"Ekidna, beat him within an inch of his life, but be careful about the genitals. I need them intact." Glemos snapped his fingers like he was giving orders to a dog.
'Fuck me and my big mouth!' Morok thought as the Fomor darted at him.
Her yellow eye enveloped her with a bolt of golden lightning, her blue eye produced a mist that drained the world energy and sealed his spells, while her red eye engulfed her in flames that made each one of her punches burn at both his body and mana.
Typhos had hit Morok hard, but he wasn't an Awakened and his two wings only had a limited number of feathers for each element. Ekidna had six wings, each one amplifying one specific element and generating a much greater output.
He fainted before the fourth blow but she kept hitting Morok until Glemos stopped her.
"What about the woman?" Ekidna asked while cleaning her dress from the blood.
"Wait here until she is done." Glemos replied while lifting his son with Spirit Magic as well. "If she survives the process, I can use her to understand why humans with six affinities are stable while Formors are not. Your races both evolved from primates, after all."
Ekidna unconsciously touched the Harmonizer at her neck, looking at Friya with envy. Glemos didn't miss the gesture, but the feelings of his specimens didn't matter to him, only their usefulness.
***
Between their innate recovery abilities and the presence of the mana geyser, Lith and the other Awakened recovered just a few hours later despite the severity of their injuries. Friya was still unconscious due to exhaustion but was otherwise as fit as a fiddle.
Nalrond, instead, was in dire need of food. His body had self-digested to heal the wounds and kept doing it in order to survive. Without nutrients, healing made him weaker instead of stronger.
'I wish Quylla had shared with us her Injection spell.' Solus was free to move but there was little she could do without the risk of alerting the Tyrant.
Glemos had shown to have keen senses even in the mines, surrounded by world energy. Activating the dimensional pocket or casting any spell without a precise idea of how to escape his detection would have been suicidal.
The Tyrant had brought his prisoners into an upper floor, where no crystal grew and a complex set of arrays drained the energy coming from the geyser, using it to fuel the lab he had set up.
Thanks to the magical formations, Solus's mana sense worked again but so did Life Vision and whatever finer mystical sense Glemos might possess.
Lith and the others were chained to the wall with the Council's upgraded version of Odi restraints. The shackles attuned with the life force of their wearer and blocked every attempt to use magic or even bloodline abilities.
Solus could have easily opened them, but she still had to find an answer to the question: then what? While her companions were unconscious, she had watched Glemos examining them one by one with his breathing technique.
He had taken a lot of notes, especially about Lith and Friya. After every session, he moved to Ekidna and the stretcher where Morok lay, to try and spot the differences with the previous specimens.
Solus had been busy leaving Lith's side whenever Glemos closed in to avoid the effects of his breathing technique while also formulating a plan to escape. She now had dozens of them, but none would work in the presence of the Tyrant.
'When the heck does he leave?' She thought in frustration. 'This is the perfect place to Spirit Warp us away, but Domination would burst my Gate and alone I'm no match for him, not even with the Hands of Menadion. I need a diversion.'
About two hours after their capture, Morok stirred on the stretcher.
"You are finally up, son." Glemos said. "I have prepared a good meal for you. You need strength for the next set of experiments."
The voice of his father jogged Morok's memory from its stupor, making him jump up while recalling his twin battle hammers, Grimnir, to his hands.
"Do we really need to waste more time like this?" Glemos didn't even turn around and kept setting the table.
A square oakwood table lay in the farthest corner from the prisoners. It was covered by a white linen tablecloth, with gold-veined porcelain plates at three of its four ends. A line of fine silverware was arranged on either side of the plates over napkins shaped like crowns.
Morok noticed that his wounds had been healed, his hammers had self-repaired unhindered, and that his stomach was empty.
'There's no point fighting now.' He looked at his companions, glad to notice they seemed to be fine. 'I'd better regain my strength and listen to whatever my father has to say. With a bit of luck, I can exploit whatever he is plotting to get us out of here.'
"Excellent choice." Glemos nodded, gesturing to Morok and Ekidna to join him at the table. "We should have had this talk right after your Awakening, but that brutish Drake kept you away from me.
"I can't wait for the moment when the Council puts Ajatar to trial and executes him."
"Why should they do that?" Morok wanted to snarl, but his plate was suddenly filled with a steaming stew of freshly cut vegetables and prime cuts of meat whose scent made his mouth water.
"Because I meddled with more than just one of the unproductive mines in his turf and I left more than enough proof to frame Ajatar for the practice of Forbidden Magic." Glemos grinned at the thought of the Drake chained like the beast he was.
"It was you?" Morok dropped his spoon in surprise, but Glemos caught it with Spirit Magic before it splashed in the stew and dirtied the table.
"Of course it was me. I needed Ajatar to be so busy that he would send you out. It was the only way to have our conversation away from prying ears. On top of that, performing my experiments on the turf of someone else gives me plausible deniability when they get discovered.
"People like Ajatar and Faluel will have a lot to explain once we are done here. When the Council is done with the investigations, they will be considered either incompetent fools or ruthless criminals.
"Best case scenario, they lose their status of Regional Lord. Worst case scenario, their lives."
Morok wanted nothing but to jump at his father's neck and choke the life out of him for plotting against two of the best people he knew, yet he gritted his teeth and kept his cool.
"What are you doing here, exactly?" The empty plate of the stew was replaced by a steak that Morok cut, wishing it was his father's heart.
"That was the next item on the agenda. Explaining to you why you were born and making you a part of the opus of your family." Glemos smiled at his son.
It was the first intelligent question that he had ever asked, making the older Tyrant hope to not have completely wasted his genetic material.
"You see, Tyrants and Balors are considered to be two different evolutionary branches of the same species of magical beasts, yet the assumption is only partly right."
