Author's Note:
This is the last chapter with torture depictions. Or rather, this time it's less torture and more... well, see for yourself.
---
The scene rewinds slightly... to Level 5, Freezing Hell.
"It's cold..."
Blume murmured that honest assessment, body and voice both trembling.
Sue and Beauty stood beside her, looking equally miserable. Nothing but a single layer of prison garb and no winter clothing in this world of snow and ice. Of course they were freezing.
"Whether it's Level 3 or Level 4, we're always half-dying from heat, but... that doesn't mean cold is any better..."
"Did you know? Apparently if you go back and forth too many times between places with extreme temperature differences, it puts a strain on your heart and can even cause sudden death... Though honestly, this cold alone is more than enough to kill you."
Even grumbling like this, Sue and the others kept working through the labor that doubled as their torture.
Their job: fell the trees growing in Freezing Hell and haul them out.
The work, which also served as torture, was meant to secure fuel for maintaining Level 4 at Blazing Hell temperatures. Firewood, in other words.
It wasn't sourced solely from here, but the high-quality, resilient timber that grew and thrived in this frigid environment had uses beyond firewood. Primarily, the construction of torture implements.
Sue felled the trees. Blume trimmed the smaller obstructing branches. Then Beauty hauled away what had been roughly reduced to log form.
The work required prisoners to use bladed tools, but only Ability Users weakened by Seastone were allowed to handle them. Non-Ability Users were uniformly assigned to hauling.
Guards in winter clothing patrolled with guns at the ready, able to suppress any incident immediately.
Anyone deemed too risky wasn't assigned to this work in the first place. They were either simply locked in a cell and left there, or sent to the other form of torture.
Blume did her best to keep moving her numb, stiffening hands, but partway through, a wolf-like howl echoed from deep in the forest, and she flinched, freezing in place.
"...That's the Wolf Units..."
"Yeah... The ones too vicious to even keep on Level 2. ...Come to think of it, do you know what the other torture on Level 5 is?"
"Feeding the Wolf Units, right? I know about it... You carry raw Sea King meat, still dripping with blood, close to their dens and leave it there. If you don't run away fast enough, the prisoner who carried it becomes food too."
"And the raw meat they prepare? Deliberately a little short of enough. They do it on purpose so the hungry wolves will go after the still-moving 'food' right in front of them... It's basically an execution."
"Aah, so that's why I've been hearing screams from deep in the forest. ...Blume, is the next tree ready yet?"
"...I'm sorry, Beauty... My hands are a little..."
"...Here, Blume, I'll do it. Take a break."
Sue took the sickle from Blume and started hacking away at the remaining branches.
Beauty, meanwhile, held Blume's chilled hands against her chest to warm them. Small and slender as she was, Blume was in far more danger from this freezing environment that sapped body heat.
Once most of the branches had been trimmed, Beauty stood up to carry the log, but paused. "Hm?" She glanced around, something catching her attention.
"...What is it, Beauty?"
"...No, it's just... something that sounds like wolves growling... close by? And the number of them seems..."
Seeing Beauty's uncertain expression, Sue reached out with Observation Haki to scan their surroundings. And then something snagged her senses, something she hadn't noticed before because she couldn't concentrate. Her expression went rigid.
"This presence... beasts... Wolf Units?! And this many...?!"
Blume and Beauty could tell from Sue's ashen face that something was very wrong.
One of the Guards watching them decided the three had stopped working because they were slacking off. He moved to reprimand them, raising his gun to discourage any defiance.
But the next moment, before that Guard could say a word, everything changed.
"H-hel... help... Help me! Somebody help me!!!"
"?!"
Sue and the others. The other prisoners. Even the Guards. Everyone turned in shock toward the voice that had suddenly rung out.
Emerging from the forest in desperate flight: two prisoners and one Guard.
And chasing them, bursting from the trees, an overwhelming number of Wolf Units.
As Sue and the others had just been discussing, the Wolf Units inhabiting this forest were routinely fed a quantity that was "a little short" of enough, delivered by prisoners.
To make up for that shortfall, the wolves would attack and devour the prisoners who had carried the food.
Even without that, these wolves were naturally vicious with powerful predatory instincts. It wasn't uncommon for them to attack prey right in front of them even when full. But at the very least, when they had enough food, they rarely roamed far afield searching for more.
So during the "feeding" period, the prisoners doing "felling" work could carry out their labor in relative safety.
...That only held true when there was enough food.
More precisely, it only held true as long as the wolf population remained stable enough that "food plus prisoners" was a sufficient quantity.
Level 5's extreme cold rendered Visual Den Den Mushi and similar devices completely inoperable. There was no way to know what was happening inside except through direct observation. No way to monitor the situation in real time, no way to track the Wolf Units' dens or pack movements.
And so the Guards hadn't known. Couldn't have known.
At some point, the Wolf Units had been breeding deep in the forests of Level 5. Their numbers had grown far beyond expectations. The traditional quantity of "food plus prisoners" was now woefully insufficient.
The result: the wolves surged out all at once in search of food.
They devoured the raw meat in an instant, killed and ate the prisoners who had delivered it, turned them into corpses to feast upon. And the wolves that couldn't even get a share of that, still so many of them, turned on the Guards who had been watching over the prisoners.
After killing and devouring several, they chased the rest who fled... all the way to the felling work site.
From that point on, it was a hellscape.
Prisoner, Guard, Jailer. Made no difference. One after another, they fell to the wolves' Fangs.
Those who ran were overtaken. Legs crushed in powerful jaws. Arms crushed. Skulls crushed. Facing wolves that attacked in packs, even the prisoners who were no weaklings couldn't move properly in the extreme cold. One by one they became silent corpses. Fresh food for the wolves.
Several Guards ran desperately and reached the entrance to Level 5.
But the moment they opened the door, the wolves caught up and brought them down, snapping their neck bones. Dead on the spot. The thrown-open door stayed open, and frigid air poured into the corridors.
The cold reached areas that should have been unaffected if the door had stayed closed, or at least been shut again quickly. Surveillance Visual Den Den Mushi began shutting down one by one.
Guards in areas that shouldn't have been that cold yet looked around in bewilderment, and Wolf Units that had charged up the stairs attacked them too. Unable to keep up with the sudden turn of events, the Guards fell to those Fangs one after another.
Before long, the moving parts of Level 5's door froze solid and stopped functioning entirely...
"This is Level 5! We have a state of emergency! The W-Wolf Units... the door... R-reinforcements, no, send rescue... AAAAHHH!!"
Afterward, the Guards became aware of the anomaly on Level 5, but survival of the remaining prisoners and Guards was judged hopeless. To prevent the Wolf Units from climbing up, they reluctantly sealed the Level 4 side door.
The decision was made: abandonment of the remaining Guards and prisoners. In the meantime, armed personnel and the Jailer Beasts would be assembled to deal with and suppress the situation. That was the plan.
Before that suppression force could even move out...
In the Freezing Hell where nothing but wolves seemed to stir, three figures were still moving.
"I seriously thought I was gonna die..."
"Thanks, Blume... We only made it because of your Mist smokescreen."
"No, I was only able to use my Powers because Sue stripped the keys off a Guard's body and unlocked our handcuffs... And then Sue knocked out most of the wolves with some kind of mysterious power."
"If we're talking about who saved who, it was Beauty holding off the wolves and protecting us until then... But we're not safe yet. Let our guard down and we'll still freeze to death."
The sudden rampage of the Wolf Units, trampling Guards and prisoners without distinction.
Sue, Blume, and Beauty had somehow survived it... and had managed to catch their breath.
They'd climbed onto the roof of one of Freezing Hell's cells, an empty, unused one with no prisoners. Sue had used her Powers to create a Cardboard House, sheltering them from both wolves and cold.
"So... what do we do now? They've probably figured out what's happening and are starting to mount a response..."
"If they do, we can get out of Level 5, but we'll just go right back to being prisoners. Cuffs go back on, and it's torture again starting tomorrow or the day after."
"It's Seastone, so we'll lose our power again too... I don't want that. But if you ask whether we could actually escape from here... that's not exactly realistic either..."
Blume's words trailed off.
They had survived, and as a bonus, they'd gotten their Seastone handcuffs off. For the first time in a long while, the two Ability Users could feel strength returning to their bodies. But if they were captured again, the cuffs would go right back on.
And then it would be back to... that thought was inescapable, but neither was there any plan for what else to do.
Sue alone had something that wasn't quite nothing for an idea, but without a concrete vision of where to go, what to do, or how to proceed, she couldn't bring herself to say anything.
Still, they couldn't stay like this forever. Every passing moment brought Impel Down closer to deploying forces into this level.
'...It's all or nothing. We go outside and search for the entrance... The wolves seem to have gone back to their dens already, so... ?!'
Sue sensed a presence outside the Cardboard House and snapped her head up.
'Who's there? Just one person... Doesn't seem like Impel Down forces. And this presence, I've felt it somewhere before...'
Blume and Beauty noticed Sue's reaction. Tension shot through the group.
Steeling themselves, the three opened the entrance of the Cardboard House, carefully concealed until now, and stepped outside toward the source of the presence.
Standing there was...
"Hey there, ladies... Having some trouble?"
"You... What are you doing here?! Kisack!"
A prisoner who had been locked up in one of Level 3's cells not long ago, only to vanish without a trace one day. The one who was always grinning and looking their way. The man Sue had called "that creepy old geezer." Kisack.
For some reason he wasn't wearing prison clothes but a worn-out jumpsuit, with a towel draped around his neck. That signature creepy grin was alive and well, and the moment his gaze fell on them, Sue and the others stiffened with wariness.
Kisack didn't seem to care. He let out a low chuckle.
"What a shame... You got a stroke of luck and managed to get those handcuffs off, but just sitting around here, you'll get caught again, y'know? And when that happens... heh heh heh."
"...So what? You saying you're gonna help us or something?"
"Yeah, that's exactly what I'm here for."
"?!"
"Heh heh... Come with me."
Kisack jumped down from the cell roof. With a glance that said "follow me," he jerked his chin toward the direction he'd apparently come from.
Sue and the others were suspicious. Not only was it sudden, this was an invitation from Kisack of all people. They weren't sure whether to go along with it.
But they had no other options. They decided to follow while staying on guard. Even if something happened, even if Kisack attacked them, they had Sue and Blume with their Powers restored, plus Beauty free of her handcuffs. They could handle it.
After disposing of the Cardboard House to destroy the evidence, Kisack led the three into a forest separate from the one where the wolves had their dens.
Behind a building no longer in use, he pried open a metal hatch that was both frozen and rusted over, and they went inside. Some kind of sewer or utility Facility, by the look of it.
The Facility itself seemed to be out of service too. No water flowing through it. Barely any smell.
After walking through it for a while, Kisack stopped and slowly turned around. Facing his silhouette and its sly grin in the dim light, the three braced themselves. Was it a trap after all?
"Hey now... Don't get all tense. It's not a trap or anything. I just figured it was about time for a little reveal."
"A reveal? ...What do you mean?"
"Heh heh heh... This is what I mean."
Crack, crack, crack-crack-crack...
"?!"
Right before their eyes, Kisack's body began deforming with a series of cracking sounds. As though being rebuilt from the inside out, joints dislocated, bone structures shifted, transforming into an entirely different body.
Sue and the others watched the transformation in stunned silence. Kisack's lips moved faintly the entire time, muttering something under his breath...
"Joint flexibility... Reversal. Skin texture... Reversal. Hair texture... Reversal. Hair color... Reversal."
With each word, everything reversed and changed.
Rough, dry skin became dewy and soft. Coarse hair became glossy and full. The color shifted from purple to yellow... no, to gold.
And as these changes progressed, it was Sue who was the most stunned of all.
Because the man called Kisack was rapidly transforming, presence and all, into someone she knew very well.
The other two gaped at the sheer magnitude of the change.
Under the piercing gazes of all three, Kisack... no, the person who had been Kisack spoke one final time:
"Beauty and ugliness... Reversal. Age... Reversal... 51 to 15. Ah, ah, good, my voice is back too. And lastly... well, this one doesn't really matter to me either way, but... sex, Reversal too. ...Phew, all back to normal. All right, let me reintroduce myself..."
And then...
"I can finally see you again in this form... Mom!"
"...You... Alice?!"
Sue's youngest daughter, Alice. Who was supposed to be on Merveille with her other daughters. Standing there with a smile of innocent delight, like a child celebrating a successful prank.
She was there.
To be continued...