“Not pink, make it darker. Why did you make it pink? Wait, can you actually see? Do you have any taste at all?” The low dividing wall turned from neon pink to a darker Bordeaux. Felicia patted the stone barrier with a smile on her face. She was still wearing the same ratty and torn business suit, but at least her surroundings had improved greatly.

She'd told Agren to absorb all the things around them until he had his mana back. She stumbled and fell under her butt before she managed to tell him not to absorb the ground. Instead, the forest had started disappearing at a rapid rate. A couple dozen trees had been erased from the face of the earth before her very eyes.

She had then started commandeering the stone in her hands as a voice-controlled architect and contractor all in one. Taking into account the core-repelling walls and the story Agren had told her so far, she ordered him to dig into the ground. She had chosen a shaded group of bushes placed at the back of the hut as cover. From there on she started designing her dream domicile. They needed to emerge for air and mana multiple times, Felicia noting the shifting sun as she tried keeping track of time.

“The wall is fine like this, thank you.”

“This is so stupid! Why is this room so useless? Why are you making me make useless things?”

Felicia was standing inside the dimly lit one-room apartment. She trailed her hand across her soft bed, smiling slightly as she remembered how much effort describing it had been. Apart from the bed, she had forced Agren to materialise a rather complete suite of modern appliances. She had a well designed but technologically primitive cooking area set up, along with a bath and shower combo, a soft couch and an open closet filled with ripped suits. The way to light this place had stumped both of them until she told Agren to make cylinders of glass in the ceiling. These stuck up from the forest floor at hidden places, one even going through an entire tree and bringing in direct sunlight. Finally, she felt a similitude of comfort. The knowledge that each part of this place had been explicitly designed by her own words helped her calm down a lot. She laid down on the bed, mentally exhausted by a long day of focus.

“We need to go.”

She opened her eyes, forcing her mind awake from the half-slumber she had fallen into. “Where?”

“Something is coming. The silver man, I can’t leave the hut, and I promised him, so I can’t leave the hut. I must be in the hut when something comes. I can't help it if you take me from the hut, but I can't leave the hut.”

Felicia decided not to question Agren’s weird reasoning and instead walked up the narrow stairs. She idly touched the stone stuck inside the choker. Her purse had contained a few small pieces of jewellery, and she had spent a lot of effort on forcing it to materialise the simple and snug necklace. Firmly mounted in front of her trachea, the stone itself was locked inside a fitting cage of metal. The entire thing looked like the product of an amateur silversmith with too much money. An amateurish piece of jewellery containing an extremely expensive diamond.

Felicia ran up the narrow stairs, hurrying to the front of the small building. She barely managed to see bright flashes of light emanating from the hut before she smashed into something hard and firm.

“Hey!”

Something hard and firm that spoke. Standing up and rubbing her aching butt, the woman looked up. A dirty and bearded man looked down at her with hard eyes. The light shining through the doorway was enough for her to identify black hair, a scarred face and the physique of a bodybuilder that was atrophying quickly. Wrinkly flesh and sagging muscles that still contained silent strength, but had not been fed or used recently. She noted ragged shirts and pants, all made from tor and dirty burlap. The dull metal band around the towering man's neck seemed oddly out of place. The smell of unwashed bodies hit her the moment the other men started talking.

“It’s a woman!”

“Woah.”

The man she had just bumped into didn’t say anything. Two more shapes came into view, one a lanky and thin man covered in even more dirt and filth, the other a shorter man with a sagging beer gut.

“No stone, what do we do?”

“Who cares about a stone. A woman! It’s been too long. Very thoughtful of the dungeon.” Licking sallow lips, the fat man strode over to Felicia, eyeing her like a butcher would eye a prize cow. His hand snatched out, going for her wrist before the short man stopped and looked at the big guy still glaring down at her. “Do you mind?”

The way the tall man kept looking around along with the way he carried himself reminded Felicia of a few soldiers she had known. The three men had surrounded her, and panic had started gaining traction in her mind. The small bit of comfort she had felt at making a small space of her own was fading rapidly as she started backing up. She had nearly reached the door when she felt fingers on her arm. The skinny man was way too close, looking at her with eyes that seemed all too inhuman. “Let go, who are you? Stop! NO!”

“What’s she saying? Fancy clothes, what’s this stuff?” the words coming out of the fat man’s mouth sounded unfamiliar to her ears.

“Who cares, the last women I had was that camp whore with one tit. We’re lucky.” The skinny man had shifted his grip higher, easily ignoring Felicia’s struggles. His other hand lifted and reached for her chest.

“Stand down. Recon first. There is a chance we can escape, but we will need to cooperate.” The tall, muscular man’s voice sounded like gravel made from steel. The command in his voice froze the other two in their place.

The skinny man scoffed derisively. “No way. We are dead meat. No-one comes back from prison, you know. We were dead the moment they caught us.” His hand moved towards Felicia’s chest again.

Her mind was both paralysed and going into overdrive. Her inability to act was not something she anticipated. Like nearly all untested people, she thought she would be pretty good in a crisis. Instead, her mind was so filled with imagined horror that she failed to act at all.

Then the skinny man’s left hand firmly grabbed her left breast. Before the sensation of being physically violated could register, his other hand snaked around her neck and brushed her necklace.

*CRACK*

The necks of all three men exploded simultaneously. Fingers slackened, and Felicia found herself falling to the ground along with the three men. Fresh blood splattered her face, only to vanish seconds later. She sat there, watching in abject horror as three corpses - their necks bloody ribbons of mangled flesh and bits of bone - disappeared piece by piece. She vomited, adding acidic bile to the festival of smells assaulting her nose. This vanished too as she sat there paralysed.

It took Agren an hour to eat everything. It took Felicia another hour to start moving again. She had fled into her mind, closing out the outside world as she kept looking at the fascinating display. Seeing three bodies disappear as if a giant cheese slicer was shaving them down, slice by slice, was rather interesting, to be honest. She couldn’t have looked away, even had she wanted to.

“What was that?” Her voice sounded remarkably steady if a bit hoarse.

“Food! Shiny man kept his promise.”

It took her another half hour to process this reply. “What was that on their neck?”

“Metal slave collars. The skinny man I was given before had one.”

“THEY ARE FEEDING YOU HUMAN LIVES?” This fact had only now sunk in. Felicia's mind was blanked by the disgust, outrage, indignation and absolute repulsion she felt at this very concept. Her modern sensibilities groaned as she came to terms with the fact that an empire was sacrificing human lives. She looked down, suddenly realising that the clothes she is currently wearing could very well be made from humans. Riping the fabric free from her body, she bolted outside. There she covered the grass in another layer of bile as she heaved. She crawled to the stairs going down, briefly hesitating at the thought that the entire bedroom apartment might be made from human. Deciding she was too tired to care, she plopped down on the bed and let sleep take her away.