.
The password I had overheard then was definitely five digits.
The Male Dogs seemed to be spinning the lock with desperate focus, trying to hit those numbers.
“…!”
Please. Please. Please.
I prayed with everything I had that it would not open.
According to the words Leviathan had left behind, the moment that door opened, the future waiting for me was bleak.
“If the Male Dogs get you, you’ll either be gang-raped until you go mad or actually eaten alive.”
I still had not seen them with my own eyes, but the voices filtering through the wall made it clear Leviathan had not been bluffing.
[Sniff sniff!! Woman! Woman!! Sniff! Open!! Open up!! Sniff sniff! Sniff!! Woman!! I want to eat her! I want to fuck her!!]
Whatever state they were in, the ones called Male Dogs were unmistakably human.
Human men whose minds had clearly broken.
Had they been injected with some special drug? Or deliberately trained to assault the prisoners of Prison Island…?
Even thinking charitably, the best I could imagine was that they were simply the most lust-driven of the male inmates, brought here for this purpose.
But I erased that last thought at once.
If they had still been ordinary prisoners, Jaehee would never have been left so savagely wounded after they caught her.
They were people; they could see and hear. There was no reason for a person to snap another’s body or tear flesh from an ear with their teeth.
…Then again, their true nature was not what mattered right now.
What mattered was the simple, crushing fact that several of them were hunting my body from the other side of a single wall.
— Clack. Click. Click.
The lock on my solitary cell shuddered.
Would it break under that much force?
The cell was built to be sturdy, yet I was trapped inside while the Male Dogs threw everything they had into opening it. The possibility that it might give way only fed my dread.
I trembled. I was terrified.
There was no room left to lose myself in the spores’ stimulation.
Even when the Male Dogs grew exhausted and fell back for a moment, a single moan from me would somehow restore their frenzy and send them charging at the cell again.
[Bitch!! I want to fuck her!! Sniff sniff!! Hey. Turn it! Turn it! Open! Woman! Woman!!]
“…!”
I stayed curled in the only posture the space allowed—back aching, breasts crushed flat—powerless and sealed away.
Every instinct screamed to open the door and stretch my spine, but not now. Not like this.
Please don’t open.
I prayed the Male Dogs would fail.
Very rarely, when the spores’ torment peaked, a wild thought flickered: maybe it would be better if the cell opened and they simply took me.
But the memory of Jaehee’s wounds and the execution she had described wiped that thought clean in an instant.
No matter how aroused I became, being caught by them would become the worst experience of my life.
No. Please don’t open.
Please.
Still the solitary cell kept shaking; the enraged Male Dogs flipped it, threw it, rattled it without mercy.
— Thud!
“…Kyaah!”
[Woman! I heard her voice! Throw it!! Throw it harder!!]
The moan torn from me by the impact only drove them wilder. They hurled, overturned, and shook the cell that held me.
Motion sickness clawed at my mind until I thought I would go mad.
Even so I had to keep my mouth sealed, endure both pain and arousal, and lie as still as a corpse.
Only then did I understand the true cruelty of solitary.
This was not merely a place to be locked away.
It was not a place to rest.
It was a device built solely to crush both mind and body.
And so I became certain.
Solitary…
This place, living up to its vicious name, was somewhere I must never return to again….
If I kept being locked in, the odds of the Male Dogs cracking the lock would only rise, and one day I would end up in their hands, forced into something filthy and unspeakable.
It was already dangerous enough now.
The future would only grow worse.
So I prayed.
Please….
Please, this time, don’t let the Male Dogs open the solitary cell.
I had no god I truly believed in, yet I begged and begged on pure desperation alone.
Please… let me return safely to my cellmates…!
How much time had passed?
After countless desperate prayers inside the solitary cell, the Stimulation Spores never stopped tormenting me. The limited oxygen in the sealed space made me lose consciousness whenever the arousal grew too intense.
And whenever a moan escaped by accident, the Male Dogs shook the cell without fail.
By the time I was drifting in and out of a hazy half-consciousness, a genuine desire to escape solitary had taken root.
More precisely, it was a moment of repentance.
…I had shown weakness for no good reason.
And I had failed to manage the Demeanor Penalty Points that caused all of this.
Trapped here, body aching and heart constantly clenched, I had finally reached the limit of my mental strength.
The unbroken anxiety made my heart feel ready to burst; the endless self-reproach left my very existence scraping the floor.
That did not mean I wanted to offer my body to the Male Dogs.
I simply wanted the allotted solitary time to end as quickly as possible.
If they would only let me out, I would never lie again.
I would obey every word the guard spoke and give everything I had to both training and torture.
I made that vow and begged for this time to end.
Then, through the fog of my fading awareness, voices drifted faintly closer.
[You brought her?]
[Yes. We made it back safely today.]
[Good. As long as she doesn’t fall the way she did last time, the Male Dogs won’t get her. All right then, A522.]
[Yes.]
[Pull A713 out and massage her arms and legs until dinner. It’s her first time in solitary, so her body will be completely stiff. Make sure she can at least crawl.]
[Understood.]
Those voices were not the Male Dogs’ frenzy.
Familiar voices speaking to each other reached my ears.
This… wasn’t a dream, was it?
Then A522—Jaehee—received the password from Leviathan and unlocked the cell.
Light from the guardroom spilled into the solitary cell, and a familiar face appeared: Jaehee.
“…Ah!”
“….”
I almost called out to her in pure relief.
But the moment I saw her smiling yet deliberately silent expression, I clamped my mouth shut and bit down hard.
I had spent the entire solitary period repenting, yet I had nearly made the same mistake again.
“….”
In silence I let Jaehee lead me out of the cell.
“Ugh… uuugh…!”
My body was a wreck.
After a full day sealed inside, every joint had locked solid and refused to straighten. My nipples, tormented endlessly by the spores, tingled at the mere sensation of air even though they were still hidden under the prison uniform.
Then the other cellmates approached.
Yejin and Luia.
They sat beside Jaehee and began massaging my arms and legs as well.
“Guh…! Ah… ahh!”
It felt as if electricity were racing through my entire body.
As the stiffened muscles and joints were worked, strength slowly returned and I began to feel almost human again.
No… wait.
Yejin had walked out of solitary under her own power in a body like this?
I could only think she was truly incredible.
“How was it, A713? Did you enjoy solitary?”
While that stray thought still occupied me, Leviathan—who had been watching—spoke from the side.
At his question I forced strength into the body still sprawled on the floor.
I was in no condition to move, yet I had to move.
“…!”
Leaving my worried cellmates behind, I pushed myself up and crawled to Leviathan’s feet.
The moment I finally reached the tip of his shoe, I pressed my forehead to the floor in a deep bow and spoke.
“…I… have reflected.”
Exactly as I had rehearsed countless times while locked inside.
“On what?”
The expected follow-up question.
My throat was raw after more than a full day in solitary, but once the question had been asked there was no reason to hesitate.
“Honestly… I truly did not realize I was smiling at that moment. But I treated your words like a gamble and failed to trust them… and because of that I received penalty points, failed in my duty as an inmate, and could not answer your question properly.”
I laid out my faults with complete sincerity.
Even if he had never thought of it that way, I was an inmate who had failed to obey his orders and had been punished for it; that fact had to be spoken.
“While I was in solitary for that mistake, I thought about many things and felt many things. I will live my prison life diligently. I will no longer claim I do not belong here. So… so….”
I had done well up to that point.
Yet the final words refused to leave my mouth.
Just this one last part and it would be finished.
I had practiced so many times….
“Hah~ So what you’re really saying is, please don’t send me back to solitary again?”
But Leviathan was still a guard.
Someone who had watched inmates for a long time stood far above my expectations.
He read the words I was about to speak and cut me off first.
“I get the general idea. And I can tell you’re sincere from the attitude you just showed. You must have practiced a lot in solitary—‘I was wrong,’ ‘I’ve reflected,’ ‘Please forgive me,’ and so on.”
“…Yes. That’s correct.”
“But what I liked most was that you couldn’t bring yourself to say the last part. Hey. A713. Lee Nayoon.”
“…Yes.”
What was he about to say?
He stepped closer to where I lay flat on the floor and placed the toe of his shoe on top of my head.
He did not press down hard or put his full weight on me.
He simply rested it there, applying a light, steady pressure.
And yet… what was this?
This strangely pleasant feeling that felt almost natural?
“If you had finished saying everything you wanted at the end, I would not have accepted your sincerity. Why? Because an inmate has no right to ask a guard for anything.”
“Ah….”
“But you instinctively couldn’t say it. In other words, you learned with your body and through experience that an inmate must never ask a guard for something. How about it? Does that sound right?”
“…Yes. I believe it does.”
A little more weight settled onto Leviathan’s foot.
Still I did not resist.
I did not even form the thought of resisting.
As if this was simply how things were supposed to be.
Even with my forehead aching and my head being stepped on, no urge to fight back existed.
“The first time is always the hardest. Especially for someone with little experience like you—people of your disposition thrash around a lot here on Prison Island, unsure what they need to give up. In that sense, you realized it quickly.”
“…Thank you.”
“Good. Keep that mindset. Especially until next week.”
Leaving those strange words behind, Leviathan lifted his foot.
The faintly pleasant pressure vanished, and a flicker of regret even rose in me.
But I had already adapted to the situation, so it was fine.
Regret was only momentary.
Prison life had barely begun; the training and torture sessions I still had to endure were many. As long as I could endure the oppression of this place, that was enough.
If I could manage that much, I would be able to avoid the solitary confinement that had filled me with such anxiety and dread.
I had learned through this solitary experience that physical agony was far preferable to mental torment.
Now it was truly time to do well.
After that, time passed quickly.
I left solitary, ate dinner with my cellmates, and was dragged to the torture room.
Today’s torture was a beating similar to the last one.
The only real difference was that it focused entirely on the cane.
Even though being locked in solitary had limited me to basic corporal punishment, it still amounted to a full hundred strokes.
By the time welts rose on my calves and blood began to flow, the session ended.
The others must not have earned any notable penalty points either; they finished around the same time, and we returned to the cell almost together.
“Solitary. You did well.”
“It was scary. But you endured.”
“I hate solitary the most too.”
“Unnie. Welcome back.”
“Thank you.”
Perhaps because they had shared similar experiences, the moment we returned to the cell my cellmates sent congratulatory messages for surviving solitary.
Luia in particular offered a welcome that carried the meaning of now sharing the same feelings.
It was the seventh day since I had entered Prison Island.
The sense that I had finally stepped onto the same level as them brought a strange, quiet satisfaction.
The days that followed were pure repetition.
Inmates had no weekends.
Only endless training, endless confinement, and endless torture.
Mornings began with a meal and an enema; forenoons were spent in the training area, afternoons in the guardroom.
Then, based on the day’s results, we finished the schedule in the torture area before returning to the cell to be locked away once more.
Each day left me exhausted and worn down, yet on the days Leviathan did not come to work I focused on recovering my strength inside the cell.
Had I grown a little used to it?
Nearly another week had slipped by when, one morning, Leviathan pulled us out of the cell.
The moment the inmates’ oath and breakfast ended, he tossed out a single sentence that froze every member of Cell 3 solid.
“Today is Execution Day. We have a condemned inmate in our cell, so everyone moves to the auditorium. Follow me.”
The greatest fear we had briefly forgotten amid the repeated pattern had returned as reality.