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There was no light.
No sense of space.
No weight, no warmth, only a void so complete it felt like existence itself had collapsed into a whisper of a memory.
Dark's consciousness stirred like a flicker in the abyss.
It wasn't a return to awareness so much as a reluctant resurfacing.
Like drowning in black water and finally realizing you needed air, but still not knowing which way was up.
He existed, that much he was sure of.
But nothing else made sense.
Sounds reached him first, not the comforting kind, not something he could name or identify.
Voices?
Machinery?
Screams?
He couldn't tell.
His brow should have furrowed in confusion.
But he couldn't even feel his face.
'Where… am I?'
The question came, but not as a voice.
It was a thought pressed into the void, unanswered and heavy.
A jolt of panic stirred in him.
He tried to open his eyes.
Nothing.
He tried again, harder this time, focusing on the motion, like he'd done a thousand times before during his assassin training, forcing his body to obey no matter the pain.
Still nothing.
It was like his eyelids were glued shut.
Or maybe… maybe his eyes were gone.
'No…!'
He tried to move a finger.
A toe.
A twitch of the jaw.
But his body remained as it was, numb, stiff, weightless yet anchored.
A prisoner in his own skin.
'Am I paralyzed?'
The thought should have triggered logical calm, he'd been trained to deal with injury, to assess damage, to survive even the impossible.
But something was different now.
It wasn't pain that held him down.
It wasn't broken bones or nerves in shock.
It was something deeper.
Something unnatural.
He felt like he was wrapped in invisible chains, not metal ones, but ancient, cold and unseen, binding not just his limbs but the very space he occupied.
Fear, real and raw, crept in like a rising tide.
The kind of fear that clawed at the back of your mind and whispered that this time, you weren't getting out.
'How did I…'
His last memory surged forward like a wave crashing against the dark.
Running.
Fast.
The air slicing past his ears, the figures of assassins chasing him with weapons and bloodlust.
The city lights blurring as he dodged gunfire and blades alike.
And then, something strange.
A truck.
Appearing beside him like a ghost made of steel.
No sound, no screech of tires.
Just there, beside him, impossibly fast, impossibly timed.
Then impact.
Then nothing.
'That truck…'
Did it kill him?
No, he was alive.
He had to be.
The dead don't think, don't feel, don't listen to whispers in the dark.
'Do they?'
A flicker of doubt rippled through him.
'Maybe this was death.'
But it didn't feel like it.
There were no flames.
No light.
No judgment.
Just the crushing silence and unclear sound.
This was something else.
Something in-between.
And Dark, one of the most feared assassin in the world, the man who had walked through death's door countless times and laughed in its face, felt something he hadn't felt in years.
Powerless.
And for the first time in a long, long time… afraid.
Within the suffocating stillness, Dark's mind remained the only part of him that hadn't been chained down.
It raced, not with fear this time, but with calculation.
Thought.
Cold and methodical.
If there was one thing he had mastered above all else during his years as an assassin, it was control.
Control of his body.
Control of his mind.
Control of any situation, no matter how dire.
He was a tactician, sharp, unyielding, precise.
Even now, stripped of his senses, denied the simplest ability to twitch a finger or draw a breath, he refused to give in to chaos.
He combed through the data, however fragmented it was.
His last clear memory, running.
He had been at full speed, adrenaline coursing through him like a second bloodstream.
The city had stretched before him like a blur of color and light, his enemies closing in behind.
And then… the truck.
A monstrous thing moving too fast, too smooth, too perfectly aimed, like it was destined to hit him.
He remembered its headlights, like twin suns in the night, searing into the corner of his vision.
He remembered impact.
Everything after that blurred into black.
Now, here he was, stripped of every sense except thought.
That was the first inconsistency.
'If I were dead, my thoughts would not remain.'
He clung to that.
It was the only anchor he had.
So what then?
A coma?
A high-level brain injury?
But no, his thoughts were too lucid for that.
He wasn't confused.
There were no fragmented memories, no time skips, no delusions floating through his mind.
His clarity was intact.
He remembered everything.
Which meant…
'Paralysis.'
His mind pulled that thread hard.
Paralysis made sense.
Some kind of nerve damage, perhaps his spine had been shattered in the collision.
But even that theory began to crumble as he explored it further.
He couldn't feel pain.
Not dull.
Not sharp.
Nothing.
Not even the cold weight of a bed or the warmth of light against skin.
'That's not how this works.'
Even in paralysis, the body gave signs, pressure, tingling, the ghost of sensation.
But here?
It was like he wasn't even in a body.
No physical feedback.
Just absence.
He had trained for everything, poisons, tranquilizers, deprivation.
Yet this?
This was new.
Another possibility came to mind.
Induced coma.
Maybe he was under sedation.
Maybe someone had found him, rescued him or captured him, and placed him under some kind of experimental medical hold.
But that didn't explain the blackness.
Or the odd noises.
Or how real his own thoughts felt, unclouded by drugs.
Each theory began strong but collapsed under its own weight.
Poison?
No.
Too clean.
Too complete.
Even the most sophisticated agents left some trace.
Technology?
Neural disruption?
Mind control?
Too many ifs.
Too little data.
And the more he turned these ideas over, the more frustrated he became.
Not because he couldn't figure it out, but because none of them made complete sense.
Each scenario answered a part of the mystery, but not the whole.
A puzzle with pieces from different sets.
He needed more information.
More stimuli.
More anything.
But the darkness gave him nothing.
No time.
No sound he could decipher.
No body he could trust.
Only his thoughts.
And the unknown.
He let out a breath, or at least, he imagined he did.
There was no way to tell.
'Then there's only one conclusion left. I'm somewhere I've never been. Experiencing something no training could've prepared me for.'
And for someone like Dark, who had outwitted syndicates, dismantled organizations, and walked through fire with blood on his hands and calm in his eyes, not knowing was the most dangerous thing of all.