Liquid Metal?

"Actually, you probably don't know this, but I'm not allowed to die. I've told at least two people recently that I'm not gonna die again, so I'm kinda set on not embarrassing myself there." 6 said lightheartedly.

Hanging their head, Vian decided to stop judging this insane new cellmate, who seemed to do his absolute best to react outside of their expectations at every chance he got.

According to Vian, this prison was seemingly built to kidnap beginner level adventurers from their Domus planets, and then use them in various ways.

In their experience, they had never seen any prisoner arrive here above the level of beginner, not even a single basic, though some adventurers did become reach the basic level after arriving.

Once they were here, the adventures would mostly be forced to fight each other, often times to the death.

When they weren't used for fighting, they were experimented on and put through terrible ordeals.

Vian had only experienced the experimentation once, and even then, they were unsuitable for any of the experiments that the researcher attempted to conduct on them.

But they had seen the aftereffects these experiments had on their cellmates over these months.

Some of them would return days after being taken from the cell, their bodies missing chunks and limbs all over.

Their minds didn't always come back entirely functioning either.

They would return barely able to speak sometimes, stumbling through their sentences like idiots, unable to keep their mind focused.

Rarely, these experiments, even with the missing chunks of flesh or limbs, would see them returned to their cell with an upgrade in some way.

These cases were the times that Vian saw adventurers raise their level to basic when they were previously only beginners.

More often than not, however, experimentation led to the deaths of the unfortunate adventurers forced to go through it.

Vian was both lucky and unlucky.

Due to their unique physiology, which wasn't often found amongst beginner adventurers, left the researchers unable to conduct any kind of experiments upon them.

They lacked the necessary knowledge to do so.

Vian had no mouth, and only consumed air. They could only take in the specific types of air they required to live, and thus the researchers couldn't force them to absorb anything to see the effects.

Being made up of air, there was no way to study their physiology either, as all they would find was air.

Elemental beings were basically souls that inhabited an element, and in particular, air elementals bodies were entirely intangible, leaving them closer to being pure souls than the rest of the elemental beings of the universe.

Though they could be damaged by physical means, that was the full extent of their bodies.

So the researchers lacked the tools to conduct experiments on Vian, and they lacked the need or desire to gain access to these tools. It wasn't like they could benefit themselves with this research, as elemental beings worked entirely differently.

When it came to fighting, Vian was a relatively rare air elemental, in the sense that they nearly entirely lacked the capacity to fight.

That was why despite part of being a species that was considered universally above average, they were still a beginner when they managed to become an adventurer.

And so when the guards forced Vian into the ring, they spent the matches running about and hiding, and since they were invisible to most species, especially beginners of those species, the matches looked like an insane adventurer fighting nothing, swinging their weapon and chasing something that wasn't there.

Eventually, the guards and researchers had both decided Vian was useless and left them unbothered in their cell.

Since then, they had remained in the cell, only able to interact with newly kidnapped adventurers for a short period before the adventurers would inevitably die within a short period of time.

"When can I expect to see our friends?" 6 asked. "Not like, actual friends. I'm talking about the guards."

"You act like you want to see them." Vian replied.

"I do."

Despite the terrible things that Vian described to him, 6 remained entirely unperturbed, even smiling at times while they recounted the horrors that they had seen done to the adventurers before him.

6 wasn't smiling due to hearing about these terrible things, as he honestly couldn't care less about them, but rather do to his own thoughts.

He was excited about this situation.

This was exactly the type of experience he wanted to be put through.

What would happen next, what type of experiments would take place, what would he be forced to fight?

The very idea of all of these things happening out of his control excited him, giving him something to look forward to.

He even began being thankful for the kidnapping, despite the initial dissatisfaction he felt about being treated like a good.

All he had to do was kill whoever did this, after he finished having his fun of course.

His eyes remained glued to the door, waiting for the moment that it would open to reveal the guards on the other side.

Between attacking them violently the moment he saw them and acting happy go lucky and doing his best to annoy them into telling him as much information he could wring out of them, 6 was teetering on the sides of the conundrum that had presented itself to him.

"I am not the air they walk through." Vian said. "How should I know when they'll come around."

Attacking them would be futile in the sense that there was no chance of 6 actually hurting or killing the guards.

If they were weak enough to be harmed by beginners, they wouldn't have the confidence to kidnap them and place them in cells without any restraints.

If anything, the guards were likely to be around the level of an intermediate adventurer, otherwise they wouldn't have this much confidence.

But it would still allow 6 to get a sense of how strong they were and allow him to gauge what his odds of escaping from this place on his own were.

On the other hand, acting like an annoying daft fool would have its own benefits.

They wouldn't think much of him and would be more willing to give up information.

The con to this was that 6 had already shown that he wasn't entirely foolish in his interactions with Vian, and there was no way to tell if the guards were able to monitor their actions within the cell.

Even the technology of 6's homeworld was able to make some very well hidden, if not entirely unnoticeable, cameras, so there could very well be some type of observation magic or camera hidden within the cell that 6 couldn't see.

"How long do they usually wait once a new adventurer comes by?"

"Few days, few minutes, few seconds. I've been left alone with a newbie for over a week without the guards coming by to pick them up." Vian said.

After the two prisoners trapped in their cell spoke for another hour, most of that time occupied by Vian telling 6 everything he knew about the prison and the guards, the door to their cell finally opened.

Instead of the usual standard door that swung on hinges, the solid hunk of metal merely turned transparent, fading away like an apparition.

Just as the door soundlessly opened, Vian felt the flow of air in the cell change.

Knowing that this meant the door was opening, they immediately stopped talking, going silent as soon as the guards appeared behind the door.

6, whose eyes hadn't left the door throughout most of the conversation over the last hour, as he had no way to look at the face of his conversational partner even if he wanted to, watched the entire process of the door fading away, happily looking upon it.

Vian relaxed the air of their body as they saw that 6 behaved himself as the guards walked into the room.

With how 6 reacted when they first revealed themselves, they were worried that he would immediately attack the guards when they appeared.

Though Vian had warned 6 several times about the guards, telling him several time that the guards were far stronger than any adventurer that they had met so far, they were scared that 6 wouldn't believe their words.

They had seen several adventurers brutally beaten right in front of their eyes just for speaking to the guards rudely.

As much as they enjoyed sharing their own misfortune with others, they equally enjoyed having other to share anything with at all.

They didn't want their first cellmate in the past two weeks to die right off the bat.

This was the kind, and vulnerable, part of Vian that had survived their long unjust imprisonment.

They wouldn't admit it, even to themselves, but they hated the tortures and brutality that they witness their cellmates go through.

Even if they had only known those cellmates for a few days, or in this case, hours.

When they thought of how 6 had attacked them without hesitation, the guilt they subconsciously felt lessened.

The two guards, one of them half a head taller than 6 and the other a full head taller, stayed standing just outside of the cell, as if waiting for 6 to do something.

Both were fully covered, not showing even an inch of skin, with solid metal armor.

There were no gaps in the armor, as it was carved the same singular piece of metal.

The metal in the joints of the armor, where you would usually see breaks, moved as if they were made of a fluid rather than a solid.

After a quick once over glance of the two guards, 6 looked both of them in the place where he assumed their eyes would be as he nodded, as if saying hello.

Seeing this, the taller guard chuckled, and the shorter one slapped him on the chest as if annoyed.

As the guard's hand pulled away from the other guard's chest, 6 could see a fluid portion of metal separate from the shorter guard's hand, leaving behind some of its armor.

The portion of armor left on the taller guard's chest slowly fused into his own armor.

"Ah, don't be like that chump. You'll get the better of me one day." The taller guard spoke with a youthful voice as the shorter guard scoffed.

While he was speaking, the guard visibly grew in height.

It was just a smidge, but it was enough to notice.

Simultaneously, the guard next to him shrunk by nearly the same small increment, as if the two had just exchanged bits of their bodies as part of a bet.