Chapter 580: A Butcher To Oneself
Anya couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.
Her mind, still young and innocent despite everything she had endured in this underground prison, simply refused to process the image before her.
The axe. The blood. The leg leg lying on the stone floor like discarded meat.
It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.
Mika, for his part, bit his lips so hard that his teeth nearly broke through the flesh.
The pain was indescribable, agony that radiated from the stump of his thigh and exploded through every nerve in his body.
Even a hardened soldier who had seen the worst horrors of war, would have screamed until their throat bled if something as horrendous as this had happened to them.
They would have called out for their mothers and wept.
But Mika held it all in.
His face, already pale from weeks of anti-mana exposure, had gone corpse-white. Sweat poured down his forehead in rivers.
But he didn’t make a sound. Not a whimper. Not a cry. Just that terrible, steady silence as blood pooled beneath him on the stone platform.
And then, before Anya could even begin to process what she had witnessed, Mika’s hand moved toward the axe again.
"No." She breathed. "No, Mika, you can’t—"
But he could. And he did.
The axe rose once more, gripped in hands that should have been too weak to lift it but somehow found the strength.
Mika looked at his remaining leg and—
The blade came down.
Thunk!
The sound was different this time. Duller.
The first cut had been clean. This one was messier since Mika’s strength was failing.
The axe bit into his thigh but didn’t sever it completely on the first strike.
He had to wrench it free and swing again.
Thunk!
And again.
Thunk!
And again, until finally, with a wet, tearing sound that would haunt Anya’s nightmares for the rest of her life, the second leg separated from his body.
Mika fell backward onto the stone platform, his torso now ending in two ragged stumps that poured blood onto the cold rock.
His legs lay nearby like discarded objects, like they weren’t even part of him anymore.
Seeing this, Anya’s mind started fracturing.
She could feel pieces of herself shattering, fragments of her sanity crumbling away as she stared at the boy who had been her whole world, now legless and bleeding on a stone altar in the depths of the earth.
But Mika wasn’t finished.
With a grunt of effort that seemed far too small for the agony he must have been feeling, he pushed himself up onto his elbows and he began to crawl.
He crawled toward his own severed legs.
His arms pulled him forward, inch by agonizing inch, leaving a trail of blood on the stone behind him.
His stumps dragged uselessly, still leaking crimson.
The distance was only a few feet, but it must have felt like miles.
When he finally reached the legs, he grabbed them—one in each hand, holding his own dismembered limbs like they were nothing more than firewood.
And then, impossibly, a smile crept across his face.
It was a strange smile. The kind of smile a person wears when the universe has played such an absurd joke on them that the only possible response is bitter, broken laughter.
"What a joke. Just a couple of weeks ago I was feasting on some fried chicken legs, but now here I am holding my own."
Anya couldn’t respond. Her thoughts had scattered like frightened birds.
All she could do was watch.
Mika shook his head, the bitter smile fading, and reached for another tool that lay nearby.
It was a sharp piece of metal that he had painstakingly sharpened over countless hours, honing it against the rough stone until its edge was keen enough to slice through flesh like butter.
He positioned one of his severed legs on the stone platform. Then, with the precision of a surgeon, he made a long incision from the top of the thigh all the way down to where the foot had been.
And then he began to skin it.
His fingers found the edge of the incision and pulled, peeling the skin away from the muscle beneath with a wet, tearing sound that made
The outer layer came away in a single piece, like removing a stocking, revealing the raw, red flesh underneath.
Seeing this, Anya’s stomach lurch violently.
She wanted to run back through the narrow fissure and pretend she had never followed Mika into this horrible place.
But her body refused to obey her commands. She was frozen in place, her eyes locked on the grisly scene before her.
Mika himself worked methodically.
Once the first leg was skinned, he did the same to the second, his movements growing more efficient with practice.
The skin came away, and beneath it was the meat—that pulpy, red flesh that looked so terribly, unmistakably like what it was.
Human meat.
Then he took the bucket. The same plastic bucket he had been bringing back day after day, the one he had always presented with such triumph.
Anya’s eyes fixed on that bucket, and suddenly, horribly, she understood.
"No." She whispered. The word came out cracked and broken. "Please, Mika. Don’t. Don’t. It can’t be. It can’t be."
But it was.
Mika took the sharp piece of metal and began to carve.
He sliced off small pieces first—thin strips like bacon, like the ham you would put on a sandwich.
Then larger wedges, thick cuts of meat that could have been served as steaks.
He worked his way up the leg, stripping flesh from bone with the efficiency of a butcher preparing a carcass for market.
Except the carcass was his own body.
Anya watched him scrape every last bit of meat from the bone.
He didn’t leave anything behind—not the muscle, not the fat, not the small bits of tissue that clung to the joints.
Even the knee, which should have been difficult with all its cartilage and connective tissue, he attacked with a smaller, sharper scalpel he had acquired, meticulously separating every edible scrap from the inedible parts.
"Every piece is important." He muttered to himself, almost as if he were reciting a lesson. "Can’t waste anything. Not down here."
Soon, the first leg was nothing but bone. A perfect, clean skeleton from hip to toe, with only the smallest fragments of flesh still clinging here and there.
Mika examined his work with a critical eye, then nodded with satisfaction and tossed the bones aside.
They clattered against the stone with a sound that made Anya flinch.
Then he started on the second leg.
The process repeated. The skinning. The carving. The careful separation of meat from bone.
Mika worked in silence, his face a mask of concentration, as if he were preparing dinner instead of mutilating his own corpse.
When the second leg was finished, he sat back and looked at the bucket.
It was full now—brimming with chunks of flesh that had, mere minutes ago, been part of his living body.
His expression was strange. Not disgusted. Not horrified. Just...contemplative.
"Not enough yet." He murmured. "Need more."
And then he picked up the axe again.
Anya’s heart stopped. What was he doing? What more could he possibly cut? His legs were already gone—both of them.
Was he going to cut his arms? Was he going to cut off his arms too?
But then she looked at his stumps, and her eyes widened in shock.
His legs were growing back.
Even as she watched, she could see the flesh regenerating.
Cells multiplying at an impossible rate, tissues re-forming, bones extending outward from the stumps like time-lapse footage of a plant growing.
In the span of minutes, Mika’s legs had already regrown to eighty percent of their original length.
Only the feet were still missing, and even those were taking shape, the bones of the ankles emerging, the arches forming, the toes beginning to sprout.
Anya had always known that Mika’s body was extraordinary.
He never got sick. Not with colds, not with fevers, not with any of the childhood illnesses that afflicted her and her sisters.
He was faster than any child his age, stronger than should have been possible.
And he healed. He healed so quickly that wounds that should have taken weeks to close would disappear in seconds.
She remembered the time Charlotte had accidentally pushed him during a game, and he’d scraped his knee badly on the gravel path.
All the sisters had rushed to help, their mothers close behind.
But by the time Fauna arrived with her healing magic, the wound was already gone.
Not healed—gone, as if it had never existed.
But this...this was different. This wasn’t a scraped knee or a small cut.
This was entire limbs, regrowing from nothing in a matter of minutes.
—
When his feet finally finished forming, Mika looked at his new legs with something approaching satisfaction.
Then, without hesitation, he raised the axe and brought it down on both of them at once.
Thunk! Thunk!
Two legs, severed in a single moment.
The sound was becoming familiar now, and that familiarity was perhaps the most horrifying thing of all.
Once again, he skinned them.
Once again, he carved the flesh from the bone.
Once again, he filled the bucket with meat that had been, moments before, part of his own living body.
By this point, he had fallen into a rhythm.
The hesitation that had marked his first few attempts was gone, replaced by the efficiency of grim practice.
He had done this before. Many, many times before.
And he kept doing it.
Anya watched, frozen in horror, as Mika cut off his legs again.
And again.
And again.
Eight separate times, he repeated the process.
Which meant sixteen legs, severed. Sixteen legs, skinned. Sixteen legs, butchered.
A boy who was barely six years old had done all of this, again and again and again, a torturous cycle of self-mutilation that would have broken the mind of the strongest warrior.
And he hadn’t made a single sound.
Anya thought about herself. She thought about how, back in the world above, she would cry if she got a paper cut.
She would run to her mother sobbing if she scraped her knee. Even the smallest wound, the tiniest scratch, would send her into a panic, desperate for comfort and healing.
And here was Mika, cutting off his own legs over and over again, skinning himself alive, carving out his own flesh and he hadn’t cried once.
Something inside Anya’s mind snapped.
A strange smile crept across her face. It wasn’t a happy smile. It wasn’t even a sane smile.
It was the smile of someone who had seen too much, who had witnessed something so far beyond the boundaries of normal experience that the only possible response was madness.
She giggled. The sound was high and brittle, completely inappropriate for the horror she was witnessing.
But she couldn’t stop it.
