“Yes, okay, okay, put it here.”

  Nico opened his eyes with difficulty, small bright specks floating in his field of vision.

  “It's a knife wound, colleagues, no fluid, so we could try extraction,” said a familiar voice squeaking on his left side. Nico tried to turn his head toward the sound, but the world spun around him. His left arm felt numb, and he vaguely remembered a sudden sting before everything went dark.

  “Extraction? How? It's in a very delicate area. There are important organs around there. Do we want to kill the guy?” said a female voice with a strangely baritone tone.

  The shadows around him seemed to move, to get closer, but when he tried to focus, his eyes burned and everything became blurry again.

  Another voice, this one higher pitched, added, “Well, if we don't try an extraction, there's no hope for the boy. Look at these branches.”

  Nico couldn't remember who those voices around him were talking about, but the words he heard made him feel agitated. He tried to wriggle free but realized he was tied hand and foot.

  After a moment's pause, the voice continued: “Barnabás, you visited the boy. What are the symptoms?”

  The voice squeaked in response, and Nico vaguely remembered that it was the same voice as the gnome who had visited him earlier... although he couldn't say how much time had passed.

  Barnabás said, “The boy didn't report any symptoms to me, but I must say that when I saw the corruption... in this condition, I intervened immediately.”

  The woman's baritone voice added, “And so you didn't make a complete diagnosis. What if there are no problems with the boy?”

  “Oh no, no,” squeaked Barnabas, "I spoke to Marco, or Marlo, I don't remember... anyway, the gentleman in charge of security. He told me that the boy arrived here late in the evening with a group of friends, and that one of these friends, in order to convince Marco, or Malco, to let the boy stay in line to be seen today, begged him, saying that he had serious memory problems. Although,“ Barnabas squeaked sharply, as if revealing a secret, ”and this Marco, or Malco, whichever he is, added in confidence: it seems that the boy was behaving very strangely while waiting in line."

  “Nonsense,” said a voice on Nico's left.

  Nico turned and saw, beyond the straws that were slowly fading away, a tall, lanky man bent over him, his red hair tousled and streaked with white. A tremor ran through his chest without warning.

  “I don't trust that scoundrel... I saw him taking bribes from the poor sick people in line. He would sell his own mother for five copper coins,” said the high-pitched voice at Nico's side.

  “You'll agree,” said the baritone voice of a woman to Nico's right, “that we're wasting time here. We're not putting Marco on trial,” she paused, “or Malco, for that matter,” she said with a hint of sarcasm, “it's the boy we have to think about,” she concluded seriously.

  Nico turned, trying to put a face to that voice. He saw a tall, incredibly thin woman with an aquiline nose and a pair of half-moon glasses perched on her nose. Her dark hair, streaked with white, was pulled back into a tight bun. As he looked at her, a slight shiver ran down his spine.

  Nico felt a couple of fingers probing the wound, pulling the skin, then pressing as if trying to squeeze a pimple. His body reacted before his will: a jolt, as his breath broke into small, disordered gasps. A hoarse, guttural sound came out of his throat and he cried out, “Let me go.”

  Several voices around him muttered something indistinct. He tried again to break free, but in vain. Now that his vision was clearer, he turned his head in every direction he could.

  He noticed that he was naked from the waist up, and below he was covered with a sheet. He felt something hard and rigid beneath him and imagined that he was lying on an operating table or something similar.

  He saw beyond the three who were examining him, the red-haired man, the woman with the bun and half-moon glasses, and Barnabás, the gnome, and he saw all around him a sort of amphitheater with steps raised one above the other, on which perhaps hundreds of people were seated.

  His stomach contracted and his breath caught in his chest. He tried again to wriggle free, to pull away.

  A cold, icy hand rested on his bare shoulder: “Don't worry, boy,” said the woman's baritone voice.

  The cold, unwanted contact made him pull his shoulder back slightly; Nico repeated: “Let me go.” The words came out broken, his mouth dry. The thought of being able to leave the game at that moment seemed the only possible lifeline. He took a sharp breath, then began to say aloud, shouting and croaking:

  “Exit the game.”

  Nothing happened.

  His throat burned, but he tried again, thinking back to what the flute-like voice had murmured when he left the game. He screamed, his voice scratching his vocal cords:

  "Exit game. Returning to reality. Exit game. Returning to reality."

  Nothing happened.

  The tall man, pulling back his red hair streaked with white with one hand, approached Nico, staring him in the eyes. Nico stiffened, growling like a trapped animal.

  “My dear colleagues, I think we need to intervene. The boy is showing the first signs of madness,” said the man, staring his dark eyes into Nico's.

  Nico snapped, irritated by the absurdity, breathless and trembling:

  “What madness? I'm not crazy. Let me go.”

  Barnabás' voice squeaked, “Prepare for sedation.” But the woman's baritone voice roared, “No.” Then, after a pause that lasted a moment, she said, "We have to monitor the boy. If it's his mind that's been contaminated, we need to check that he's okay, that he's lucid, and ask questions while we intervene. Only then will we know if the infection is receding."

  Nico began to fidget compulsively, fearing what would happen to him: since these were surgeons who he imagined had no knowledge of modern medicine, he imagined all kinds of horrors: incisions, cuts, lacerations, and infections. All of this came to mind with horrible images, and bile rose to his throat.

  He turned to vomit at the side of the operating table, but all that came out of his mouth was a small gush of bitter bile that dripped onto the black, obsidian floor, which was all in one piece with no gaps between the tiles, like a single block.

  The woman with the half-moon glasses approached him with a white handkerchief and wiped his mouth. Then she said, “Boy, what do you remember? Do you remember your friends? Do you remember how you got your injury? If I ask you to go back to a moment in your childhood, can you do it?”

  Nico, like when you tell yourself not to think about a pink elephant, used his mind to remember the faces of his friends: Leo and the others. He remembered the exact moment when the monster, offspring of the Shadow, had wounded his side, and he cursed that moment. he remembered a moment from his childhood when his uncles and grandmother, forced by the fact that he couldn't stay home alone, had taken him to the amusement park with them to celebrate Bruno's ninth birthday.

  Nico, however, did not speak, did not say anything: he fidgeted on the bed, wriggling, and Barnabás' voice squeaked: “I'm sorry, Adelina, but I disagree. The boy needs to be sedated, even if it's just a light sedative that leaves him partially conscious, but with all this fidgeting, the extraction will only be more complicated.”

  The man with the high-pitched voice and white-streaked red hair nodded at the woman named Adelina and said, “I agree with Barnabás, let's prepare a light sedative and intervene,” he concluded, pulling back a strand of white-streaked red hair with one hand.

  A louder buzz spread through the room but quickly died down.

  Nico felt the prick, the needle piercing his flesh and the cold liquid entering his muscle.

  The skin around the injection site seemed to melt into a slow warmth. His breath came out in a longer sigh and the voices around him seemed muffled. His arms, hands, and legs, at first tense and contracted, relaxed without him wanting them to.

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  Almost immediately, a feeling of slight drowsiness enveloped him. It was a moment of almost peaceful calm; he felt that he no longer hated those people, that he was no longer afraid that something might happen to him; he was calm, tranquil. His breathing had become regular and his chest was no longer trembling; he no longer felt the need to tense his muscles in an attempt to free himself, surrendering to the peace of the moment.

  Adelina's voice reached him like a sound filtered from meters underwater, but he understood that she was talking to him. She asked him questions that Nico understood slowly, with a delay.

  “Elphias, if you want to proceed, I'll be your second,” Barnabás squeaked to his colleague.

  Several large glass syringes glistened in the reddish, flickering light that illuminated the room. The enormous needles, as long as fingers, passed before his eyes with a movement that was too slow, too unnatural. Nico raised his head to follow where that enormous syringe with its very long needle was going, wondering, at the limits of logic, why a needle should be so long.

  He saw the needle approaching his skin, recognized the reflection of the light on the glass, and a tense face watching him: cold eyes, or perhaps it was just his own gaze being reflected back at him. He tried to swallow, but the lump remained stuck in his throat.

  Adelina, next to him, was talking to him. In Nico's head, the sentences were clear, but only meaningless murmurs reached his ears.

  He felt someone's fingers on his skin, but the sensation was muffled. The fear was there, pressing in his chest, but there was a thick blanket suffocating it, quieting emotions, gestures, and reactions.

  He saw hands handling the syringe and pulling up the plunger with difficulty, as if there were a liquid inside his body that was difficult to draw up. He heard her mutter something about the oily liquid being too hard, too thick. Then, like a small wave, a blackish, pitch-like fluid began to rise up the glass, revealing what Nico now understood he had inside him. Horrified, he widened his eyes. Adelina whispered something to him, but the sound washed over him.

  When the liquid in the syringe began to stir, alive, and his side gave him a painful twinge, perhaps from the numbness, perhaps from fear, he fainted.

  Nico struggled to open his bleary eyes; he was lying on a soft bed with fresh, white sheets, completely different from the cold, hard surface he remembered from his last hours of fragmented lucidity. The room around him was immersed in a soft darkness, partially attenuated by a thin crack in the closed door that let in a flickering, reddish beam of light and by the colder, milky light of the moon filtering through the window, barely illuminating the floor and part of the wall.

  Nico remained motionless for a few seconds, trying to figure out where he was, when memories came flooding back to him in a cold shower.

  First came the image of Samuele. He, breathless and eyes wide with fear, in an extreme act of self-defense, pulled the small throwing dagger from his wristband and stabbed Samuele in the eye. His heart was pounding in his temples; he could hear it in his ears with strong, rhythmic beats, faster and faster. Then another memory: Alessandro Bianchi's article on the stimulation of the somatosensory cortex and its link to induced trauma. And then: Erebos.

  Nadia's certainty in stating that it was they who had infected the real world with the visors. They as a “bridge,” as a means through which the virus had managed to slip into reality, passing from simulation to the real world.

  His throat tightened. His breathing was fast, broken.

  And then again: Erebos, the attack by Nerakth that had attacked him and touched his real self, had contaminated him, just as Bianchi had said in his article.

  His heart was beating irregularly, making it difficult to breathe. He swallowed, but the movement stopped halfway. And then again, all the confirmations of what Nadia had said: traffic chaos in big cities, hospitals in turmoil, information leaks that pitted the great powers against each other. When that flood of memories ceased, he felt exhausted, as if after physical exertion.

  He stood up, lifting the gray shirt he was wearing, the only garment he had on, to look at his side. When he saw the scar, he breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that everything had been resolved, that those crazy surgeons had healed him. The scar remained whitish but marked in several places by small bruises, probably the result of the punctures made to extract the oily liquid. But the most noteworthy thing was that the black branches that once extended under his armpit had receded, surrounding only the wound in an irregular circle.

  Too caught up in his memories, he felt, only then, the metal turning in the patch. He got up quickly, pulling down his gray tunic.

  The door opened with a creak of poorly oiled hinges, and three figures appeared in the doorway, whom he recognized instantly: Adelina, with her hair in a high bun in the middle of her head, tall Elphias, and short Barnabas, the gnome, his beard dyed red by the dim light of the oil lamps in the corridor.

  “Ah, good, you're awake, lad,” said Elphias, brushing back a strand of red hair streaked with white. “Please, sit down, sit down,” he added in a conversational tone. “It's just a last-minute check after the operation.”

  Adelina, in her usual baritone voice, added, “So, what do you remember about the last few hours? Any progress?”

  Meanwhile, Barnabas, with his long hands and tapered, arthritic fingers, gently pushed him to sit up. Nico took a few steps back but, because the room was now much smaller with three other people in it, he fell onto the bed, sitting down abruptly.

  Barnabas, without even asking permission, lifted his robe. Nico tried to push the gnome's hands away, but he muttered, “Go away, go away,” pushing his hands away. “If we don't check...” He left the sentence unfinished as he lifted the fabric.

  The three gathered around the wound, exchanging incredibly faint murmurs that Nico did not understand.

  He blurted out, “So I'm fine, right? When are you going to let me out of here?”

  The three of them looked away, staring at him: Adelina from above her half-moon glasses, Barnabas from behind his bottle-bottom lenses that magnified his enormous black eyes, and Elphias, who pulled back a strand of hair that had fallen back over his face. After another meaningful exchange of glances, Adelina spoke: “Would you like to tell us what you remember? Is your memory clouded?”

  Nico nodded, but when he was about to talk about the Nothing, the mission, Erebos, drawing on his memories, he felt something crack: as if a piece or two of the big puzzle had slipped away. He had a complete picture of what was happening, but he was missing small pieces, insignificant or not, he couldn't say.

  Perhaps his gaze had spoken for him, because Adelina intervened with compassionate eyes: “You remembered... but now you've forgotten again, haven't you?”

  Nico's eyes widened, wondering how she knew, but he had to lie, he had to get out of there. So he said, "No, that's not true. I remember everything, I'm fine, in fact, I'm great. Thank you. So... where's the exit?" he asked, trying to get up.

  Elphias placed a hand on his shoulder. “The operation was successful. We thought so. But apparently we didn't eradicate the root, which has returned.”

  The man lifted Nico's tunic and pointed to the dark veins with his finger.

  “See these? It's an improvement for you, but not for us.”

  Adelina added in her usual baritone voice, “They weren't there when the operation was over, but now they've come back.”

  Barnabas squeaked, “We need something more radical.”

  Nico blurted out, with a lump in his throat, “What do you mean?”

  Adelina and Elphias shot Barnabas a warning glance, and he laughed awkwardly from under his white beard, “Come, come, it's nothing serious, we'll see tomorrow.”

  Then, pulling a small leather notebook from his sleeve, he said, “For tomorrow, I would prescribe a light breakfast and then fasting for the rest of the day. It's best not to consume any liquids or solids before the operation.”

  He said this to the two of them as if Nico were an ornament and not the subject of those prescriptions.

  Then they turned to go through the door, and Nico, hesitant, asked with his heart pounding in his temples with the anger of feeling like a prisoner: “Hey, when are you going to let me out of here? I'm fine.”

  Elphias muttered, “Soon,” while Adelina whispered, “We'll see.” Then the door closed behind them with a sharp thud, like the bars of a prison.

  Nico stood up and approached the window, looking for some opening in that kind of glass, something that could be forced open.

  Nothing. It was probably the result of some kind of spell or something else, because he clearly remembered that the Black Tower had no windows, and in any case, he would certainly not survive the fall from that height.

  With the information in Alessandro Bianchi's article, that meant, as Leo had said, ‘waking up dead on the other side’.

  He laughed bitterly, staring at the city of Narbras below him, thinking back to his friends. Who knows if they would wait for him. He couldn't stay in there forever. How was that prison any different from the one outside the game, with Bruno and his grandmother making his life impossible?

  He waited, awake, lying on the bed, for time to pass as the blue moonlight gave way to darkness and then to the faint pink glow that precedes dawn. Finally, outside in the corridor, he heard a squeaking noise: he imagined that outside the door, far away in the corridor, there was someone with a trolley carrying breakfast for the sick prisoners. A door opened, and a nasal voice murmured, “Wake up, breakfast,” followed by the thud of the door closing.

  Nico thought that this was his only chance to escape: no one would come into his room again until they took him for surgery. He threw himself onto the floor, pretending to be unconscious. His heart was pounding and he had a lump in his throat, but he had to act: it was now or never, or he would be stuck there forever, he was sure of it. Another door opened, closer by; the nasal voice murmured, “Wake up, breakfast,” it sounded like a young voice, it would be easier, he thought. The door slammed shut and the trolley began to squeak again. He didn't care what those healing surgeons said: he felt better, he remembered everything or almost everything, and if the problem of memories and blackouts returned, he would find another way to heal, to eliminate Erebos from his body.

  When the squeaking noise stopped in front of his door, Nico's heart was pounding and his hands were shaking with excitement. He clenched his fists to release the tension, hoping it wouldn't show. He heard the key turn in the lock, then the nasal voice murmured, “Oh, mom...”

  He heard the breakfast attendant's knees hit the floor. Through half-open eyes, he saw that it was a boy about his age, skinny as a rail. Nico was sorry, but when the boy reached over to turn his face, Nico lunged and headbutted him in the nose.

  The pain was immediate, throbbing in the center of his head, and, unlike in the action movies his grandmother liked, the breakfast boy didn't faint. He tried to scream, but Nico was quick to put his hand over his mouth. The boy bit him, Nico pulled his hand back, and it began to throb. There was a moment of uncertainty in which the two boys looked at each other uncertainly, but Nico was sure he was more determined: he didn't want to stay there locked up forever.

  He clumsily lifted the boy and threw him out of the room onto the breakfast trolley. There was an absurd racket and several voices murmured something: some shouted to ask what had happened, some cursed, some groaned, annoyed by the noise.

  Nico, clinging to the boy's hips with his arms, sat up. He had done it: the boy had fainted. Now he just had to pull him into the room, lock him in so he couldn't raise the alarm, and escape.

  [AUTHOR'S NOTE]

  Updated log: Subject N_01 parameters indicate incomplete recovery. Corruption persists in latent form. Escape was predictable, but not necessarily rational.

  Assessment requested: Is Nico recoverable, or is the contamination evolving?

  Was escape a logical choice?

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  To stay synchronized with updates, activate follow.

  Log closed: the system observes, silently.