“That’s… um… a bit tight,” Det said, as the hangman’s noose squeezed around his throat.

  “Kind of the point, dumb-ass,” Beast said from one gallows over, where she made sure Sage’s own hangman’s knot was done right.

  “Colorful commentary aside,” Beauty said, his own hands confirming the condition of Det’s knot. “She is correct. Once the rope goes taut—we have tied it very specifically—it will lift you just past your tiptoes, and put pressure on your airway. This will prevent most oxygen from reaching your brain, and you will feel your lungs burning for air.

  “Personally, it felt like my chest was on fire from the inside out, while darkness crept in from the edges of my vision. It was well and truly horrifying.”

  “Gee, thanks for making me feel better,” Det said flatly.

  “While this is happening, you will also begin experiencing cerebral hypoxia—that’s when your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen—and you will feel your heart pounding in your chest.”

  “Mine almost burst out of my chest,” a helpful instructor said as they walked by, a huge grin on their face like it was a happy memory.

  “You may also notice a bluish tint to your skin, a sluggishness to your thoughts, and even loss of control over your fine motor skills. Don’t worry, though, at the first sign of seizure or coma, we will lower you enough to allow you to breathe normally again.

  “Medics are standing at the ready to help with your recovery.”

  “And, then we’ve passed?” Det asked, and made the mistake of looking over at Sage. The man was already shaking his head. “We can go?”

  “Pass?” Beauty asked rhetorically. “Heavens no. The first experience will be the fastest, and will also be over the soonest. It’s not nearly enough to train your ReSouled body to work with less oxygen. After you’ve recovered enough the Medics give you the thumbs up, we begin the process again.

  “We are going to repeatedly strangle you until the lunch time break,” Beauty said. “They brought finger sandwiches and fresh fruit today. It’s an excellent spread.”

  “Cheesecake for dessert, for you lucky asses,” Beast added, having moved on to check Calisco’s own noose.

  “Until… lunch?” Det said. “That’s, what, four hours from now?”

  “About that,” Beauty said. “Assuming you meet the minimum requirements of how long your body can last. If you’re close, we’ll keep pushing until you reach it. If you don’t meet the requirement, you’ll spend your afternoon getting hanged as well.”

  “And if we meet that requirement?” Det asked.

  “Then we move from hanging to drowning,” Beauty said. “It’s fascinating, but our bodies handle the two situations very differently. One has the lungs gasping for anything to fill them, the other seizing as they’re filled with something they can’t process.

  “Each are equally agonizing at the beginning, though the pain will lessen over time.”

  “Wonderful,” Det said.

  “Are you having seconds thoughts?” Beauty asked, coming around to stand in front of Det. “You can always be sent to join the cadet the headmaster gave a personal lesson to earlier.”

  “No second thoughts here,” Det said firmly. “This is going to suck, but I get why you’re doing it. I’ll get through it, and be stronger for it. I don’t even hold it against you.”

  “Kind of you to say,” Beauty said. “But you will. Hold it against me, that is. At least for a while. Few people look kindly upon the people who torture them as I will you.”

  “You’re not worried about me getting angry?”

  “Even if you did, Det, you’re not strong enough to be a threat to me. I’ve been through what you’re about to experience, and then significantly more. Even if you could hurt me, it would hardly slow me down, assuming I noticed.”

  “I might replace your regular milk with oat milk,” Det threatened lamely.

  Beauty’s eyes narrowed. “I have a new appreciation for the depths of depravity to which you would crawl for vengeance.”

  “I’m evil like that,” Det said, and tried to take a deep breath in preparation for what was coming. Stupid rope got in his way, which was kind of the whole point of it.

  “I see almost everybody is ready,” Myrddin said. “Then, let us begin.”

  With Beauty standing in front of Det, he wasn’t entirely sure how the man was supposed to pull the rope up to choke Det. Turned out, Beauty wasn’t doing it, the headmaster was. With his magic, he simultaneously lifted ninety-nine cadets by the ropes around their necks, while one-hundred others got pushed to the bottom of the water-filled tanks.

  Det didn’t even have time for the thrashing cadets stripped down to their underwear to keep his attention before the squeeze of his throat demanded all his attention. As a ReSouled, he could hold his breath for a decent period of time, but he’d purposely prevented himself from doing that. This wasn’t an exercise in holding his breath.

  It was an exercise is suffering. In suffocating and choking. And he wasn’t going to game the system in some kind of shortcut to cheat. He needed his body to adapt, so he was going to throw it to the wolves from the beginning.

  Still, just like he’d expected, it sucked.

  The rope—some kind of rough hemp—scratched at his skin at first, until the noose tightened, then pulled him up. Naturally, his body acted, moving his feet to get him onto his tiptoes to take the pressure off his throat. That worked for all of zero-point-one seconds, the rope continuing to pull up. The scratching on his throat changed to tugging on his flesh, stretching it uncomfortably as it wouldn’t slide anymore.

  That was when his windpipe started to compress, or whatever the hell the rope was doing to him, and panic began to set in. His heart sped up in his chest, pounding against his ribs like it was trying to get out. A cough or gag tried to slip its way up his throat, but it couldn’t get past where the rope closed it off. Counter to that, he couldn’t swallow, and spit got caught at the top of his throat, only making him want to cough and gag more.

  Det brought his hands up—still manacled together—to try and get his fingers inside the rope to pull it away. They… they didn’t work right. He couldn’t get them in there. It was too tight.

  Too tight!

  His feet scrambled for a grip, a place to stand, anything to take the pressure off his neck. He was too high. Each swish of his toes just barely touched the ground, but it wasn’t enough, and it was taking… too much… energy. He was… getting tired.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Arms… heavy. No, he needed to… get his fingers… into the rope…

  His face felt… weird. Full. Swollen. His tongue was too big for his mouth.

  Wait, where did Beauty go? He… he was supposed to get Det down. Why couldn’t he see him? Why couldn’t he see anything? When had everything gotten so dark?

  A new surge of panic spiked its way through Det’s body, bringing with it the clarity of the pain of his lungs burning. Of his heart thundering. The bruising and tearing of his skin under the coarse rope. The strange numbness in his hands. The knife straight through his brain that made it feel like somebody was trying to pry his head open.

  They lied. They weren’t going to let him down. He’d volunteered to be murdered.

  And he wasn’t ever going to get back to Yumiko and Natsuki. He…

  … hit the ground with a dull thud, his legs completely giving out beneath him before his whole body dropped. Strong fingers—not his—loosened the devilish rope around his throat, and Det both gasped and choked at the same time.

  “Seven-point-three seconds,” Beauty’s voice said from somewhere. “Not bad for your first attempt.”

  Det hacked up what felt like half a lung before he rolled onto his back to find Beauty standing above him. “What?”

  “That’s how long it took you to pass out,” Beauty said. “That’s your baseline. Next time should be longer.”

  “That… that was only seven seconds?” Det said. It’d felt like… hours.

  “Seven-point-three,” Beauty clarified. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

  Now that his thoughts were coming more quickly, other sounds began breaking their way into Det’s attention. Namely, the sounds of a hundred men and woman choking, or gasping for breath. The splashing of water where cadets broke the surface.

  “And here’s the Medic,” Beauty said, another shadow passing over Det.

  He didn’t even have a chance to figure out if the silhouette was a man or woman before the cold shock of healing washed through him. Instantly, the last dregs of cotton were cleared from his mind. The bruised pain from his throat vanished, and even his pounding heart slowed to normal. The change was so sudden, it was almost like a second wash of cold energy.

  “Break is over,” Beauty said, and the rope began pulling Det back up.

  From his back to his knees, it only took a second, then he was hurrying to stand up—anything to take the pressure off his throat—before even that wasn’t enough. Just like that, the same pressure closed around his neck, cutting off the flow of oxygen to his brain a second time. Knowing what would happen next—expecting it—did not make it any easier.

  Just like the first time, his body panicked and fought against what was killing it. Worse, this time, it lasted longer. Eleven-and-a-half seconds before he dropped to the ground again, only to repeat the commentary, the healing, then the lift of the rope once more.

  Eighteen seconds.

  Thirty-one seconds.

  Fifty-nine seconds, so close to a minute, according to Beauty.

  All of it, absolute torture.

  At least, after the sixth attempt, some of the panic subsided, in that Det could rationally keep it held down. He and his body both were learning what was expected of them. While it was learning to go without oxygen or proper blood flow, he was taking lessons in how to control his panic.

  Back on Earth, Det had always been good under pressure. Kept his head in emergencies, like when Nat had fallen out of the tree and broken her arm. Yumi had full-on lost it—at first—when she’d seen her daughter’s arm bending in the wrong direction, and not at the elbow. Det had just acted. Gotten them in car and to the hospital. Spit out the details to the processing nurse while his daughter went in and out of consciousness from the pain.

  The memory of it was a blur, but he’d gotten through it. Nat had recovered, and she was fine now. No lasting damage. Thankfully.

  Det would get through this too.

  I sure hope the memory of it is a blur later…

  The thought trailed off as darkness overtook him a second before his body hit the ground yet again. How many times had that been now?

  Rolling over with a practiced motion, Det got his own hands up to loosen the rope at his throat, while he lay on his back and purposefully sucked in a slow, steady breath of air. Expecting to find Beauty looming above him, he had to do a double take when he found the man instead crouching nearby.

  “Time for lunch,” Beauty said, a smile on his face.

  “Lunch…?” Det asked, blinking and trying to make sense of the simple words.

  “You passed,” Beauty said. “Twenty minutes at E-Rank is impressive. Took us a while to get there, but you’re one of the first to reach the threshold.”

  Det looked at the rope still connected to the wooden gallows above him. That last time, he’d been getting hanged for twenty minutes? No wonder it felt so damn long.

  “Those finger sandwiches better be good,” Det grumbled, then sat himself up. From there, Beauty offered him a hand up, and he wasn’t too proud to take it. Accepting the instructor’s help, Det was on his feet again a second later, standing face-to-face with an older woman.

  Actually older, looking to be in her sixties or seventies.

  “This is… well… everybody just calls her Baba,” Beauty said. “She’s been healing you.”

  Looking at the woman, then past her, Det even turned on the spot to look around the rest of the field.

  “I… I might need some more healing,” Det said. “I’m seeing a lot of her. Like, a few hundred of her.”

  A shock of cold washed through him as the Baba in front of him jabbed him in the stomach with her finger.

  “Nope,” he half gasped. The woman was strong. “That didn’t fix it. Still see them all.”

  “The quirk of her magic is that her healing spells can be guided and held by turning them into clones of herself,” Beauty explained. “They aren’t copies of her or anything, and they can only do one thing—healing—but they are very good at it.”

  “Handy for this kind of situation, wouldn’t you say?” Baba said.

  “Oh, this is the real you?” Beauty asked.

  “For now,” Baba said. “Making sure to visit and check on everybody as they pass.”

  “Thanks—kind of—for healing me each time,” Det said. “You could’ve taken your time, though.”

  “Not the first one to tell me that,” Baba said, though she was more focused on looking into his eyes. “He seems fine. No lasting damage. Get some food in him.”

  “Sure, Baba, thank you for…” Beauty said, then trailed off when something about the woman vibrated. One second, she was examining Det, the next her whole body simultaneously straightened and went slack. “Ah, she swapped places with one of her healing clones.”

  “She can do that?” Det said.

  “She can do a lot at A-Rank,” Beauty said. “There’s still hope she might break through to S-Rank, where she’ll be able to do even more. I hope she manages it, I don’t know what we would do without her.”

  “She’s… uh…” Det started, not sure how to say what was on his mind.

  “She’s old, yes,” Beauty said. “Older than you can probably guess, with A-Rank slowing her aging as much as it does.”

  “How old?”

  “You should know better than asking for specifics when it comes to a lady’s age,” Beauty chided, then pointed to one of the tunnels leading away from the arena floor. “Lunch is down there. Since you’re a bit ahead of the curve, you’ll have a little longer. Enjoy it. The afternoon won’t be easy.”

  “The morning wasn’t easy,” Det pointed out, hand reaching up to the rope still around his throat. “What about this?”

  In answer, Beauty raised his hand above his head, flashed what looked like a peace-sign up there, then brought his hand back down to his side. Before Det could ask what that was for, the noose around his neck untied itself, and the rope slithered away through the air like a snake. The manacles did the same thing in the next second.

  “All this,” Det said, gesturing around to the cadets still being actively hanged across the arena. “It’s all the headmaster’s magic?”

  “Yes,” Beauty said. “This week is one of the most important and formative of your ReSouled lives, but it’s also one of his least favorite. Still, he upholds his duty with a demeanor deserving of respect.”

  “He kind of seemed to be digging it at the beginning,” Det said.

  “Don’t mistake his willingness to do it for enjoyment of it,” Beauty scolded lightly. “Nobody in their right minds enjoys watching others suffer. I assure you, the headmaster felt every second of your pain just as much as you did. As you all did. However, for you to succeed as Mistguard, this is necessary. You and your bodies need to know what you’re capable of.”

  Det blew out a breath slowly, partially just enjoying he could do that, and nodded at the other man. “Yeah, I get that. By the end, there, I had much better control over my own emotions, even as I was suffocating.”

  “That’s important,” Beauty said. “Being able to think in situations like that is what will get you out of them. Do you think you could’ve gotten yourself out of the rope by the end?”

  “Honestly?” Det said, and Beauty nodded. “I’m not sure. I had a few ideas, and much better control of my hands than I did the first few times. I know I could’ve grabbed the rope—since my hands were bound in front of me—and pulled myself up with my arms. That would take the pressure off my throat. Could have climbed up higher, too.

  “Not that you would’ve let me.”

  “Correct,” Beauty said. “The point of this exercise wasn’t escaping, but enduring. In the future, there will be training to get out of situations like this, but that’s for another day. Really, you should go eat while you can.”

  “I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” Det said. “But, after a morning of getting hanged over and over, I’m actually pretty hungry.”

  “Dying works up an appetite,” Beauty said.