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Augment Alliance - Superhero Peril
Part 2 - Razor’s Busting
By Arthur Hero
The darkness came fast.
One moment Razor was braced against the container, his core guttering low, rain hammering the docks. The next, something hit the back of his neck — a precise, targeted pulse — and the world went black.
---
He came to in pieces.
Sound first. Voices. Low, overlapping, some laughing.
Then sensation. His wrists were locked in reinforced restraints bolted to the ceiling — arms spread, feet barely touching the floor. His suit's chest panel had been cut open, the latex peeled back to expose the augment core beneath his skin. A dampening clamp had been fitted directly over it, cold against his sternum.
Then light. A wide, industrial room. Concrete. Bare bulbs. No windows.
And a crowd.
Razor counted seven of them. Seven villains, ranging from hired muscle brutes to names he recognized. Syndicate regulars. All of them watching him with the particular satisfaction of people who had been waiting.
Krieg stood at the back, arms folded.
"He's awake," someone said.
They didn't wait for a formal signal.
---
The first hour was the worst — not because the pain was greatest then, but because he could still feel the core fighting back. Every hit, he felt his power answer it, a hot reflexive surge under the clamp in his testicles, trying to push strength into muscles that needed it. He pulled at the restraints. He tried to twist away. He said nothing when they demanded it and everything sardonic when they didn't.
That cost him.
One of them — a heavyset enforcer with a grin Razor was already starting to hate — figured that out before the others did.
"Heard the suit runs hot everywhere," the man said, almost conversational, and drove a knee up into Razor's groin with the full weight of his stance behind it.
It wasn't an ordinary hit, and Razor's body knew it immediately. The pain didn't stay where it landed — it ran, white and electric, straight up from his testicles, through his core, the same pathway that carried his strength now carrying something else entirely. His vision blanked. The current under his sternum that he'd been holding onto, white-knuckled, lurched and stuttered like something had reached in and yanked the wire.
He made a sound he didn't recognize as his own.
The enforcer laughed, delighted with himself. "Told you. Wired straight through."
"Again," Krieg said from the back, with the flat interest of a man taking notes.
They didn't make it a habit — Razor understood, distantly, even through the haze, that this wasn't going to be the rhythm of the next four hours. It was a discovery, logged and filed, not a tactic to repeat. Which was almost worse. It meant Krieg now knew exactly where the wiring ran densest, and exactly how to make one hit do the work of ten. His balls.
The sarcasm didn't come back after that.
What came next was worse, in a different way — less a single sharp shock and more a slow grinding wear that didn't let up.
Two of them produced batons. Not standard issue — titanium-cored, Razor registered dimly, the kind designed to punch through reinforced plating rather than just bruise flesh. The first strike landed across his codpiece and he felt something give that shouldn't give. The sound it made was wrong. Distant, like it belonged to someone else. Squish!
"Careful," Krieg said, from the back, in the same flat tone he might use to comment on weather. "He needs to stay conscious."
They adjusted. Not softer — just smarter. A second strike came in low across his lower balls, doubling him forward against the restraints, the air driven out of him in one ragged exhale. A third followed almost immediately, same spot, and his stomach muscles seized so hard he thought they might tear. He couldn't draw breath fast enough between hits to brace for the next one.
They targeted each area of his testicles through his codpiece methodically. You couldn’t miss them. Two large orbs that were tighter and perky than most sets of balls.
One of them stepped in close and drove a gloved knuckle directly into the front of his nuts — not a full strike, just enough pressure to send a white flare of pain straight through the wiring beneath his skin. The clamp's edge bit into the inflamed tissue around it. Razor's whole body locked rigid.
"There," the villain said, almost admiring. "That's the spot."
Krieg made a note.
LOWER CENTER TESTICLES.
They went for the joints next — a titanium baton cracking across his knee, then his elbow, each strike aimed with surgical precision at places built to bend and not built to take impact like this. His knee buckled and his full weight dropped onto the wrist restraints, the metal cutting into already-raw skin. Someone caught his jaw and forced his head up so he couldn't simply hang there and absorb it passively.
The core kept answering, weaker each time. Every strike, that hot reflexive current under the clamp tried to surge into his arms, his legs, anywhere it might help him resist — and every time, the dampener caught it before it could do anything, redirecting the energy nowhere, burning it off like static. He could feel himself being emptied out by his own body's instinct to fight back.
By the time someone landed a final blow across his ribs — the same side as the first, the give sickeningly familiar now — Razor had gone past pain into a kind of gray static. He registered impacts the way you register weather. Something happening to a body that was, at the moment, only distantly his.
Krieg watched all of it without joining in. He didn't need to. He was cataloguing.
The surge under the clamp was getting weaker. Razor could feel it — that internal current that had always been there, as familiar as his own pulse, now thinning with every cycle of the clamp.
By the second hour the sarcasm had gone quiet.
By the third he was focused entirely on breathing.
By the fourth — when the restraints were the only thing keeping him upright — the room had grown almost bored. A few of the seven had drifted to the walls, talking among themselves. Krieg had left at some point. Only three were still actively taking turns.
The current under his sternum was almost gone now. A flicker where there should have been a steady pulse. He'd never felt himself this empty. Not after the worst missions, not after anything.
Just enough, barely, to stay conscious. Which Razor suspected was deliberate.
They went after his balls again. They were swollen but the suit kept them perky and tight. It made Krieg upset. He wanted to just rip his balls off in his hands. Squeeze them. Pop them. How dare this muscle hero with his perfect body, nipples, abs, perfect handsome face, long curved cock…how dare he have perfect balls like this?
---
Eventually they stopped.
Not out of mercy. Out of schedule.
The restraints released and he dropped. Two of them caught him — not gently — and walked him down a corridor deeper into the facility. His legs moved because he told them to, through sheer will, though they felt like someone else's legs.
They brought him into a smaller room.
Clean, compared to what came before. A single chair in the center — the kind with integrated restraints at wrists and ankles, built into the frame. A table. A light overhead that was almost warm.
They sat him down. The restraints clicked shut automatically.
Then they left.
And he waited.
The silence was loud.
His ribs ached with every breath. His left eye was swollen nearly shut. The clamp was still fitted over his exposed chest, a constant cold pressure where his core used to run warm.
He'd been in bad spots before. The Alliance had extraction protocols for exactly this kind of scenario. If his signal had gotten through on the docks, they knew the sector. They'd be looking.
He told himself that.
He kept telling himself that.
The door at the far end of the room opened.
Footsteps. Unhurried. Measured. The footsteps of someone who had nowhere to be because everywhere they needed to be, they already were.
A figure stepped into the light.
Older than Razor expected. Gray at the temples. A plain suit, no armor, no harness — which somehow made him more unsettling than the Brutes. He carried a small device in one hand and a folder in the other, and he looked at Razor the way a technician looks at a machine that needs diagnosing.
He pulled the chair out from the table and sat across from him.
He set the folder down. Opened it. Glanced at something inside without urgency.
"Razor," he said. Not a question. A label.
He folded his hands on the table.
"It’s me Doc." A pause. "So nice to see you again."
Razor said nothing.
Doc tilted his head slightly, unbothered.
"You've had a long night," he said. "I won't pretend otherwise. That was Krieg's work — I don't share his enthusiasm for the theatrical. He would eat your beautiful balls if I let him." He glanced at the folder again. "I'm more interested in conversation." He looked up. "Specifically, I'm interested in your power source. The augment core. The full architecture — input, output, enhancement cascade, the suppression thresholds." He said it the way someone recites a grocery list. Simple. Obvious. "You're going to tell me how it works."
Razor's swollen eye found him.
"Nice folder," he said. His voice came out rougher than intended.
Doc looked at him for a moment.
Then, almost imperceptibly, the corner of his mouth moved.
"There it is," he said quietly, as if confirming something he'd read. "Resilience marker. Still present." He made a small note. "That's useful, actually. It tells me the core is still partially active even under the clamp. Even after Krieg’s busting. Remarkable." He set his pen down. "We have time, Razor. I want you to understand that. Krieg was in a hurry. I am not."
He reached over and adjusted something on the dampening clamp — not removing it, just modulating it.
The cold pressure on Razor's chest shifted. Changed character. For a half second, the flicker under his sternum spiked — a phantom surge of strength — and then dimmed lower than before, like the clamp had reached in and pinched something off at the source.
"Let's start simply," Doc said, leaning back. "Tell me about the day you were augmented. Who performed the procedure. What compound they used." He looked at him with calm, clinical attention. "And we can go from there."
Razor stared back at him.
The fluorescent light hummed overhead.
Outside the door, somewhere deep in the facility, Krieg's facility, the city went on without him.
He thought about the Alliance. About the signal. About the extraction protocols.
Then he thought about what Doc had just said.
*We have time.*
He set his jaw.
"You're going to be disappointed," Razor said.
Doc picked up his pen again.
"Most of them say that," he replied pleasantly. "At first."
To be continued…
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