Chapter 26.5- And so the Dragons Danced

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“So what have you been able to find out?” I asked Toji as I took a sip of the tea that Amara had so graciously made me to celebrate my almost capture and aid my recovery. She’d been worried when I explained the technique I’d used to survive the poisoning to her, but since there wasn’t anything immidiately wrong for her to point at and she didn’t have the data on how overheating could affect children of Agni like myself, she had relented from her worry and prescribed a simple ice bath before bed and now there was the cold tea she’d recommended.

“Not much. Also haven’t been able to ask much as we’ve been spending the time keeping them unconscious until suitable accommodations can be found.” He said.

“We have wooden carts, do we not?”

“Sure, the ones we use for food and provisions”

“Add some chains and lock them in separate carts. Close enough that they’ll be able to hear each other scream when the real fun starts, but not so close that they start talking and plan an escape.” I told him, and he spent a second giving me a look to verify that I was being serious before he nodded and left the room.

I hummed, focusing on my inner fire while I drank the tea. Another thing I’d noticed since waking up was that it felt like my fire came easier to me now. Maybe it as the practice of essentially dropping into a meditative state to overhear yesterday, butty fire had never felt so close to my skin before. It was like I could-

With a thought, I’d breathed out a blast of fire from my lips. The dragon of the wast was definitely going to have some competition coming his way.

X

“So who hired you?” I asked, looking down at the muscular one. He was one of the last to be interrogated in this first round, and just like the others, he kept his lips sealed. I wondered how long this state of affairs would continue for.

It turned out the answer to that one was- ‘not long’. After the first set of questioning we return4d to the first one. The one with the green mask and lithe frame. Step one was taking off the mask. Since I didn’t have any members of the Interrogation corps with me. It was up to Toji, Shin, and I to get information out of him. A matter that was causing no small amount of stress. My idea to burn them until they spoke had been tossed out almost immediately for being needlessly cruel. Toji’s idea to play them against each other with mind games until someone spoke wasn’t tossed out, but was placed on the back burner for later because Shin’s assertion that he could get the information out of them with only a few minutes was too tempting not to try.

So that was what led us here. Standing in front of a man while Shin knelt in front of him and dragged the blunt edge of a carving knife across his naked thigh. Even knowing what was going to happen did not prepare me for the screams when Shin made the first cut. He hadn’t even asked a question yet.

A/N; Not too sure about this scene yet.