"Prepare yourselves for what's coming," Elin said slyly, as Reis slowly regained consciousness, unable to control himself.
Her voice slithered through the sterile air like a serpent made of sound, smooth and calculated, yet laced with venomous intent.
Elin Valeris did not raise her tone—she didn't need to. Each word landed with the precision of a scalpel, deliberate and invasive, burrowing into the minds of those present.
She stood composed, her expression unreadable, as if what lay ahead was not horror, but inevitability—a prophecy unfolding just as she had foreseen.
Beneath her command, Reis stirred, but the motion was not his own. His body, drenched in sweat and disoriented by torment, moved like a puppet half-strung, as though his limbs responded to memory more than will.
He was returning to awareness, yes—but it was a return shaped by pain, not healing. A return into the jaws of something waiting with bared teeth.
---
But they didn't wait for his return. Instead, they dragged him toward another fate, into a phase he was not ready for.
Mercy was never part of their design. They didn't glance down to see if his eyes had opened, nor check if his breath had steadied.
Two faceless figures moved without hesitation, lifting him by the arms with clinical detachment, as if hauling a malfunctioning machine back to the operating table.
Their movements were efficient—no wasted motion, no recognition that he was still human, still fragile.
They weren't returning him to recovery—they were thrusting him forward, deeper into an abyss scripted in files and protocols, toward a phase meant to fracture what remained of him.
And Reis, still slipping between consciousness and void, could do nothing but feel his future closing in like a trap already sprung.
---
He woke up or thought he did on the cold touch of the floor, not the warmth of a bed.
There was no soft linen beneath him, no pillow to catch the weight of his skull—only the sharp, biting texture of concrete beneath fragile skin.
His mind, still swimming through fragmented nightmares, couldn't determine if this was waking or just a new form of torment carved from dream-stuff.
He blinked—at least he thought he did—but there was no change in the darkness, no proof that eyes opened or closed made any difference in this place.
His cheek pressed against the floor, and the chill of it wasn't passive—it seeped in like poison, a silent intrusion into bone.
Somewhere deep inside, something told him: this was not a place for sleep. This was where sleep had died.
---
A sharp chill sliced into his skin.
It wasn't the kind of cold that made him shiver—it was the kind that hollowed him out, that etched itself into his marrow and stayed there, whispering.
It entered not just through the flesh, but through memory, through breath, and nestled itself in the cracks of his mind like frost spreading across broken glass.
Each inch of skin felt like it was being flayed by invisible ice, slow and meticulous, as though the room wanted to peel him apart layer by layer.
He clenched his jaw, not out of defiance, but instinct—a primitive urge to hold together when the body begins to feel like it's unraveling.
The cold didn't scream, didn't bite—it whispered truths his nerves couldn't ignore: you are not safe, and you are not whole.
---
Only one sound pierced the complete silence:
There was no hum of machinery, no rustle of clothing, no breathing but his own—thin and ragged, like the lungs had forgotten how to draw air.
Silence pressed in from every direction, thick and velvety, suffocating in its purity. It wasn't the absence of noise—it was the murder of it.
He lay there, surrounded by a nothingness so complete that it began to feel unnatural, as if even time had ceased to tick in this sealed oubliette.
The void of sound wasn't peaceful; it was predatory, as if the darkness had eaten everything else, leaving only one carefully preserved note behind.
And then—it came.
---
Drip.
It was small, barely audible, yet it cut through the void like a bell in a tomb.
A single droplet of water, falling from nowhere and everywhere all at once, claimed the silence for itself.
It was rhythmic, deliberate, and impossibly loud in contrast to the nothing that had come before.
That one drop became a tyrant in his ears, dictating the passage of time, asserting its presence with cruel repetition.
It didn't fall into silence—it ruled over it, declaring: this is all that remains.
---
A drop of water.
Such a simple thing—so mundane, so ordinary in any other world.
But here, it was the metronome of madness, the heartbeat of isolation.
Reis didn't know where it came from—if it fell from the ceiling or a pipe or merely from his own fractured mind.
He imagined it forming slowly, as if each bead had to decide whether existence was worth the plunge.
And every time it fell, it whispered something different—you're alone, you're forgotten, you're lost.
---
"Drip…"
The sound echoed in a way that defied physics. It didn't just bounce—it tunneled.
It bored into his brain, creating grooves in his thoughts where there used to be clarity.
He could almost hear the space between each drop—a silence so pregnant with tension it felt like another sound in itself.
There was something wrong with it… as though the drip didn't land, but vanished into some invisible hunger.
It became a voice of its own—one he couldn't silence, one that seemed to grow more articulate the longer he listened.
---
An echo without end. As if each repetition burrowed deeper into his mind.
The sound did not fade with time—it evolved.
It became more than a noise; it was a presence. A specter with no shape, yet weight enough to crush thought.
Every repetition chipped away at his defenses, wore down the edges of his identity until Reis was no longer sure if he was remembering, or inventing.
There was no escaping it. Even when he tried to hum, to whisper, to scream—it filled the silence between those sounds with itself.
It had colonized his mind, and with each drip, it dug deeper, sowing doubt, fear, and the roots of madness.
He tried to get up, but couldn't see his hands. No light. No shadow. Nothing.
His body gave the command to move—first through a twitch of a muscle, a weak flicker of resistance against the void—but nothing followed.
There was no outline of fingers to remind him of his own anatomy, no subtle contrast to define a form in the dark.
It was not blindness. Blindness suggested the memory of color, of light once lost.
This was worse—this was absence in its purest form, a vacuum that didn't just erase sight but seemed to question whether vision had ever existed.
He could have been floating in endless space, or trapped in a box the size of a coffin. His senses betrayed him at every corner.
---
Just a thick darkness… one that swallowed every possibility of life.
It wasn't the kind of darkness that frightened children—this was something far older, deeper, as if the shadows themselves had aged into a conscious thing.
It didn't simply cover the world; it devoured it, chewed it into silence and spat out a void where memory went to die.
Reis felt like he was being watched not by eyes, but by the dark itself, as if it was curious about how long a soul could last when completely severed from the universe.
He felt his thoughts slowing, his mind slurring like a machine running on empty, struggling to function where no stimulus existed to provoke thought.
Life, in this place, wasn't denied—it was forgotten. Replaced by a stillness so oppressive it bent around his skin like gravity turned inward.
---
He tried to move, but didn't know where.
Direction was meaningless.
There was no horizon, no walls, no up or down. The very concept of space collapsed around him, leaving only doubt and drifting nausea.
He reached out, perhaps forward—or backward—perhaps he didn't reach at all.
There was no sound of shifting limbs, no echo of skin brushing stone or cloth, only silence thick as syrup, resisting movement like an invisible swamp.
And in that hesitation, a quiet terror bloomed in his chest: what if he wasn't moving because there was nothing left of him to move?
---
He didn't know the size of the room, or if there were even walls at all.
He could have been in a cell the size of a grave, or in a chamber stretching forever into the black.
He yelled—not aloud, but in thought—listening for the bounce, for some rebuke of sound, something to tell him, "you are here, and the world answers back."
But the world did not answer.
There were no walls to feel, no ceiling to touch, no boundaries to press against. Only an all-consuming uncertainty that stretched his mind until it thinned like overused thread.
He was not imprisoned in a room. He was imprisoned in an absence of reality.
---
But he knew one thing: that drop was in the same place, the same rhythm, the same spot in his mind.
It was the only constant.
That single drip, always falling from the same unreachable nowhere, anchored his sanity like a needle sewing thought to sound.
He mapped it in his imagination: above, slightly to the left, three feet away—or was it twelve?—but always exactly the same.
Like the beat of a clock left behind by a dying king, it ticked, marking time in a place where time had no business existing.
That sound didn't just persist—it ruled. It became the new gravity of his world.
---
Time passed… or vanished.
Days might have stretched on like molten glass, or collapsed into mere blinks of thought.
There were no sunsets, no moonrise, no flickering changes of light to narrate the hours. Only the drip.
He dreamed, perhaps, but the dreams had no beginnings and no ends, and when he woke—or thought he did—it was to the same stasis, the same unchanging dread.
He forgot the feel of warmth, the taste of food, the comfort of a voice. Those memories dulled, curled up in corners of his brain and began to rot.
At some point, Reis stopped counting the seconds. They no longer belonged to him.
---
No one came in. No one spoke to him. No food. No sound except water.
He wasn't fed. He wasn't visited. Not even as a check-in, not even as an afterthought.
It was as if whoever put him there wanted him to wonder whether he had ever been real at all.
His stomach ceased to grumble after the first day. Hunger gave way to a hollow ache, then to an eerie silence inside his own body, as if even his organs had resigned.
And still the water dripped. Still the black walls breathed nothingness.
Still he remained, unsure whether he was being punished, tested, or simply… forgotten.
---
And the thirst… rose like a living thing crawling inside him.
It didn't arrive all at once—it built itself, drop by drop, like an animal of smoke forming shape in the void.
First his tongue dried, then his throat. Then the back of his eyes started to itch, and every breath felt like it scraped across a desert.
He imagined licking the wall, drinking his own spit, chewing air. None of it helped.
The thirst was not just physical—it became symbolic, became desperate longing for any form of contact, of sustenance, of proof that the world outside still existed.
It clawed at him from inside, a parasite gnawing on his soul, and he began to hate that he was still alive enough to feel it.
---
On the third day or so it felt he started hearing voices.
He didn't know if it was really the third day. It could've been the seventh. Or the first. Time had no flagpoles here.
But the voices began—faint, at first, like the suggestion of sound rather than sound itself.
They didn't call his name. They didn't scream. They whispered… as if continuing a conversation that had never included him.
He clung to them not because they were comforting, but because they were new.
And in a world where nothing changed, newness was salvation.
---
But they weren't from outside.
No echo. No origin. No breach in the walls.
No click of a door, no shift in air pressure, no footsteps.
The sound had no source because it didn't travel—it was born inside his skull.
They spoke with his own thoughts' voice, wore the accent of his childhood, carried the weight of his doubts.
And that made them all the more dangerous.
---
They came from within.
Whispers curled in his mind like smoke—taunting, circling, never landing.
They wore the masks of people he once knew. The boy he shared bread with. The girl who once laughed beside him.
Their words were riddles and knives, soft but sharp.
They didn't insult him—they described him, in ways too precise to be denied.
And he listened, because he had no choice.
---
"It's over."
"They didn't bring you here to become something. They brought you to erase everything."
The words struck deeper than screams. They were not anger—they were dissection.
Cold. Detached. Truths unburdened by empathy.
He wanted to argue, to say, "No, that's not true," but the words stuck in his throat like thorns.
Some part of him agreed. Some quiet, shattered part whispered back: "Yes. This… makes sense."
And that agreement frightened him more than the voices.
---
He screamed, but his voice no longer belonged to him.
What left his throat was not a scream, but a hollow vibration—a borrowed sound from a body no longer sure it had lungs.
It echoed inside his head but didn't bounce off the room. As if the darkness devoured even pain.
There was no satisfaction in the cry. No catharsis.
It was the scream of a man calling for help from the inside of a coffin.
And nothing answered back.
---
A hollow echo, as if his throat spoke from within a sealed grave.
The sound rolled in circles, bouncing off walls he couldn't prove were real.
Each repetition thinner than the last, like a heartbeat slowing before it stops.
He wondered—was this what it felt like to go mad? Not all at once, but quietly, invisibly, breath by breath?
The silence that followed was worse than any answer.
Because it meant no one was listening.
---
On the fifth day, he tried something new.
He was breaking. No, he was already broken.
And from that brokenness came something strange—not strength, but surrender.
Not desperation, but experiment.
If he couldn't escape… maybe he could change something.
Even if it was just a single drop of water.
---
He sat and focused on the source of the drip.
He imagined a rock… or a metal plate blocking the spout.
He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to see clearer.
In the theater of his mind, he painted the object—dense, heavy, deliberate.
He saw it in shape and texture. He gave it weight. Purpose.
He didn't believe it would work. But belief wasn't needed—only intention.
Only a thought sharp enough to cut through the dark.
---
He willed his illusion to stop it.
It was more than imagination. It was defiance. A refusal to let the world remain unchanged.
He clenched his mind like a fist and hurled it at the sound, at the place above him where the drip lived.
He focused not on hope, but force. On the will to make something real—if only for a second.
It burned behind his eyes, a flash of light in the void.
And then… silence.
---
In the darkness… the drop hesitated, then stopped.
There was no fanfare. No crack of magic or gust of wind.
Just… quiet. Deafening in its suddenness.
His breath caught in his throat.
Had he imagined it?
Or had the world obeyed him?
---
For two seconds only.
Then came the drip.
Small. Inevitable.
But he had felt the gap.
Felt the world bend, however briefly, to the pressure of his will.
And for the first time in countless hours—he smiled.
Then—drip.
The sound returned, soft yet brutal in its constancy, as if mocking his fragile victory. The silence shattered again, not with thunder, but with that single, deliberate note. A drop. A whisper of inevitability.
But this time… he felt it.
Not just the sound, but the shift.
Something had changed in the stillness—not in the world around him, but within.
He didn't see it. He didn't hear it. He sensed it, the way one feels a phantom limb or the breath of a thought before it becomes real.
His illusion—his desperate, flickering effort to impose meaning on the void—had moved. It had acted. However weakly, it had responded to his will.
---
That faint pulse of control stirred something inside him.
A ripple through the numb sea of his consciousness.
It didn't matter that the drip had returned, that his illusion had faltered after only two seconds.
What mattered was that he had touched something—forged a connection, however imperceptible, between thought and manifestation.
In that abyss of absence, where even pain had lost meaning, this spark of reaction was the closest thing to hope.
---
So he tried again. And again.
Each attempt slower. Deeper. More deliberate.
He closed his eyes—not to see better, but to feel more fully—and pushed.
He imagined stones grinding shut, rusted metal sealing, mana bending to his will.
And for a heartbeat, sometimes two, the drip paused—like the world was holding its breath with him.
---
But illusions, it turned out, came at a cost.
Every trial left behind a wound not on his flesh, but beneath it.
His skull ached as though something inside were expanding too fast, too violently, for the space it was trapped in.
Blood trickled from his nose like a whispered protest. His heartbeat became an unpredictable drum—sometimes skipping, sometimes racing.
It felt as if he were clawing through the fabric of his own mind with bare, trembling hands, scraping bone and memory alike.
---
By the seventh day—though he had no way of knowing how long it had truly been—something inside him snapped.
Not broken like a twig underfoot, but split open like old stone under pressure.
He began to scratch at the floor—not to escape, not to leave a mark, not even to find relief.
He scraped and dug with bleeding fingers, the nails bending, tearing, splintering—until the pain became a companion. A rhythm.
It was not rebellion. It was penance. Punishment. A confession carved into stone.
---
He hated himself.
Hated the part of him that still hoped.
Hated the child who had believed the lies, the boy who had thought a name like "Awakened" meant destiny, not doom.
There, on the floor of that forgotten cell, Reis declared war on himself.
And as if in answer to that declaration, the door opened.
---
A sudden hiss of hydraulics.
Footsteps followed—methodical, heavy, soulless.
Figures entered, masked in silver, faceless, unfeeling.
Their presence didn't radiate malice. There was no cruelty in their gait. Just routine.
They found him crumpled like a soaked rag, and without a word, they seized his limbs.
---
His body dangled between them. Lifeless. Hollow.
They laid him down on cold metal—straps coiling over wrists and ankles like serpents returning to a familiar feast.
Lights flickered on. Machinery hummed to life.
A voice—flat, synthetic—filled the room, not as command, but as doctrine.
---
"The Organization is not your enemy. The Organization is truth. The Organization protects Scavengers and Awakened. You are part of the purpose."
Once.
Then again.
Then a third time—slower, deeper, like the rhythm of a ritual meant to replace memory with obedience.
Each repetition seemed to press itself into his bones, branding belief into marrow.
As if the words weren't for his mind, but for his soul.
---
And then came the images.
A screen flickered to life, pale and silent.
Children appeared—familiar faces. Boys he'd trained beside. Girls who had once shared crusts of bread and nervous glances.
They smiled in the footage. They played. They learned.
They ate from clean trays and nodded to instructors like well-oiled gears in a sacred machine.
---
But Reis knew what his eyes showed him could not be trusted.
Something was wrong with the colors, the lighting, the feeling—like seeing joy filtered through a grave.
He wondered if the footage was doctored—or worse, if the children had truly accepted this life after their minds had been stripped clean.
Was this their fate? To become empty shells painted with pleasant masks?
---
The screen faded. Darkness reclaimed him.
They dragged him back.
And this time, when they threw him onto the floor of his room, he didn't rise.
He didn't imagine escape.
Instead, for the first time, Reis crawled into the corner like an abandoned creature, curled up with his forehead against his knees.
---
He hugged himself—not from fear, but from instinct.
As if some ancient part of him remembered a time when the womb had been his sanctuary, when warmth had meant safety.
But that warmth was gone.
Even the memory of it was a lie now.
There was no warmth here.
---
Only the drip.
Drip…
Drip…
Drip…
Every particle—each shimmering dot suspended in the stale, frozen air—revealed itself to him, no longer hiding within the folds of reality. They didn't just float meaninglessly; they moved with intention, curved into arcs, twisted into corners, and spun like tiny stars forming new constellations before his gaze. To any normal eye, they might have seemed invisible or irrelevant, but to Reis, they appeared like living sigils carved from light and motion.
His mind—now far from ordinary—functioned as if some microscope had replaced his thoughts. What once was unseen was now magnified beyond reason. Lines that separated the known from the imagined blurred, and suddenly, his perception expanded. The world became detail, and detail became a language only he could read. It was overwhelming… and yet, natural.
And when he looked—truly looked—at those particles, some of them trembled. Tiny luminous forms, flickering with something close to fear. Others, drawn by some gravitational pull born from within him, drifted closer, as if curious or obedient. They responded to him, not just as a presence, but as a center of gravity… or power.
He reached out, tentatively, his trembling fingers parting the air like a priest touching the veil between life and death. He tried to shape the mana—bend it, twist it, give it form. A sphere. A winged shape. A creature perhaps. Even a feather of light.
But it crumbled.
The shape dissolved like ash between fingers, delicate and useless. Yet, even in failure, it left something behind. Not a result, but a residue. A scar of effort. A memory etched into the very texture of mana around him.