Chapter 19: If you take my arm, I’ll just get cooler

Staring up at the cement ceiling above him, Gunther wondered if there was ever a chance he was going to get out of here.

There was no blame, no judgement in his statement. While he had been sent here on others orders, he hadn’t been told to do what he did. If Rhys or Kellen knew the full extent of what he had done? He was sure that the both of them would strangle him for his foolishness.

He hadn’t prioritized him getting out. He had instead prioritized getting them a warning. He wasn’t sure if they understood the extent of it, but he did know that they got it. The whole group he had been swallowed up by had lost their damn minds. They hadn’t even considered a leak.

At first.

Gunther knew that as soon as he had done what he did, whether they knew how he’d done it or not, he was living on borrowed time. Gunther had a feeling that very few people knew how dangerous the E.A.G. was. Yes, they shot people, but he had a feeling that they didn’t understand the cost on the humanity side of things.

Gunther, in the short time he had been with them, had watched any civility leave so many Esper’s eyes. Whatever ounce of humanity that they did have was gone, replaced with this hardness that was just as unnatural to Gunther as their jump in powers. That was the other thing that Gunther had a feeling the others weren’t aware of.

As soon as you sold your soul to these guys, you lost parts of yourself you didn’t think you would miss for a chance that your powers would jump in Class. How the hell they promised something like that? Gunther’s best guess was drugs, but he wasn’t allowed near where they did the ’rituals’.

He was too new, and too untrustworthy. They had a right to be so hesitant around him. Gunther held no alliance to them. He was a spy, an outsider and he played that up.

He poked holes in how they ran things. From his experience as a Lieutenant, he ripped the higher level managers to shreds, and in front of the people that were supposed to respect them. He was mean, cruel, and pointed. Honestly, it felt a little good to be an asshole. Did it have the consequence of them running the E.A.G. better?

Of course not. All of the Espers here were Espers who had problems with authority. They were never going to take anything Gunther said to heart. They would have thought he was just being an asshole, not that he was giving them actual advice wrapped in the behaviour of his father and mother breathing through him.

They would never think that.

That was, until one of the Lieutenants of the actual E.A.G. showed up. Up until this point, this group had been acting as a branch of sorts, not quite a part of the main E.A.G. It was clear to Gunther that they were just testing the waters. Seeing if they were capable of doing anything.

He did not realise that him joining would make this branch have enough value to catch the attention of the true higher ups.

That was what happened right before the monster attack on the front lines, and that was when Gunther learned that there were more powers than he had actually thought that there were. There were mutations happening in the Espers and their powers, and that was a horrifying thing that he could not easily tell anyone.

The Lieutenant was on Gunther’s ass. In a way that told Gunther that they had a feeling that they knew what he was up to. They knew he wasn’t committed to the cause, and that was a problem. Gunther wasn’t allowed out on his own anymore. He had to go with an annoying Esper watchguard. The others didn’t understand why.

They were basically drones in the grand scheme of things. He could see how the E.A.G. viewed the ’normal’ Espers. They were cannon fodder. Things to be used. They knew that Gunther could be more, so they treated him like a proper threat. His last act was destroying the generator knowing that Rhys would be able to see why he had done what he had done. A last act of defiance before he was locked up with the fucking crazy bitch who was the Lieutenant sent to ’straighten’ him up.

Oh yeah, there was a whole other aspect of the E.A.G. that the public didn’t know. The E.A.G. were homophobic as well. It wasn’t something that Gunther had clued into right away until the Lieutenant had arrived. They had sent a pretty blonde woman with blue eyes that were devoid of happiness to try and convert him to ’straightness’.

They knew his history of taking mostly male Guides as his partners for guiding sessions. So not only did they view him relying on Guides as an issue, they also didn’t like that he was relying on male Guides. That was a fucking whiplash back to his childhood for Gunther. He hadn’t expected that kind of poison from anyone but his parents.

That was something his Mom had repeated over and over. That Gunther couldn’t end up with a boy, he had to end up with a girl. Boys were icky, and disgusting. Girls were pretty and soft. It was a damn miracle that he had Rhys around in any capacity because if he hadn’t? Gunther could genuinely see himself flourishing in the E.A.G. If he had taken a wrong step in his childhood, Gunther could have been right beside the crazy bitch they had sent to his city.

The Lieutenant was named Callie. Too normal of a name for a being who felt so fucking evil. She was small, petite. About 5’3 in height, she didn’t look as intimidating as she felt. She was only a B Class Esper, and she didn’t wear a uniform. She wore civilian clothes. If you didn’t know who she was, she would blend into the general public. Until you met her gaze.

It was stone cold. Hard blue pebbles in her face. She had either experienced a lot of harshness in her life, or she had no soul. Those were the only two options Gunther could come up with given his own life experience. He had seen that expression on a few of the Espers that went into gates and never came out when he was a kid.

It was a disservice that she wasn’t doing the same.

She never smiled, and those pebble-like eyes watched like a damn hawk. As soon as she caught wind of what Gunther was doing, she put a literal leash around his throat and threw him into a cement room to have several Espers beat the shit out of him.

He was their ’dog’. He needed to learn his place. That treatment had lasted a week, and when it became clear that beating him everyday wasn’t going to do the job, she switched to different tactics.

She was trying to break him down so that she could mold him into the image that she wanted him to be. What they

wanted him to be. Gunther was annoyed that she wasn’t much of a talker. If she was, he could have gotten who they were out of her, but she wasn’t budging.

The worst part?

She kept saying that Gunther was hers. He was meant to be hers.

That was the most horrifying thing that she could say. For some reason, Gunther had been promised to this psycho as a companion? A dog? It wasn’t clear, and Gunther wasn’t going to go through with it. He had one person in his heart, had since the day he’d met them, and he would never, ever betray that love and affection that he had for that man.

Did that mean that he expected to get out of this alive?

Gunther knew that Casper wouldn’t be happy with his answer, so he chose not to think about it often.

So, here Gunther was, on day…he couldn’t actually remember time that well anymore, in a tiny cement room meant to break his mind. Little did little blondie know that Gunther had long ago broken. Whatever these people thought that they could do to him wouldn’t work. He doubted they would ever be able to deal half as much damage as his actual parents did.

He had only recently started to realise how much they had fucked him up. He thought it was normal to go around thinking that everyone was indecent and didn’t love their partners enough because they were so nice to them. Turns out, he was the freak in the situation, and that was why the man he loved had planned to leave him.

They could not hurt him in any way that would matter. Even if they cut off a limb, it didn’t matter. He had plenty of strong people around him without limbs, and hell, he could just make one if he wanted to. Water was versatile. He could like, put a shell or something on the bottom and hook onto the water. He could walk on that.

If they took an arm? Wow, what a cool whip arm he’d have. They truly didn’t understand how much he could bounce back.

Even when they told him the news of what had happened on the front lines and how everyone who had been sucked into the gate had been from his Guild, he didn’t crack. He didn’t crack when they told him that Kellen had gone in solo.

He didn’t crack when they told him that they had it on good authority that Rhys had put himself under so that he wouldn’t go insane. He didn’t crack when the days ticked by so slowly that he thought he was going to lose his mind with worry.

He did smile when the shouts of anger and frustration rang through the building at Kellen’s success. He gave as much of a celebration as he could given what they had clearly wanted to happen, didn’t. Gunther wasn’t sure why, but there was a heavier anger from the blonde bitch that day when she came in to punish him.

Her hits were harder, angrier, and for her first time, she slipped up. She was mumbling something quiet, thinking that he couldn’t hear. He was a whole Class above her, she would have to be insanely quiet from him not to be able to hear her.

“…bosses’ hard work, wasted.” That tidbit was interesting. Hard work? What hard work? And who was her boss? The fucker who started the E.A.G.? Or the one who was currently in charge of it? Were those two different people? And how was Kellen making it out alive of the gate a waste of their hard work? What had they done that could be wasted?

Gunther could feel something almost clicking in his mind before it would disappear because she was still beating him up. He’d basically become her punching bag, kept weak power wise and physically so that he couldn’t escape.

At least, not yet. He was planning to give it a good old college try here soon, but with her slip up, Gunther wasn’t so sure anymore. He needed to find out what the hell that meant. For him, and for everyone else in the city. For Casper.

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