The first thing Lucas felt opening his eyes was the dizziness.

Heavy and pressing, sitting right behind his eyes, the kind that comes from impact rather than sleep. He pushed himself upright slowly, one hand against his forehead and the other pressed flat against whatever was beneath him — cold and solid and present, which was at least something.

His vision blurred, then settled.

"Where am I."

His voice came back to him strangely. Not the way voices echo in a room — something different, deeper, like the sound had somewhere very far to go before it stopped.

That was when he looked around properly.

Everything was dark.

Not the dark of a room with the lights off, not the dark of being underwater or underground. This was something else entirely, the kind of darkness that doesn’t feel like the absence of light so much as the presence of something else.

It stretched in every direction without end. No walls he could see. No ceilings or edges or boundaries or anything to measure distance against. Just an enormous black expanse that swallowed everything it touched, and him standing in the middle of it on a floor he couldn’t see but could somehow feel.

Lucas frowned and got to his feet fully, dusting off his clothes out of sheer habit while his eyes moved across the darkness and found nothing useful.

"What is this place."

No ocean. No cruise. No sound of panicked cadets anywhere. Not even Nova screaming somewhere in the distance.

Just silence, and the strange muffled quality of his own footsteps as he took a cautious step forward, then another.

"Where did I even end up, what is this pl—"

"I’m impressed."

Lucas nearly left the ground entirely.

The voice came from somewhere in the darkness ahead of him.

"So you can maintain your consciousness here as well," it continued. "Outstanding."

Lucas turned sharply toward the direction of it, his eyes searching through the dark. "Who’s there?"

It took a moment, but he found the figure.

Far ahead, sitting on something that might have been a throne, the shape was difficult to resolve clearly, like the darkness was actively choosing to obscure it, a silhouette.

Sitting with the ease of someone entirely comfortable in a place like this. Face indistinct. Everything about him blurry at the edges, unnatural, like he existed slightly outside the rules the rest of the world ran on.

Lucas raised his guard before he’d decided to.

"Who are you?" he said, his voice sharpening. "What is this place? What’s happening right now?"

The figure didn’t answer immediately.

The silence that followed somehow made everything worse.

Lucas clicked his tongue and opened his palm.

Nothing.

He looked at his empty hand for a moment, genuinely confused, then tried again.

Still nothing. No green trails, no familiar weight settling into his grip, nothing.

He opened and closed his fist a couple of times like the daggers had simply gotten delayed somewhere and would arrive momentarily if he was patient about it.

"...Oi."

Nothing.

"Don’t do this to me right now."

"Shadowfang."

Nothing.

"Shadowfang."

Silence.

"What the hell!?"

He stared at his own hand with the expression of someone who has been personally let down by something they trusted completely. Then another thought arrived and he looked up at the empty air above him.

"System!"

No screen materialized.

No notification. No blue window. No familiar flicker of an interface appearing at the edge of his vision. Absolutely nothing happened.

Lucas went very still for a second.

"...System?"

Still nothing.

Something cracked in his expression.

"WHAT. Since when do you not respond?! You appear for everything! I breathe wrong and you throw notifications at me! I make a mildly interesting observation and you show up to insult me about it! I can’t get rid of you on a good day!"

The darkness absorbed the accusation without comment.

"Shadowfang."

Nothing.

"System."

Nothing.

"Mana perception. Status. Inventory. Literally anything. Any response at all."

Nothing.

Lucas slowly lowered his arm, looking at his own hands with an expression that had moved through frustration and arrived somewhere genuinely unsettled.

’This has never happened before.’ His thoughts were running fast underneath the surface of the performance. ’Not once. The system has been there since the bench, since the first second of all of this. Even when it threatened to kill me, it was still there. My daggers have appeared every single time I’ve called them.’ He looked at his empty palm again. ’Why isn’t anything responding?’

The word that arrived underneath the question was one he hadn’t felt properly in a long time.

Helpless. He hated it the same amount he always had.

From the direction of the throne, a sound came through the darkness.

A chuckle low and quiet at first, and then longer, genuine laughter, the kind that comes from watching something that is actually funny to the person watching it.

The figure had apparently been observing the entire exchange, the desperate dagger summoning, the increasingly aggressive system interrogation, all of it and found it worth laughing about.

Lucas’s eyebrow twitched.

"Stop laughing like a fool, reveal yourself!"

The figure leaned forward slightly, and the faint edge of a smirk became barely visible through the dark. "You should see your own face."

He raised one hand with the ease of someone doing something effortless.

"Do you mean this?"

Something materialized in his grasp.

Green trails moved through the darkness, faint and unmistakable, the specific color of something Lucas had carried ever since the system gave it to him. The shape of it, the curve of the blade, the markings near the handle, there was absolutely no mistaking it.

Shadowfang.

His Shadowfang, sitting in someone else’s hand like it had always been there.

Lucas took a step back without deciding to. "How do you have that."

The figure turned it over once, casually, the green aura catching the non-light of the darkness around it, then rested it against his shoulder with the comfortable ease of someone holding something familiar.

That specific gesture, more than anything else so far, sent irritation running through Lucas’s chest.

"Put that down," he said. "That’s mine."

The figure ignored him completely and stood from the throne, and the soft clicking of footsteps began moving through the dark toward him. Lucas still couldn’t make out the face. The closer the figure came, the more the darkness seemed to arrange itself around him, preserving the obscurity, like it was cooperating with him.

"Who are you?" Lucas said, more seriously now, the frustration burning down into something colder. "Answer me, just who are you?"

"Why so impatient?" the figure replied, and his voice was the kind of calm that has nothing to do with being relaxed. "You’ll know. Soon enough."

He stopped mid-step.

"But before that—"

Lucas felt it before he understood it. Something shifting under his boots, a sensation that didn’t match the solid floor he’d been standing on, and he looked down and found the darkness moving.

Pulling.

"What the—"

His boots were sinking. The black floor was drawing him in at the edges, swallowing the material of his shoes, climbing toward his ankles before he’d processed that it had started.

He jerked backward.

His legs wouldn’t cooperate properly.

"WAIT—"

Up to his ankles. Then his shins. He drove his hands down toward the ground trying to find purchase and felt his fingers sink too, the darkness accepting them without resistance, and he pulled back hard but the movement was wrong, heavy, like trying to run through something that had already decided it owned the direction.

"I really, genuinely dislike whatever this is!" he said, and his voice came out sharper than he meant it to.

The figure watched him struggle and said nothing for a moment.

Then "For now," he said, with the quiet weight of someone delivering something they’ve been holding for the right time, "I’ll only say this."

Something changed in the darkness around the figure.

A glow appeared within it. Faint and deep, the color of something that didn’t belong in any natural light spectrum. Crimson, sitting behind the shadow of his face like eyes adjusting to show themselves.

Lucas looked up.

The figure’s eyes had turned red.

The kind of red that every instinct Lucas had, trained through months of fighting and being fought, recognized immediately and without deliberation.

Danger. Genuine, absolute danger, the kind that didn’t announce itself and existed the way very cold things exist, quietly and completely.

The smirk that stretched across the man’s face was slow and deliberate, the smile of someone who knows something enormous that you don’t, and is enjoying the distance between those two states.

Lucas’s breath hitched.

The darkness had reached his shoulders.

"I have my eyes on you," the figure said softly.

Lucas stared up at him, unable to pull himself free anymore, unable to do anything except be exactly where he was.

The man’s voice dropped lower.

"...Reji."

The darkness closed over him all at once.

Everything disappeared.