He pulled himself up from the ground where he had fallen, shook his head and put his forearm up to his nose. His entire sleeve was red with blood. Which was understandable. The head bleeds alot and he had just got hit in the nose by the end of a guard's long stick. The odd part was that his nose wasn't in pain at all, in fact it was the exact opposite. It was numb, even to the touch. So although he could taste the iron in his blood as it trickled into his mouth, he felt no pain.
His head was a little woozy, but he didn't feel pain.
The other oddity was that the other captives were laughing. I think he and the guard were the only two who found that one odd. The Solo cluster citizens had been captured and forced into the salt mines to work for the Serenity cluster elites, the guard apparently assumed that they were all easy to intimidate. And, to his credit, tied up in a line and shackled to anchors to keep them in their workplace, intimidation wasn't that hard to produce. What the guard didn't know and that the captive miners did was that they had moved as close to the downed man as possible. And given him plenty of slack to move fairly freely now.
He also didn't know that the man he had hit for having a smart mouth was also Solo clusters foremost fighting masters. People would come from all over to train with him and learn his techniques. The prisoners were about to have themselves a show in this underground room against the one guard who was 'brave' enough to attempt this.
They knew that things would change after this. They knew that the line the guard stood behind, indicating the limit of contact danger would change. Or that their own shackles would be tightened so that this would never happen again. They also knew that this was 3 weeks overdue.
What they didn't know was how quick it would be over. The guard was taken off his feet with a spinning attack that he never saw. Some would swear later that they were right there and never saw it themselves. Then he was dragged fully into the captive mining zone and demolished. He was knocked out before the pummeling stopped, which was a blessing.
They also didn't expect for him to grab the keys and free them all...