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The sound of laughter was what pulled him from unconsciousness, though the noise of it was devoid of any true innocent joy. It was a feminine pitch, that much his half-conscious mind could grasp, but there was no genuine joy in the sound. Instead, there was something mocking about it, a malicious little chime to it that struck something instinctive in him to be wary.

"He's moving," noted another voice, somewhere to his right where the laugh had come from just above his head. It's hard to drag himself out of the depths of what had been unconsciousness, but it was hard to tell if he'd been knocked out or drugged to sedate him. Tentatively, he tried to reach his clawed grasp up to feel out for any injury--only to realize that with the rattle of a few chains, he was strapped securely to the ground. He could feel the hefty weight of chains against his wrists, his ankles, and his knees, with a heavy chain collar wrapped snuggly against his throat, now that he was conscious enough to recognize the weight and small jingle of metal on metal. He could feel movement close to above his head, and a separate warmth of someone's knee digging against his hip from the side. His position had been left vulnerable, arms spread out and bent parallel with his head, and his legs spread, with no room for struggling.

There's a low, precautious growl as his eyes open, only for his view to be immediately temporarily obstructed by a firm set of hands yanking a muzzle roughly down over his maw. It forces his jaw together uncomfortably tight against his upper teeth, making his teeth and bones ache with the strain. There's no relief though, because with a little click of metal on metal, he found the muzzle secured behind his head, and he could finally catch a glimpse of his mystery attackers. Two human females, a brunette just at his left hip and the other, a pale blond woman with distant green eyes, leaning idly over his head with a confident, chilly little smirk that made a strange shiver of fear run through his belly.

"Can't have you snapping off at me now, can we? It's always inconvenient when your kind get rude," the blonde woman hummed, smacking his shoulder as if he were some sort of livestock or pack mule. It'd the thick, heavy, dud dud dud of palm on his scaled shoulder, not mean for any comfort or affection. It's a signal to her partner to begin.

"Scales first," The brunette announced, brandishing what looked like a blade though the tip of it was curved into a vicious half-circle. It looked like a paint scraper with how the blade tapered to the tip, and immediately, the dragon managed to put the words together in the after-haze of his stupor, starting to squirm in shock as the cool blade was pressed just below his stomach, just to the side of his hip. There was an uncomfortable pressure, before the hard metal of the blade pierced the smoothness of his scales. At first, it was just a light puncture of a sensation, not unlike stepping on a tac or getting a papercut. The blade was sharp enough that it was the shock of seeing the metal sink and feeling the pop of the scale-wall being breached.

Then the brunette, with almost practiced fluidity, drove the object upwards and with it, she scraped off the heavy layer of scales that made up the outer protection of his skin. If he hadn't been tense before, suddenly it felt like someone had set fire to the first layer of muscle under the scales, and blood followed. It was almost like the fleshy pink, damaged skin couldn't decide where to bleed first, the trauma of the sudden motion leaving the skin torn and showing exposed, twitching muscle under it. His arms jerked fiercely against the metal chains binding him, and the noise that escaped him from the gag is nearly a howl through his nostrils alone, with the inability to open his mouth to let the sound slip free. With the scales having bunched and pressed against one another on her blade, the brunette gave a little jerk upwards, pulling off another small strip just from how they'd stayed connected to the ones that had gathered on the cold metal. It was like a human peeling off too much cuticle from a damaged nail bed, and it left the skin unbroken under it, but obviously damaged and raw.

"Dragon scales," the brunette announced with some level of pride as she held up the stripped scales, "are worth their weight in gold." She was careful to drop them in a small box he hadn't noticed sitting behind her. There were three boxes, and he was loathe to think of what the others would be for. For now, he could only pant hard through the muzzle, his eyes darting from where she'd lifted his scales to drop them, to where she now settled the knife against his scales once more. He tried to flail, but any movement made the strip of naked, bleeding flesh on his stomach ache, his eyes watering as he jerked his arms against the chains once more.

"None of that," the blond woman commanded at his head, gripping him by the exposed flesh just under his jaw. Her nails felt like little razors, not piercing the skin, but digging in enough to make his breath choke in his throat. "You're lucky we didn't just knock your teeth out and left you unmuzzled. The sounds are always so interesting," she added in a quiet complaint, before lifting her free hand, the sharp nails there digging against his lower eyelid to pull it back, pinching it to hold it in place and keep him from blinking. It stung, and her knee buried under his head to tilt his face up--she was making him watch.

Using the leverage of where the scales had already broken from the skin from her first swipe, the blade was pressed to his skin, and with one eye pinched open, he was forced to see his own scales separate from the layers of soft, squishy flesh under it. The smooth motion also dislodged the little pool of blood that was welling from the first strip of scales removed, and it sloshed a little spray of the deep red liquid up the course of his chest. Squirming, the panicked breathing through the tight hold of the muzzle was mixed with muffled cries again, an agonized sob that he couldn't let free with the confines of his mouth being bound. The blonde above him let a little laugh of delight free once more.

"I think he's crying?" She said to her partner, though the brunette wasted little time in taking a third strip, drawing out another muffled scream. Now there was a sizable patch of scales completely gone from his stomach, nearly five or six inches across and almost a foot and a half upwards. She had taken half of the scales of his stomach, all the way up to the jut of his collarbone. Each time she had taken a strip, she had dropped it, blood-soaked and clinging together like a snake skin too thick to have been shedded, into the box behind her. It was hard to tell how much of his chest had been exposed as muscle and how much might still be the layers of skin under his scales, considering the blood marred it and no matter if it was muscle or flesh, every little brush or flex of his body under it made it sting anew. The pain was so hefty it made his bones ache, almost, and with the tightness of constriction across his nose and jaw, it was hard to breathe through the desperate, airless little gasps that slipped through his nose. He was at the risk of hyperventilating, something both of them recognized, and the blonde rolled her eyes in disdain.

Jerking his head back roughly, she pulled back to slam her open palm against the side of his head. It both winded him briefly, and made his ear ring from the force of the blow so close to it, but it had its effect; he was shocked out of his panic breathing, and instead, was left to let out a quiet whimper at the way his skin twitched on his stomach. There must have been a raw, exposed nerve somewhere in the batch of mutilated flesh, and each time it twitched, it sent little stinging spikes across the skin. He flinched away from the sight of his mutilated belly, causing the girl leaned over his head to tut, almost gently. Like she was fussing over a child's scraped knee instead of helping the other torment him.

"You're just making my job harder, aren't you? Why don't you behave a little more? I have to take care of those sharp claws of yours, but I still want you to see. How about I help you out?" She chimed. From behind him, where he can't see where her hands are moving, there's the scrape of something hard and metal on the floor under him. The sound grates on his ears but even more so, it sends a cold feeling through him like someone was tapping the bones of his spine with an ice cube.

"Mmf-!" It's a noise that wouldn't have made sense to either of the women even if it hadn't of been muffled, a protesting yelp of a sound as the knife comes into view. There's no question what it was for, particularly when the blonde moved to clench his head between her knees with enough pressure on his temples to make his brain feel a bit foggy. It secured him, and kept him from squirming or turning away as she reached forward, plucking his left upper eyelid up, before drawing the blade against the thin skin. It was soft, as all eyelids tended to be, and she was precisely careful not to damage or cut his actual eyeball as she carved off the skin. It started as a gentle sawing sensation of the serrated edge of the blade, but with how sharp it was, the flesh gave way into little gushes of blood. His eye burned, and if he wasn't muzzled he would have been screaming aloud. For now he could only make the noise in the back of his throat, nearly a howl as he rioted and jerked against the restraints.

Every bit that the stripping of his scales may have hurt felt twofold in the actual rip of skin from his eye socket. When her knife had cut about half way through his eyelid, she took little precaution in using a bit of force behind her hold on it to simply yank, pulling it free from the rest of the skin and leaving the remains of the upper lid to pucker back against the muscle that normally opened and closed it. His eyeball swiveled to the left and right, the blood welling directly against the whites of his eyes. Compounded with the throbbing, blood-dripping sting of anything that wasn't the back of his now-missing eyelid against it, his lower lid tried desperately to cover the painful gap that now protruded from his eye socket.

"I'm going to leave the lower ones on for now. I don't want your eyes falling out just yet," she observed, and before he could shake away or try to cope from the pain of losing the first one, the blonde had grabbed the lid of his right eye. This one she was a little more impatient with, savoring it less as he pulled it as far away from the eye as possible, stabbing the sharp tip of the knife directly in the middle of it, yanking the sharp end of the blade one way, before twisting it in the flesh and ripping it the other. The corner of his eyelid gave way first, leaving her to yank off the remaining shred of flesh that had barely held it together. With blood running down his cheeks, mixed with the fluid from his now ripped at tear-ducts, it was hard not to try to black out from the pain. Unconsciousness would have been a blessing in that moment, but short of impossible considering he could no longer close his eyes with only his lower lid keeping them from bulging from his skull like a morbid cartoon.

"You've had your fun. Get to your half of the work. Those claws aren't going to severe themselves," the brunette answered--all business and formality. She'd only taken the momentary break from scaling his stomach to watch her partner work, and to avoid making mistakes and wasting scales while he thrashed in his bonds. While he still squirmed, it was now a much more pathetic reaction, his energy sapped in response to the dire agony that vibrated from the bleeding viscera around his eyes. His struggles are weaker when she digs the knife against his stomach again, and scrapes another foot of scaling along the path that had started trying to congeal on his stomach. As painful as losing his eyelids had been, the blood flow from them wasn't enough to deprive him of his awareness of the moment, and the sensation made him breath in shaking groans. It seemed his inhales were never deep enough to get a full breath in his lungs before it was shaking form him in misery again. It was almost enough to make him miss the movement of the woman above him, but it was nigh impossible to not see her move now. Through the red haze and watery vision of both pain and damage to his eyelids, he could see her standing.

What he wouldn't see is her movement over to the table of tools that had been laid out for convenience not far away. While her companion preferred to work with the comfort of necessity nearby--the scale scraper, the boxes to put the scalped parts in--she preferred the comfort of being able to leisurely pick her tools when the time came to it. Collecting a spike, a wedge, and a hammer, she moved over to his right arm, stretched out still. Dangling the spike in front of his face, she couldn't help but give a laugh again. "This is to make sure you don't scratch me up with those fancy claws of yours before I manage to get them off of you. Behave for me, won't you?" She encouraged again. The words almost don't register with him for how distant they sound in comparison to the thunder of blood rushing through his head in that moment, pounding through his ears and drowning out the world around him.

The message was sent, loud and clear, when she pressed the spike to the center of his hand and hit it hard enough with the hammer to drive it through in one, smooth motion. It isn't enough to drive it into the ground under him, but she amended that by shifting her weight down onto his arm, her knee digging into his forearm as she slams the hammer down into the spike a few more times. It left his claws spread from the now inability to close and flex the muscles of his hand. She worked with a quick efficiency that suggested she knew what she was doing, and enjoyed doing it. After he could no longer close his palm into a fist, she took to the first claw, dipping the sharp edge of the wedge just under it. From the corner of his damaged eyes, he can see the hammer raise high and then slam down, driving the wedge between the softer, more vulnerable underside of his claw, and the bone of his fingers that connected it. Not only does it separate the claw from his finger, with a sickening crunch he can feel the bone that it had been connected to snapping under the sudden pressure and force.

He kicks out against the binds, shaking the chains enough to sound like the rattle of a train on rickety tracks in the silence of the room around them. The dragon was given no reprieve as she pins his squirming fingers down with the wedge again, and knocks it down between the second claw and finger. This one doesn't come through quite as easily, rupturing the hard material of his claw and fracturing it down the middle.

"I said stop squirming!" snapped the brunette suddenly, seeing the damage to the claw that the blonde had been trying to severe. Even if she hadn'twarned him, his protests were clearly grating on her nerves. In a rush of anger coupled with her words, she lifted the curved-tipped scraper and stabbed it down into the soft curve of flesh where his hip curved, unprotected by scales or any harder surface. It broke the skin and dug deep immediately, causing another little restrained howl to slip from his muzzle. It hit nerves immediately, and he isn't sure how badly the damage is, but there's the awareness that the pain stopped at his hip and that he couldn't feel the attached leg in any more than a numb, sleep-tingly fashion below it now. Irreparable damage.

"Sorry," the blonde noted to her partner, digging the wedge against the damaged claw and severing the now-two-pieces with one more clean whack of the hammer. "We can still get scrap cash for it, right?" With two fingers bleeding from the tip, jutting bone broken out from the skin where it'd been attached to the hard tips, he could only feel his fingers twitch in the violent response to stripping him of his natural defenses. He knew that fracturing a claw could hurt, but this went beyond that; even if the knife was no longer at his eyelids, he felt like it had been embedded in the tips of each finger and left there to sit, stabbing and throbbing at the remains of what had been his most powerful asset. She turned to his dewclaw next, not bothering with turning the claw the right way to drive it under. That would be an inconvenience, she seemed to decide, and instead, she dug the bladed wedge into the cuticle surrounding the side of it to chop off instead.

The declawing of last first half of his front claws had distracted him from the blade being dug back out of his hip and driven up his chest again. Now it was barre across his underbelly; the scaling there had been softer than trying to go at the tougher, protective scales of his back. He had no doubt that when they were done with his torso, they'd take his back scales as a whole hide, though. The thought made bile rise in the back of his throat with a sudden flood of nausea, and he had to fight from gagging when he knew that anything that rose wouldn't be able to escape with how tight the muzzle remained clasped around him. Unless he wanted to choke on it rising through the back of his nostrils; at that point, death by suffocation would have been a blessing in comparison of what was to come.

Collecting the severed claws in one hand, the blonde stood to go drop them into the second box, away from where the strips of his stolen flesh had gone. Now with his rib cage distended and unprotected, the skinner had set aside her scraping blade in favor of a smaller one, not unlike the sharp edged small knife that had been used to removed his still-bleeding lids. Every part of the dragon felt like he was being stabbed with a thousand little needles in the areas where she'd taken his scales, but it was nothing compared to the slow, throbbing pain above and against his eyes, or the stabbing sensation that still filled the tip of every one of his digits. The blonde stood with one leg against his wrist, reached down, and yanked roughly at the spike.

The feeling of air running completely through his palm, through the wound there now, was foreign. Like something was obviously supposed to be there, blocking the gentle breeze of air settling in the room. Instead, it stung at the fresh blood, but before he could stop to think on the sensation, the blonde had moved next to the brunette's side and had set the spike at the center of his other palm, driving it in again with one, smooth motion--the arch of a blacksmith's hammer at a sword instead of a spike to drive a beasts' arm down. He was too hoarse, to worn to scream now, and the only sound that escaped him in a choking, shaking little groan. The dragon was wearing down, and if he had been a beast once, a monster, he was now nothing more than a creature at the slaughterhouse.

The blonde begins on his other hand with just as little warning as he'd gotten for the first one. There was a crack of a sound that he felt before the pain began this time; the rest of his body ached so badly at this point that it nearly didn't register to his senses. He was in a daze at this point, having trouble focusing on what parts of him hurt more. The loss of blood was starting to have more of an affect now, with the thick, red pool of blood gathering down his sides from his chest, from his hip, from the tips of his fingers, and from his eyes. He could only hope that the strange, drifting feeling that was starting to cloud his mind would grow to the point where he could use it to distance himself from this pain, but each new moment brought a new surprise, a new agony, as the blond quickly stripped him of the claws of his other hand as well. Such little mercies weren't allotted to him.

Before the dragon could start to let himself detach from the situation, he felt the new knife in the brunette's fingers dip into the center of his lower abdominal muscles, shredding tight layer of muscle that shielded the squishy contents of his organs underneath. It was a cut meant to eviscerate, to slice him open fully like one might carve a cooked bird. She took it upwards, careful only to pierce the layers of skin and muscle instead of the valuable organs below, stopping only on the deep, smooth cut when she hit the bottom bone of his rib cage. Instead of pulling the knife free, she twisted it up, slipping just between the muscle layered against the bone, and instead, started to flay the skin to the side. This renewed the sensation keeping him conscious but the muscles, now sliced clean, kept trying to twitch and flex in the wake of his erratic breathing and muffled screams anew. With the damage to his eyes, albeit blurrily, he was watching himself be flayed open with his skin cut to one side, left to flap over his chest cavity before being peeled back, and then the other. The white gleam of his bones was exposed, the rib cage glistening red with blood.

"Pass me the hammer," the brunette instructed, reacting over him with her palm out to the blonde. The warm wooden handle of the mallet was pressed into her grip, and before he could stop to think about what it would be used for, she had already dug her bare fingers into the soft, squishy layer just under his lower ribs, lifting at the same time that she brought the head of the hammer down. The first rib was removed with a crack, driving just a bit of the jagged edge close to his sternum into the flesh. She made quick work of this bone, dropping it in the same box that his nails had been deposited in; apparently it was a box for the more solid parts of his body. One for scales, one for bones.

"One for organs," she announced as if she could almost read his mind, or watch where his swiveling, unlidded gaze had landed in watery panic on the third box. He was losing blood rapidly now, the pounding of his beating heart forcing his blood from the open destruction of his ripped open chest.

Instead of moving on to the claws of his feet, the blonde returned to sit just above his head. "Here we are. Now the show really starts. We're going to let you watch us harvest those squishy little insides until you lose enough blood to draw the final curtain, if you know what I mean." She noted, toying the tips of her fingers along his blood-stained cheek bone just where the muzzle dug against his jaw. Her personal knife was in her hand again, and she had the full intention of using it as she pushed his eyes back into the sockets far enough despite his weaker groan of protest at the stinging, only to seize one lower lid, carving it from the tear duct to the corner in a smoother motion than she'd made with his top lids. With nothing left to hold it in and the muscles damaged beyond use from both lids being taken, his eye sat almost useless, gaze focused on the ceiling above them. A quiet wheeze of breath deflated from his chest as the brunette took another rib. He didn't have long left.

The second lid is taken, though rather than leave him the peace of being blinded by the swell and drop of blood to cover his gaze, the blonde dug her fingers in around the top and bottom of the squishy, orbs, pulling both out far enough that it didn't tear the connecting nerves to his brains, but popped it out enough to where they could rest, facing downwards. His brain could barely comprehend the distortion of not being able to see in the direction he was facing, but he could certainly see with horror as the brunette dipped her fingers into his chest cavity to seize ahold of his stomach first. "Careful with the acids. Wouldn't want to damage any of the rest of the goods, right?"

The brunette seemed to be genuinely enjoying her work now in comparison to how bubbly the blonde had been all along. There's a strange, cold, metal feeling when she reaches back to grab a clamp, tightening it down against the tubes leading to and from his stomach. It's a pinching sensation that rings not as painful as everything that had happened so far, and had he not been cut open on display, he was sure that it would have felt 'inside'. Now, with everything open and twitching in the air it had been exposed to, he can't even feel anything move, with the muscles pulled back and displaced. It was pure discomfort mixed in with the agony that had every breath shaking from him mixed with a groan.

He does feel when the tubes are clipped just above and below the clamps, leaving his stomach clamped in place, stuck to the other tissues of his chest cavity, which she takes care to snip away at until she can lift it fully from him. His eyes sit on his cheeks, watching the whole ordeal, but it's the shock of seeing something that should be inside of him outside of him that finally, finally offers him the respite of unconsciousness. With blood loss mixed in, he wouldn't be waking again.

Even without being able to see his eyes close, considering that option was far removed by then, both could tell from the way his quiet whimpers faded into slow, shallow breaths, that his mind had swapped off from the situation and had gone into darkness. The brunette cursed in mild disappointment, before shifting quickly to shove her hand up into the goo and mess of what she had left his chest looking like, until her fingers wrapped around the still pulsing organ of his heart. It was messy, but she gave a little sigh of relief when she felt the quiet thud in the palm of her hand. It was still going, and this was her favorite part of events like this.

"Go ahead," she instructed her partner, and with a roll of her shoulders, the blonde used the same knife she'd cut his lids away with to dig unto the soft scaling of his throat, moving subtly to slice a clean line under one of the scale patterns, separating the skin there and digging into the esophagus hidden underneath. All at once the shallow breathing of his lungs seemed to gurgle as the last bit of blood not being pumped freely from his body via his wounds began to flood into his lungs. They were worth the same full of air or blood, but they'd weigh more at market with the blood filling them; it'd be easier to get them out without them collapsed and hollow, too. The blonde flicked one eyeball with meager disappointment that he'd gone before they managed to get the heart out, while the brunette reveled in the feeling of the heart giving a few, weak, hummingbird like flutters before ceasing.

"I get to knock the teeth out of the next one first," the blonde announced with some level of a sulk. "It's more fun with they scream and can't bite than it is when we muzzle them. I don't care if it is cleaner at first."