Darkness surrounded him.
A young man lay on the ground. His eyes were closed, and while he slept soundly, faint mumbling sounds slipped from his lips.
When it was finally time for him to wake, he slowly opened his eyes.
But opening them changed almost nothing.
It was as if a black curtain had been drawn over his vision.
As he lay there, his bare skin pressed against the floor, and a cold sensation seeped up from beneath him. The chill clung to his body and made him instinctively tense.
He slowly pushed himself upright. He planted his hands on the ground, intending to use them for support as he rose, but the moment his palm came down, he felt it sink into something wet.
The floor was soaked.
From what he could tell by touch alone, it was a thick, heavy liquid. Since he could not see anything, he had no way of knowing what it was. The first thing that came to mind was mud.
As the seconds passed, his eyes adjusted to the dark a little more, but his sight still had not sharpened enough to make out what surrounded him.
He tried to stand, only to sway lightly as soon as he got his footing.
His head was spinning. It felt like he had been lying down for a very long time.
He tried to remember where he was and how he had ended up here, but his mind was like a blank white sheet. Empty. He could not remember a single thing.
He started taking slow steps forward. As he moved one foot after another, he felt a strange coldness all over his body. He reached down and touched himself, expecting to feel the familiar texture of his usual clothes.
Instead, his hand met bare skin. He was wearing nothing.
His fingers moved across his body, checking himself in growing confusion, and when his hand finally reached his chest, he froze. His chest was wet too. The liquid there felt very similar to the one on the ground. And along with that wetness, there was something else.
A wound. A long wound stretched across nearly the entirety of his chest.
The moment he realized he was injured, his pulse quickened. Heat rushed through his body. Alarm bells began ringing inside his head.
Panicking, he broke into a run. As he stumbled forward through the darkness, he shouted at the top of his lungs.
"Is anyone there... I'm injured, help me!"
If he stayed like this for much longer, he thought he might bleed to death.
He kept moving as fast as he could, but even in his panic, he did not forget to sweep one hand through the air in front of him. The darkness was absolute. He did not want to crash into something and end up with another wound.
His voice echoed through the blackness as he ran.
After a while, exhaustion began to catch up with him. His pace slowed, and eventually he came to a stop.
He bent slightly and tried to regain control of his breathing.
For a moment, he had completely lost himself to panic. But strangely enough, he was not even feeling any pain. Once he calmed down, he realized his condition did not seem nearly as critical as he had first assumed.
Surely bleeding to death was not supposed to feel like this.
"What the fuck is this place!"
The curse burst from his mouth as he lamented his situation, and then, without warning, a thin sound began to ring in his ears.
It resembled the note of a deep flute, strange and drawn out. He turned his head and looked around. He already knew he would not be able to see anything, but at the very least, he thought he might be able to figure out which direction the sound was coming from.
But oddly enough, it did not seem to come from any direction at all.
To be honest, it would have been more accurate to say it was coming from inside his ear and pushing outward. He had never experienced anything like this in his life.
He raised a hand to his ear and touched it. Then he jammed his fingers over his ear holes, trying to block the sound. Even after covering them, the volume did not change in the slightest.
As he pressed harder, trying in his own clumsy way to muffle it, he noticed something worse. The sound was slowly getting louder.
He clamped both palms over his ears, trying to cover them completely.
It was useless.
This was not something he could do anything about.
As the sound kept rising, panic started creeping back in. He tried to weigh the worst possible outcome. A loud enough sound could damage his ears, maybe even burst his eardrums, but that was under normal circumstances.
This place was anything but normal.
Minute after minute passed, and the sound in his ears climbed to an unbearable level. It was like someone was standing right beside him and screaming without pause.
At the final point, he dropped to the ground and pressed both hands over his ears with all his strength. It was a reflex more than anything else. It did not lessen the noise, but he had nothing else left to try.
The volume had risen to something close to the roar of an airplane engine. Under normal conditions, his eardrums should have ruptured by now and spared him from hearing any more of it.
Yet he could still hear it.
He began grinding his teeth from the pain. Tears welled in his eyes. He was pressing his ears hard enough to injure them, and the violent sound surging inside his head made him feel as though he were standing in the middle of an earthquake.
Just as he was about to black out from the pounding pain in his skull, the sound suddenly stopped.
Instantly.
As soon as it vanished, he lifted his face.
The surroundings were still pitch-black, but unlike before, there was now a blue line floating in the distance.
It looked less like a line and more like a rod of blue light.It hovered in the air, about a short walk away from him.
He wiped his tears and pushed himself back to his feet. The blue line was far above him. Perhaps if five or ten people climbed onto one another's shoulders, they might be able to reach it.
As he walked toward it, the line began sliding to the right. And as it moved, it left letters behind in its wake.
Even though he was still some distance away, he was close enough to read the text forming in the air.
So he read.
----------------
< Selection >
Subject : Person 8
Form: Human
Cause: ███████████████████████████████████████████
Rank: E
Aspects:
Gears:
Contracts:
----------------
You have been chosen for Selection.
If you can complete the stages, your wish shall be granted.
----------------
He stared at the lines as they formed one after another, reading them carefully.
He did not understand any of it.
Your wish?
What was that supposed to mean?
----------------
Assigned Objective: Eliminate the target
Reward: Gear
----------------
When the final lines appeared, the whole thing remained suspended in the air like a massive wall of glowing text.
As the young man read it, his already tangled thoughts became even more confused.
It seemed he had been given some kind of mission.
And there was a reward for it.
Then the sound suddenly rang through his ears again with brutal force.
Fortunately, this time it lasted only for a moment.
His eyes squeezed shut on instinct. When he opened them again, the floating text was gone.
Once more, everything sank into pitch-black darkness.
He wondered what the target could possibly be, but the answer did not take long to arrive.
A sound came from somewhere in the distance.