The four members returned to their base much more somber compared to when they left.

“He can’t be that bad,” Luxinna tried to light up the morale. “I mean Rem is on our side.”

“Listen to me, forest-head,” Melody spoke grimly. “My entire continent works our slaves like a machine, but Martynov’s story about Rem is way creepier.”

Cytortia looked at the demoness in confusion.

“How is Rem worse than Hellgate?”

“The Hellgate is a pit of sadism,” Melody conceded, recalling what Ebony told her. “However, even Hellgate have a special section for diplomatic prisoner, Rem don’t even pretend to care about courtesy of war.”

Cytortia turned silent.

In the Argentum War, Rem never granted the Cartel any luxury of knowledge. There were no formal declaration, only a letter of newspaper clippings, warning the Mexican to cease unsanctioned activity in America with approval of the Mafia commission. The Cartel ignored the warning, then the kidnapping and ransom demand occurred. The dispatched negotiation team only met an electronic speaker bringing the will of Samadi.

The church the meeting held caught fire. The scrambling negotiator fled outside and met their missing comrades, delusionally laughing like mad-men.

The devil ascended in the next twenty-four hours. Facilities got deconstructed. Explosion, fires, police raid, everything that should not crumble dematerialized. Key personal with sensitive secret vanished and reemerged mentally broken. Their bankers quit and the hit team sent to silence them returned in a straight-jacket. Politicians suddenly went mad and exposed for corruption. Testimonies carted away many of the Cartel’s top official. To add more insult to the decaying infrastructure, a long-suppressed dissenters rose and forced the Cartel to its knee.

“At least in Hellgate, you get kept alive to suffer,” Melody narrated, as they reached the warehouse’s front-door. “Rem don’t keep prisoner. He sends them back to destroy you. Martynov said the Mexican Cartel only learn the Argentum’s identity after their boss announced his unconditional surrender on live TV. Jekyll Aztellic is dangerous, but Samadi is lethal.”

Hikma sighed.

“Guys, Martynov is exaggerating.”

The French-Arab opened the door and instantly proven wrong.

…

A girl sat motionless in the middle of the warehouse. She looked spotless, pristine from her clothes to her flaming orange-hair. The four won’t notice any damage, if not for the eyes. They were dead. All light of resistance crushed so finely she was more like a breathing corpse than a full fledge human.

“Chuang?” Cytortia trembled, seeing her senior sister destroyed beyond comprehension.

“Cartia,” Chuang blinked deliriously. “No, you are Arwen, right? But which Arwen? I remember fifteen Arwen. Half of those Arwen always left. Another half died because of me. I feel worst about the later.”

Chuang's pupils were like a wild animal—cornered, afraid, desperate and fearful. 

“This is getting funny,” Chuang laughed. “Oh, there are four of you? I remember getting beat up by twice that number. Do me a favor and drug me first, okay? The gang rape is little better when I am delirious. Ha, ha, ha, ha—fucking marriage—those arseholes run the moment things sour. Then again, I used them, so I guess I am asking for chest-burster.”

Chuang giggled madly.

“You guys should have seen it!” Chuang gave a trembling, broken smile. “Sploosh! Blood everywhere. I died screaming. Ha. Ha. Ha. What an idiot. I promised Cena I will marry him when I was a kid, but no surprise, a backstabbing bitch like me got what I deserve. The saddest thing is he never left my side, so they tore him to pieces in front of me. The blood taste like caramel… I hate caramel.”

Chuang slowly turned silent before throwing herself from the chair, worming toward the four like a caterpillar.

“Please kill me!” Chuang cried, unable to stop smiling as she beseeched her four saviors for life’s last destination. “Chop me to piece! Dissolve my body! Hack my brain from my skull and burn it! I don’t care what you do! I don’t care how much it hurt! I don’t want to live anymore! Please end me already before he come back! You can use me however you want! But just keep him away from me!”

Chuang brawled like a baby, stunning the four spectators into the orbit by sheer clusterfuck.

“Oh. My. God,” Hikma barely believed this broken shell nearly killed him.

“No,” Melody corrected him fearfully. “Hikma, this is solid proof no benevolent gods exist.”

Cytortia lost her words.

“Congratulation,” Luxinna Latoria watched Chuang curled into a ball. “You won the argument, Melody. Nothing is worse than Rem’s torture chamber.”

A voice suddenly rang beside them.

“Thanks for a vote of confidence, guys,” Rem was drinking a homemade milkshake. “You might think I am bull-shitting, but I will admit I screw up. Now, I understand what you want. Each of you get a punch, after—”

BANG!

Several things happened in that instant. Chuang saw Rem, screamed like she saw a giant man-eating cockroach with the face of her mother, then emptied everything in her anus and bladder. Hikma threw a feeble punch, which landed with a soft smack on Rem’s expressionless face. Hikma might be a great Arcanist, and an excellent defensive swordsman, but his hook was pathetic. However, Luxinna’s sucker-punch remained impressive as ever. Hikma landed the hit because Rem let him, but the elf didn’t need any permission. Her fist plowed into Rem’s abdomen and sent him crashing into the wall with enough force to crack the concrete.

“WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?”

Lux yelled, pinning Rem to the wall by his throat.

“A modified [Mentalism],” Rem’s pained answer was concise.

“Incredible,” Melody concluded. Her brain functioned 135% better from raw horror. “You adapt [Mentalism] Arcane to interrogate her. But how can’t she recognize any of us.”

“She can,” Rem corrected Melody. “But save from your truly, she can’t distinguish you from a hundred other version she remembered from the nightmares I put her through.”

“Nightmares?”

“Nothing major. Think of it like a hyper realistic dreams several lifetimes worth of tragedy long.”

“Nightmares don’t do that to people!”

“Orange juice don’t kill people until you overdose the citric acid,” Rem explained without a hint of shame. “One lifetime of those dreams and she will shrug it off as an illusion, but several hundred? Not to mention I refresh her memory on every loop, so the increasing fake memories slammed her all at once, every single time. At a certain point, fake will outnumber the real. Right now our goddess lost the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.”

Melody turned away from Rem, too stunned to respond.

Hikma and Luxinna lost their words in their throat. They put themselves in Chuang’s position and came up with zero way to resist Rem. It was then they finally realized how unstoppably cruel Rem could be, and they immediately wanted to run away from that fact.

Cytortia remained silent. She walked toward the sobbing Chuang, ignoring the liquid pooling on the concrete and the emerging foul stench. The goddess of wood knelt down and cradled the woman who torment her throughout her childhood, trying her best to give the fallen Heavenly Daughter some warmth.

“Fix her,” Cytortia calmed the panicking Chuang down and whispered to the shattered goddess. “Don’t worry, everything will be okay.”

Chuang sobbed and fully let go of the floodgate, wailing on Cytortia’s shoulder like she no longer had anything to lose.

“Fix her?” Melody gasped, focusing her eyes anywhere but the demonic human who caused the carnage. “Cy, there is no fixing this. This is not like a broken washing machine and fried motherboard. Brain is a complex organ, and Rem flamethrowered all inches of its surfaces.”

“No,” Cytortia threw a glare at Rem. “You won’t do anything that you can’t reverse. You can undo the damage, right? As your boss, I am ordering you to do it.”

Rem sighed.

“You got me,” Rem admitted. “I leave a backdoor behind. Even if that doesn’t work, sealing away all the false memories and reset her consciousness to what it was thirty minutes ago isn’t that hard.”

“As expected, you are being an ass about everything,” Luxinna growled, but deep down she felt relieve. “Will it kill you to use a method that don’t involve maiming and death threat?”

“You are assuming I will follow that order,” Rem said. “News flash, I don’t plan too.”

Silence

“Rem,” Hikma warned. “Enough is enough. This is against everything we fight for. I don’t want a fight, but you will fix her mind one-way or another.”

Luxinna reacted by tightening her grasp on Rem’s windpipe.

“Go ahead,” Rem calmly invited the violence. “But don’t you want to hear the reason I have to do this.”

“Does it involve our safety?” Melody said tastelessly. “Thank you for the concern, but none of us need to stoop this low to stop her from ratting.”

“Information leak concern contributes about 42%,” Rem admitted. “Another 58% is purely for her own sake.”

“Excuse me?” Luxinna grimaced. “Are you telling me you mind-fuck people for their own sake? What about the Argentum War?”

Rem didn’t entertain blinking.

“So Martynov told you about my escapade with Antonio,” Rem concluded, tapping Luxinna in the arm. “Good for him. You must know eventually. Now would you begrudgingly allow me to breathe.”

Luxinna hesitantly unpinned her arm.

“Hikma can you please put Chuang to sleep. She already have enough for one day,” Rem asked.

Hikma begrudging throw an [Conceptual Seal] at Chuang. The Arcane took effect and Chuang sank to slumber on Cytortia’s lap, purring like a kitten.

Rem begun his explanation.

“Making excuse for the Argentum War is pointless. The Mexican Cartel won’t back off and they had Mexico in their grasp for years. It already hard enough to persuade the commission to reinforce our sovereignty. I need a perfect victory and I don’t want any innocent to suffer in that war. This victory condition required me to pioneer psychological warfare and strategic strikes from the cover of anonymity to impair the Mexican. Martynov might forget to mention my strategy worked. Neither side suffered the loss of human life in the conflict.”

“You killed none, but condemned hundreds to a mental hospital,” Hikma sternly replied.

“I am not a god, Hikma,” Rem justified. “I can’t perform a miracle without a price. Do you realize the number of lives narcotics destroyed? In a certain perspective, asylum maybe too good for them. With the medical care in the market today, I guess they will be ready to rejoin the society soon and the trauma will make them think twice about narcotic trade.”

“What about my sister?” Cytortia stared at Rem sternly. “What did she do to deserve this? And why don’t you fix her?”

“That what I must know,” Melody added. “What make you defy Cytortia’s direct order?”

“Because I want to save a soul.”

Every eye turned toward Rem.

“Rem, this is not saving people,” Luxinna’s voice was almost pleading. “We are above this kind of thing. How can you save people by breaking their will? Can’t you register how fuck-up evil is this? Please give us an actual explanation.”

Rem gazed at the sky.

“How do you balance saving a person happiness against their soul?”

“What?” that question caught Luxinna by surprise.

“You are making no sense,” Hikma whispered, barely understanding his friend anymore.

But Melody got it.

“You are playing a long game,” Melody theorized in a mixture of horror and fascination. “All the shit you put her through is an investment in Chuang Tianshang. You yanked her memory out with [Mentalism] and it convinced you to do this.”

Rem nodded.

The conversation veered in a disturbing direction for Luxinna.

”Why?”

“An unmaterialized alternative caused by one Queen of Heaven's suck-ass mentorship,” Rem cursed. “Now, we need to clean her mess.”

The entire room got knocked out of orbit save for Cytortia, who remembered a much kinder girl.

“Rem, tell me. What did my teacher do to Chuang?”

“More like what she failed to do,” Rem clarified. “Artio hit the ball off the park by advising you to left. I watched Chuang’s evolution into bitch we see today, and you can quote my word that Nu Wa failed at all conceivable metric as a mentor. The Heavenly Daughters—Chuang, LinLey, and even Tai Hua—reached your master's arms as a clay with potential. Through a combination of failing to understand basic humanity, intense internal competition, and an unhealthy amount of ego mismanagement, all of them emerged as a piece of work with too much firepower. Chuang’s case hit me pretty deeply, so I chow the risk and unbaked the bread.”

“Unbaked the bread?” Melody questioned.

“People rarely change once they set,” Rem explained. “Chuang’s formative years molded her into an omega bitch. The only way to reshape that stone is to convert it back to raw material, and recast it. But that would dishonor her as an individual, killing the Chuang we recognize and replacing her with a doll. I can’t have that. I want her to have an epiphany, and this mean pioneering an alternative design.”

“Alternative design? Mind-fucking is a fashion trend now?” Luxinna looked at Rem like he just gone insane.

“Partly,” Rem admitted. “An epiphany come from realization and experience. To understand one, Chuang must reflect on her action from another perspective and—by her own will—realize how far she sunk. This meant learning and repenting on her action from the bottom of her soul. It is why I need to put her into a nightmare loop. I need her to understand what she subject other people through.”

“You use Mentalism to subject her to cycle of repeated nightmare, carving fear of death and despair for her to learn what it feel like to suffer under tyranny,” Hikma looked at Rem, and realized his inner wished. “You want to teach the sanctity of life, by making her experience the world where life isn’t sacred.”

Melody and Luxinna growled, but Hikma’s verdict was enough to pacify them for now.

Rem looked at Cytortia.

“Your master’s failure—no—this world’s failure lies in failing to teach your senior sisters the value of life. While some people—like you, Cy—naturally value the beauty of life, most learn its sacredness from pain. Your senior sister never got that. Instead, they got the power to set life on fire and a zero inhibition.”

“You make her experience what it like to lose her life.”

Rem nodded dryly.

“I understand what you are thinking. You think I went overboard. That I overdid it to the point she broke beyond recovery. Yes, I overestimate her mental fragility, but the next part of the plan is still intact. And I need your help for that.”

“Wait! You want us to be your conspirator?” Luxinna gaped at the suggestion.

“Fine,” Cytortia declared.

“Cy, are you going along with this?” Luxinna questioned her friend.

“We don’t have a choice,” Cytortia said. “Is the next part will make her better?”

“Oh, you will like the next part,” Rem said. “In fact, I need you to contact Lancaster.”

“Shyme?” Luxinna said. “You are dragging a 33 Stars into this.”

“We need someone to protect Chuang because she will be powerless in the next part of the plan.”

“What are you planning,” Melody interrogated Rem.

“It doesn’t matter, Melody,” Cytortia ordered. “What matter now is getting Chuang back to her feet? And Rem, after this we need a re-org. I cannot have you do this kind of thing without our permission.”

“Yes, my lady,” Rem smiled.

It took a long time, but the bread called the Heavenly Daughter of Wood was finally coming out of the oven.