Gradually Growing Grim

After the intense pain ended... perhaps it had not ended at all, but had merely become numb and impossible to feel.

The Maliro man, bound to a chair with electrical wires, struggled to breathe. Only the faint rise and fall of his chest showed that he was still alive. Apart from that, he was practically a dead man.

From his ankles to his knees, all the flesh had been scraped away by steel wires. The doctors had performed an amputation on the spot without sawing through the bones. The two sections of his lower legs were still attached to him, but they were no longer legs—only bones.

His head drooped. He had gone from his initial terror to calmly accepting everything before him, and the psychological journey had been quite fascinating.

He did not dare reveal who was behind him, because by then, it would not be only him who died. His brothers and sisters, as well as his family, would die too.

Everyone related to him by blood would be purged. That was one of Maliro's defining traits.

In this country of two ethnic groups, the most common thing was to purge the bloodlines of the opposing side.

That practice had even extended into daily life.

Rather than let everyone connected to him face death, he would rather face death alone.

At first, he had found the pain and terror unbearable and had nearly confessed.

But once pain reached the point of numbness, it instead awakened the backbone and courage within a person.

No matter how painful it was, how much worse could it get? Wasn't it already like this?

The only thing he hated was that he should never have gone to the casino. He should never have watched them give away fifty thousand dollars' worth of chips