"Bastard. Did you think you could escape after telling your lover about us?" Eldric snarled, driving his knee squarely into Alex's gut. The impact was harder than Alex could find words for. He stumbled back and sucked in a sharp, ragged breath, trying to numb the shearing pain that radiated outward from his stomach in long, punishing waves. The experience was agonizing in a way that climbed all the way up into his skull, leaving him nauseated and dizzy and barely standing.
"Boss, let me teach him what happens when he doesn't follow along." Nack rolled his neck from side to side with a series of audible cracks, smirking as he reached toward Alex.
"I have not told her anything." Alex's voice was barely above a whisper, withered and thin with the pain that had settled into every corner of his body. Eldric had been beating Alex since the moment they had entered the washroom. He had even considered running, considered not following them to the restroom at all, but the threat they had leveled against the princess had frozen him in place and forced his submission. Rationally, he knew there was little they could actually do to her physically. However, they could spread rumors, and the image of Princess Eva meeting with Alex, hugging him, and fleeing the dormitory building to hide from prying eyes was more than enough to do damage on its own.
Those rumors, passed from mouth to mouth and ear to ear, would grow uglier with every retelling, and he did not have the heart to bring trouble upon her, not after she had confirmed her feelings and not after he had confirmed his own. If word spread that Princess Eva had met with her former fiancé and hugged him in secret, he could only imagine the worst of what would follow. Her reputation would be dragged through the mud entirely, especially given that she was already engaged to someone else, and for an imperial princess to be caught in a meeting with her ex-fiancé was something deeply unbecoming of her status.
The fallout would have been catastrophic for her image and would invite consequences not only from the imperial family but from Lucian's family as well, who were also royalty, as Lucian's father was the king of the elven kingdom. And so, rather than risk sabotaging her or creating further trouble, Alex had followed Eldric into the restroom after finding out they had seen him being hugged by the princess. He had been trailed by a cluster of minions who had walked close at his back to make sure he did not try to turn and flee along the way.
"Really?" Eldric chuckled, reaching down and grabbing a fistful of Alex's hair, which now hung loosely around his face. The small ponytail Alex had tied earlier had come undone, and the ribbon that had held it together lay somewhere on the marble floor. "I sincerely doubt you managed to keep your mouth shut." Eldric leaned in close, bringing his lips near Alex's ear. "But I do hope you did, because an engaged princess meeting her ex-fiancé in secret and fleeing with him does not sound particularly flattering to me." The voice was cold, deliberate, and quiet against Alex's ear.
Alex growled and grabbed Eldric's collar with both hands. "You better not," he snapped, anger cutting through the pain. "You will regr..." But before the warning could leave his mouth, Eldric seized Alex's wrist and twisted it with crushing force, so hard that Alex heard the joint crack, and then Eldric's other hand, the one that had been buried in Alex's hair, clamped over his mouth.
"Enough," Eldric hissed, his voice dropping into something cold and sharp. "You weak bastard, how dare you speak back to me." The words had barely finished before Eldric wrapped his hand around Alex's throat and hauled him up off the ground. Alex thrashed desperately, throwing punch after punch at the arm that held him, but Eldric's grip was like iron and did not shift no matter how many blows landed against it.
The world began to dim around the edges. The color drained from Alex's face as his lungs screamed for air that would not come. His fists stopped falling against Eldric's arm and his legs began to kick instead, flailing uselessly in the open air. The world rippled and shivered at the edges of his vision, and all he could make out through the growing dark was Eldric's face pulled into a wide, satisfied grin and the silhouettes of his lackeys behind him, howling with laughter.
"Ple..." Alex tried to speak, but the sound died before it could form, and the darkness swallowed him whole.
Or so he thought. At the very last moment before consciousness slipped entirely away, Eldric released him, and Alex crashed down onto the wet, streak-white marble floor. His clothes soaked through immediately, and a sour, bitter taste flooded his mouth, rising up from somewhere deep inside him. His body had its own ideas. The food he had eaten just a few hours ago came surging back up, chunks and half-chewed pieces returning as violently as they had gone down, spilling across the white marble floor in long, wretched heaves.
"Aaghh... aogh..." Alex retched again and again, and the more he opened his eyes and saw it, the worse the urge became, so he shut them tightly hoping it would stop.
"Filthy wretch," Alex distantly heard before a boot connected with his stomach with full force, and the kick sent him rolling across the floor until his back slammed into the corner of the room with a dull, painful thud. The agonizing scream that wanted to tear itself out of him was held back only by him biting into the soft flesh of his inner cheek, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing hard against the pain. He urged himself to wake up, to open his eyes and find himself stretching in bed, yawning, safe. But reality had no intention of letting him go. Another kick came crashing into his jaw from the side, and this time the world did not merely dim but shattered apart into a black and swirling mist, and Alex heard nothing more but laughter as his consciousness dissolved completely.
"Wake up, bastard." Something warm and liquid poured into Alex's mouth, sweet and thick like a sweet drink, flooding over his bile-coated tongue and washing down his raw throat. He swallowed it greedily, choking and gasping as his lungs heaved back to life. His eyes peeled open to find one of Eldric's men crouching over him, a boy with flat black hair and flat black eyes, tilting a small potion vial to Alex's lips with a look of open contempt on his face.
"Boss, he's sucking it down like a starved animal," the boy called out, laughing. Eldric had taken a place by the far wall, resting with his back against it, and he simply spat to the side. "Pathetic. Can't even take a light beating without needing a potion."
"You are right, boss. He's got the constitution of wet paper," Nack agreed cheerfully, and punctuated the observation with a sharp kick to Alex's stomach. The liquid Alex had just managed to keep down came surging back up, and several flecks of it caught the black-haired boy across the face. A vein rose visibly along the boy's temple. He lifted his hand, ready to strike, and Alex, still broken and trembling from the earlier beating, raised his arms instinctively to defend himself. But the blow never landed, not because Alex had done anything to stop it.
"Leave it," Eldric ordered flatly, and the boy's hand froze in the air. "We are running short on potions. He will deliver his punishment properly tomorrow."
Whatever small relief Alex had felt at those first words of Eldric evaporated completely at the ones that followed behind it.
The black-haired boy shot Alex a long, narrow-eyed look full of promise, then set the half-filled vial down on the marble floor beside Alex's face with a sharp thud before rising to his feet and turning away. Thankfully, the vial was unbroken and still, its potion stirring wildly against the inner wall of the vial.
"Not a word of this leaves this room," Eldric said pleasantly, drawing a slow finger across his own throat as he glanced back at Alex one final time. He chuckled at the wide, trembling look in Alex's eyes, then turned on his heel and started walking toward the washroom exit. The black-haired boy followed, then the others, one by one, until only Nack remained at the rear.
And then, just as Eldric's hand pushed the door open, the very air inside the restroom shuddered. The very fabric of reality split apart with a loud sizzling and whizzling crack, and a massive sphere of radiant yellow appeared, oozing mist along its outer edge, casting the white marble walls and floor in a trembling, warm golden glow.
Eldric spun back around and sucked in a sharp breath as his eyes met the gate that had seemingly appeared.
The yellow gate had appeared so close to Alex that it was barely a hand's length from where he lay, and before Alex could think clearly, before Eldric could so much as take a step toward him, Alex stretched out his arm.
Alex felt the gate calling to him with a pull that went beyond words, the warmth of that yellow light reaching into something bruised and desperate inside his chest. The words of Old Wan returned to him then, cycling through the haze of pain. Life and death situation. Class Evolution. Life and death. Death and life.Were they not simply two faces of the same coin, each giving rise to the other? He did not check his status window. He did not open his status window to identify or classify the gate. Whether it was a foolish act or the bravest decision he had ever made was a question he would have to answer later, if there was a later.
His lungs drew in one full, sharp breath and his fingers, trembling and shaking, crossed the final inches and touched the surface of the yellow mist. In the same instant he snatched the half-filled potion vial from the floor in front of his face, clenching it against his palm.
"Stop!" was the last word he heard, Eldric's voice cracking with fury, before the world went dark and swallowed Alex whole.
***
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