Nine does not manage to get free somehow.

And after four hours it's Sairu's turn.

It occurs to him that he's never done this to anybody for more than a few minutes at a time, and his point will not quite be made in the way he intended if she comes out of his room completely dead to the world because he hurt her so much she forgot how her senses are supposed to work. He takes apart the pain spell and waits a few minutes to see if she does anything.

In the space of just a couple minutes, no.

What if he gives her the pain spell again, just a flicker of it, less than a second...?

She twitches and makes some kind of nonverbal vocalization.

Progress!

He sits near her and watches and waits.

After half an hour she sits up, slowly.

"Good morning," he says.

She's not going to dignify that with a response. A look of fear, yes, but not a verbal response.

"I assume you know why you're here. Anything to say?"

She shakes her head.

"Apologies, pleas for mercy...? No?"

"Would it help?"

"It might. There are a lot of ways the rest of this night could go and you won't like any of them but some of the possibilities are definitely worse than others."

"I'm sorry."

"Then I won't leave the pain spell on you for the rest of the night."

He does other things instead. He enjoys them very much. She probably doesn't.

Just after dawn, he heals her and lets her go.

She leaves with whatever tattered scraps of dignity she can clutch.

And he crosses her off the list and goes about the rest of his day as normal and then goes hunting again in the evening. The one he finds first this time is a boy named Tezuin. Back to Sairu's room they go, and Tezuin can have four hours under the pain spell and then an opportunity to grovel. He chooses to babble threateningly. Sairu gives him three more hours under the pain spell, some poetic retribution, and lets him flee at dawn with most of his injuries healed but some burns lingering in uncomfortable places.

This pattern continues over the next week. One per day, whoever he can catch. The first few are the easiest, of course. When he catches Twelve on the sixth day, she manages to put up a fight, though not much of one.

It helps to have something to do, but achieving revenge does surprisingly little to calm the constant feeling that something is wrong and awful and intolerable and needs to be set right. Maybe there just isn't a way to set it right. Maybe it will just stay wrong forever.

This is not what most of the other apprentices think is wrong. That's mostly that the tough but fair nerd apparently just went insane, because he isn't bothering to explain the reason behind his actions and none of his 'victims' are telling.

Yeah, that's the price of ambushing people alone, is not getting a chance to explain yourself to bystanders.

On day seven, he finds two of them in a study room with five other people. It's probably the best shot he's going to get at any of them tonight. He drops them both with pain spells the moment he opens the door, before they can look up and see him.

"If you're worried you might be next, don't be," he says to everyone else in the room. "They know what they did."

And he picks up Ten and leaves Melara sitting at a table under a sense-deadening spell set to last ten minutes.

This quiets some of the rumors but not all of them, and starts up a new set.

On day eight, the remaining five of them are all in a room together, waiting for him. He scries them through the wall, pain-spells the whole room, takes Melara, and leaves the rest with ten minutes of pain as a preview.

On day nine they form a slightly better-prepared ambush. Eleven tries taunting him about - things he'd rather forget, so Eleven is the one he takes that night. Eleven does not have a very good night.

And on, and on -

The morning of day twelve, when Anaseverina wakes up, Sairu is sitting on the floor by the bed looking pensive.

Yeah. Hug?

He leans on her.

"It's... not helping as much as I thought it would," he admits.

"I wasn't all better either after you did for the one who got me."