Chapter 407: A Loophole
(Planet Juxta, Leo’s POV)
"Lord Father! Lord Father!"
Leo heard a familiar voice echo faintly in the distance, distorted like it were traveling through water, as he slowly drifted back to consciousness, his vision still blurry and his body feeling impossibly heavy.
"Lord Father! Lord Father!"
Dumpy’s voice rang out again, louder this time, more urgent and high-pitched, as Leo finally snapped out of his stupor and took note of his immediate surroundings.
’The fuck? Where am I? Who the hell knocked me out?’ He wondered, as he found himself in an unfamiliar room, that had no immediate threats, but was alarming in its own way.
The room, though not overtly dangerous, felt deeply uncanny, as it was completely plain from edge to edge, with no hint of texture or design.
There were no doors, no shutters, no markings on the walls, nothing at all to indicate how one could have entered or exited the space, which made the question of how Dumpy and he had ended up here a mystery in itself.
The only source of natural light came from a small, metal-grated opening high near the ceiling, roughly forty feet above, beyond which lay nothing but the dark night sky.
The only other creature present within the room apart from him was Dumpy, who sat a few feet away, tightly bound in what appeared to be reinforced mana rope, his bulbous form wrapped in a thick, suppressive jacket that clung to his slimy skin like a prison of its own.
"The smoking man got us, Lord Father..." Dumpy said nervously, eyes twitching as he struggled inside the bindings, his tone trembling with guilt and fear.
"He kidnapped and restrained both of us in this cursed, empty chamber. I woke up before you did, and I confronted him when he was still here... just sitting there, smoking... and mocking us."
Leo remained silent, his jaw clenched as he tried to move, only to realize he couldn’t even twitch a single muscle.
From his shoulders down to his ankles, he was bound in mana-restricting threads so tightly wound they didn’t just limit movement, they completely erased his ability to absorb ambient mana from the air.
Only his heels and jaw retained some freedom as apart from those two muscle groups, he could not move or bend anything.
"The smoking man said..." Dumpy continued, "he said these were unbreakable bounds... and that we must figure out a way to escape this room in the next 24 hours. Or when he returns... he’ll whip us both with 100 lashes each!"
Leo blinked.
Then blinked again.
’The fuck?’
His mind raced, trying to wrap itself around the absurdity of the situation, but no matter how many possibilities he ran through, whether they be infiltration, sabotage, hostage conditioning, or even prison escape training, none of them explained what kind of lunatic would go to this extent just to throw him into a sealed-off room with his frog and leave them there with a time limit to escape?
"What the fuck is the Cult up to now?" Leo mused out loud, as he wondered if one of the two old foggies he met on planet Tithia were behind this whole idea.
"If the foggies did this.... I’ll break their teeth when I get the chance" Leo muttered to himself, as clenched his jaw and tried to activate [Mirror World], hoping to summon a clone and at least use it to untie the bindings, but the moment he tried to circulate mana inside his body, he felt an invisible pressure snap down like a vice, canceling the flow before it even reached his core.
’So the bindings on my body are not just preventing me from absorbing ambient mana from my surroundings, they’re also preventing me from circulating internal mana to activate spells....’ Leo gauged, as he realized that he was being subjected to the ultimate prisoner treatment, as this was exactly how highly dangerous prisoners were jailed in a maximum security facility.
To make matters worse, Dumpy, who normally could melt solid stone just by rubbing his toxic skin against it, couldn’t do a damn thing about his own bindings either, as the jacket wrapped around his body wasn’t just for containment, it was lined with an acid neutralizing gel that clogged his pores and prevented him from secreting any acid at all.
’They have removed all our obvious means of escaping,’ Leo realized, as he took in a deep breath and gazed towards the only window opening in the room that was about 40 feet high.
As far as he could tell... the only way to escape this damn room was to access the godforsaken window and somehow escape through it, however, that was easier said than done while roaming around in these restraints.
"Who the fuck did this to us?" Leo muttered under his breath, voice low, tone flat, but eyes already scanning every corner of the room.
"And more importantly... why?" He frustratedly wondered, as he couldn’t understand the logic behind this drill that he was thrust into without preamble.
Because this wasn’t a normal punishment.
And the threat of being whipped a hundred times if he failed to escape didn’t even feel particularly cruel.... just humiliating.
It was clearly some kind of training exercise, designed not to break him, but to shape him, leaving him with the only question of who had orchestrated it... and why?
’Agh, fuck it. What does it matter why?’ Leo thought after a moment, as he exhaled sharply through his nose and shut the question out of his mind.
He wasn’t going to sit around for a full day just to find out who it was that was screwing with him, as whether or not someone wanted him to try and escape was irrelevant, because now that he was fully conscious again, he was going to try.
Not for them.
But for himself.
Because he had no intention of playing prisoner for the amusement of anyone in the Cult.
—---------
Meanwhile, somewhere on the Juxta military base, Charles thought about how in the future, if Leo was ever captured by the righteous faction, this was going to be the exact type of prison setup he would most likely find himself trapped in.
Because all maximum security prisons in the righteous faction shared the same structure: sealed cells with no slits, no doors, and suppressive bindings that left prisoners without food or water for up to 14 days, which was exactly why he believed it to be the perfect challenge to begin Leo’s training, because if Leo was destined to live a dangerous life carrying out missions within the righteous faction, then Charles believed that it was critical that he learn how to break out of the various prison systems found within the righteous faction, for the sake of his own future preparedness.
"There’s nothing quite like firsthand learning.... Also, it saves me a lot of training time!
I’m technically teaching him, while also being fully devoted to my role as a battlefield commander.
Surely Soron can’t be too unhappy about this..." Charles mused to himself, as he smugly smiled thinking about how he had found a loophole to both train Leo and live his usual life at the same time.