Chapter 629 Not The First Time
Lenny, blood-soaked and battered, managed to crack into a chuckle amid Athena's emotional outpouring. Gazing at his own heart, he did something unexpected—something that startled Athena and reignited an old fear she had nearly forgotten.
With a surprising nonchalance, Lenny crushed his own heart in his hands.
The organ yielded like a water balloon, squished without regard, as if it were a mere annoyance that needed venting.
This act, more than the physical wounds, invoked a sense of dread in Athena—a reminder of the unpredictable, courageous human who dared challenge even demons.
As Lenny crushed his own heart, a macabre spectacle unfolded.
For a brief moment, the heart ceased its rhythmic pulsations, a silent proclamation of potential death.
The room fell into an eerie quiet, and Lenny's focus intensified on the still organ. This pause seemed to herald the end, the cessation of life. Yet, contrary to the anticipated finality, the heart resumed its beating.
In that fleeting interval, where time hung by the thinnest thread, Lenny experienced an illusionary embrace of death—a sensation he had truly felt only once before. The surge of adrenaline coursing through him rivaled the thrill of a first-time skydiver hurtling through the unknown.
Lenny's laughter echoed once more, prompting Athena to ponder the depths of his madness. Despite her extended stay in the nether, where death was a transient concept, she had never intentionally taken her own life. Death, though a frequent companion, had always been a prelude to resurrection. However, she refrained from such drastic measures, knowing that certain experiences in life surpassed the perceived finality of death.
This realization was one of the peculiar characteristics of the nether.
However, Lenny had barely?expressed as much as his Will intended to. Again and again, he burst his own heart, continuing his bizarre ritual of self-inflicted death and revival, finding a peculiar thrill in the process.
He taunted Athena, remarking on the assumed enjoyment she must have experienced during her time in the nether. As far as lenny was concerned, this was a place that allowed one with sick tendencies to shine as they intended to.
However, Athena remained silent, observing Lenny with a mix of fascination and trepidation, much like her earlier encounter with the nether creatures.
Lenny, aware of the draining effects of the Nether on his powers, activated a small amount of magic to initiate his body's healing properties. The Nether beast coat he wore mitigated some of the drain of his power from the Nether, allowing him to recover to a certain extent.
Athena had suffered for a very long time in this place. And she really hated it here. However, Lenny saw something in this place that she did not see, and that was the beautiful potential in such a world. After all, in here, death was not a possibility. he could only imagine the kind of experiments he could perform in such an environment with just one test subject. He could do very very insane things and get away with it. As far as he was concerned, this place although dangerous, was laced with the possibility of thrill.
Afterwards, he turned his eyes towards her, "You have lost your heart as one born of the Arena. But no matter, I can help you with that. I let you vent your hatred for me, now its my turn..." As Lenny said those words, he approached her steadily.
She panicked as he did, but did not fight against him nor did she stop him.
Nevertheless, Lenny, with his substance of creativity, ever capable of molding and twisting horrors to suit the taste of the moment enveloped Athena with a taste of death in life.
His concoctions on her body according to normal earth days lasted for at least a month. This was a month of disfiguring her form as he saw fit and exciting to the pleasures of his brightly insane mind.
Since death did not work here, he took pleasure in venting his will to kill her again and again, until she reached a point where even if he took her heart and ate it before her face, she did not so much as give a frown to it.
On seeing this, he was satisfied with the delivered punishment, after all, she had delivered pain worse than the salvation of death. Of course, the process also saw an increase in points for himself.
"So tell me, how have you survived here?" Lenny asked her as he handed her some demon meat from his storage unit.
Death did not exist in the nether, but hunger did, and Athena had gone without food for so long that her stomach had forgotten the gift of it.
The Nether maintains the body at a specific state once one had gotten into it as it allows its cold settle in on the individual.
"That day, When Minnie teleported us, we were moved here. normally, it should not be so. Mininie's power appears as teleportation to us, but in truth, all she does his navigate through the void after calculating the distance for the location she wants to go.
However, that day she was so afraid that she had rather seek solace in the cradle of the void than go back. The event was just that traumatizing for her.
But the thing is that, the void is not a hospitable place and although passage can be allowed through it, it does not allow sanctuary.
They was also the fact that the denizens of the void would have torn us apart if we did not leave. In an attempt to survive, fighting for our lives, we found ourselves here.
If it was not for Minnie, I would have been like the others frozen forever between a state of death and a state worse than death.
But Minnie was a witch, a very intelligent one, and her unique abilities had let her touch upon this darkness before."
lenny raised a brow at this, "are you saying that..."
Athena nodded, "yes, this is not the first time that Minnie was coming to the Nether."
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