The glove descended with deliberate slowness, leather creaking as Renna's fingertips brushed the tender bud. Sarah flinched, her breath hitching—but this time, when Renna's nails scraped lightly over the nipple's peak, the child's response wasn't a gasp or whimper. Instead, Sarah's lips peeled back from bloodied teeth. "Your hands feel like dead rats," she rasped, her voice raw yet eerily steady. "Do they train you to touch kids with those things, or does it just come natural to gutter trash?"

Renna froze mid-caress. The insult should've sent fury boiling through her veins—but instead, something peculiar happened. A cool detachment settled over her like snowfall, muting the anger into perfect, crystalline calm. She watched dispassionately as Sarah's remaining nipple stiffened beneath her glove, the areola contracting into tiny peaks like gooseflesh. Professional curiosity stirred. The child's bravado was impressive, yes, but physiologically impossible to maintain under sustained torment. Renna's thumb circled the puckered flesh, applying just enough pressure to make Sarah's toes curl against the metal table. "Interesting," she murmured, more to herself than the prisoner. The pulse in Sarah's throat fluttered like a trapped hummingbird, belying her defiant glare.

The torch flared alive with a serpent's hiss. This time, Renna didn't tease—she pressed the white-hot tip directly against Sarah's right nipple with clinical precision. The flesh blanched instantly, capillaries constricting in reflexive terror before the heat overwhelmed them. Sarah knew what came next—the swelling, the blistering, the inevitable rupture—but foreknowledge did nothing to dull the agony. Her spine arched, muscles locking rigid as the fire seared deeper. It felt like a thousand red-hot needles were being threaded through her milk ducts, each second stretching the torment thinner, sharper. She bit down—not hard enough to draw blood this time—but her jaw trembled with the effort of containing screams.

Then something unexpected happened. The nipple didn't swell. Didn't blister. Instead of ballooning grotesquely like its twin had, it simply darkened—first to angry scarlet, then to the purple-black of a deep bruise. Renna adjusted the flame, her brow furrowing as she watched the areola contract inward like a frightened sea anemone, the puckered flesh pulling tight around the stiffening bud. The skin cracked audibly, fissures spiderwebbing outward with tiny, hairline fractures that darkened at the edges like burnt paper. Sarah whimpered—not from pain (though the pain was excruciating) but from the horrifying realization that this nipple wasn't going to burst. It was simply... cooking. The smell was different too—less sickly-sweet, more like charcoal and scorched hair.

Renna exhaled sharply through her nose, recalling some half-forgotten anatomy lecture in the Academy's dimmest classroom. Arousal altered tissue composition—less fluid retention, more concentrated fibrous tissue. That explained the resistance to bursting, but not the way the nipple now resembled a tiny, desiccated fig shrinking on its stem. She tilted the torch, watching the darkened flesh blacken in slow motion, the outer layers curling back to reveal pearlescent fat beneath. A thin wisp of steam escaped, carrying with it the acrid tang of burnt keratin. Still no explosion. Just relentless, methodical destruction as the nipple shriveled into something unrecognizable—a charred nub clinging stubbornly to ruined flesh.

The lieutenant adjusted her grip, angling the flame beneath the ruined peak where the breast tissue swelled in tender promise of future curves. Here, the fat was softer, untrained by puberty's harsher lessons. The flame kissed the subcutaneous layer and the effect was immediate—the pale yellow globules liquefying like candle wax held too close to a hearth. Sarah's breath hitched as molten fat bubbled to the surface in frenzied little beads, each pop sending fresh agony radiating outward. The pooled liquid shimmered for a heartbeat before cascading in scorching rivulets down the slope of her unburnt breast, leaving angry red trails in its wake. One particularly fat droplet clung to the underside of her breast before falling with a sizzle onto her ribcage, branding a coin-sized mark above her frantic heartbeat.

It was horrible—but not unendurable. The pain settled into a familiar rhythm now, no longer the world-ending cataclysm of those first blistering moments. Her nerves sang the same song they had during the forearm's branding—just pitched half an octave higher. The realization struck Sarah like cold water: pain had thresholds, and hers had been recalibrated. What would have shattered her yesterday merely made her teeth ache now. A wild, giddy thought took root. Renna wanted screams? Fine. But she'd get them packaged in something far sharper.

Sarah gathered saliva thick with blood and phlegm—tasted copper, salt, the ghost of yesterday's stale bread—and spat. The glob hit Renna's left cheekbone with perfect accuracy, sliding greasily down the sculpted plane of her face. The lieutenant recoiled, gloved hand instinctively rising to wipe the mess—but not before Sarah saw the viscous strand tremble on her skin like a grotesque pearl necklace. "Y-you—" Sarah gasped as another fat bubble burst on her breast, the pain spiking through her ribs "—you're just jealous these'll still be perky when yours are—*ah!*—sagging like udders." Her breath hitched as Renna's torch traced a fresh path along her ribs. "Bet your tits look like—*hnng*—like wrinkled sacks full of—of gravel."

Renna's fingers spasmed around the torch handle. The leather creaked ominously. Sarah watched with delirious satisfaction as a crimson flush crept up the woman's neck—not the controlled anger of earlier, but something raw and splotchy, the color of a slapped cheek. The lieutenant's nostrils flared, her usually precise movements turning jerky as she jammed the flame deeper into Sarah's breast tissue. Fat sizzled, the smell nauseatingly rich, but Sarah kept laughing—wet, broken giggles that bubbled up between gasps. Each chuckle made fresh tears well in her eyes, the salt stinging the burns on her face, but she couldn't stop. Not when Renna's polished facade was cracking like overcooked glaze.

The torch clattered onto a steel tray. Renna inhaled sharply through her nose—once, twice—her shoulders rising with military precision. When she turned back, her face was a porcelain mask again, but her eyes... Sarah shivered. Those poison-green irises had frozen into something colder than arctic ice. The lieutenant's gloved hand rose with eerie slowness to wipe the spittle from her cheek. "Pain," she murmured, the word precise as a scalpel's edge, "is a language you seem desperate to learn." Her thumb smeared Sarah's blood-saliva mixture across the child's burnt nipple, making the raw nerves scream anew. "So we'll conjugate it. Present tense. Future perfect. Until you're fluent."