“Fuck a duck!”

Lowe’s exclamation disturbed the silence that had descended following the Director’s sudden appearance. “Where the fuck did you spring from?”

Nuroon cocked his head towards Lowe, looked him up and down, then dismissed him, turning to face Gral. “I assumed I would come across you in here somewhere, Felicitous. I imagine there are armoured cockroaches that are easier to kill.”

“Too kind, sir. If I may say so, it looks as if you have been making short work of the Dungeon’s various challenges?”

Nuroon waved a hand negligently towards the remains of the fallen monsters. “All low-level trash. To be honest, I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in years. It is easy to forget the thrill that comes with a genuinely involving delve.”

“Can’t say I share your enjoyment, sir. Although, I am anticipating – with relish – putting in my bill for hazard pay . . .”

The realisation that he could speak let the stilted badinage fade from Lowe’s ears. The Essence of Silent Thought had expired, and after all the frustrated dumb play, he could finally tell Karolen . . . what? He caught her by the sleeve, pulling her towards him and opened his mouth to speak.

“What?” she hissed at him, trying to keep half an eye on the suddenly extremely threatening figure of Grackle Nuroon.

“I . . . I don’t know,” Lowe said, a look of consternation flashing across his face. “I had it! It all made sense. It was . . . Shit. I can’t remember.”

So vulnerable did Lowe look at that moment, that Karolen felt herself turning away in embarrassment. “Well, don’t push it. It happens sometimes to me at work. The harder you try to remember something, the more difficult it is to summon up. Think about something else for a bit, like, I don’t know, the sudden and dramatic appearance of a supervillain. It’ll come.”

But Lowe wasn’t listening, not really. He was suddenly bereft – not just of the deductions he’d made about the case (something about Preece, right?) but in mourning for that all-to-brief renewal of an ability to make such intellectual links. Now the Essence had faded, he felt. . . hollowed out. Like he was back at those first few seconds following his Classtration.

Lowe felt Karolen's words drifting past him, lost in the surge of remembered panic flooding his mind. Her advice, though sensible, barely registered as he was carried away by a memory he’d done his best to repress. But the sharp, dizzying void that filled him now was all too familiar, tugging him backwards, dragging him to somewhere he never wanted to revisit.

The day he lost everything.

The process had started with blinding pain. Like his core had been set on fire from the inside out. The kind of pain that doesn’t come from wounds but from something deeper, something more fundamentally crippling. Every fibre of his being, every thread that held ‘him’ together had been snapped at once. Intellectually, he knew it wasn’t a physical assault he was experiencing, but his muscles had locked, his bones had screamed, and all the power that had once surged through him—his Skills, his bonuses, his Class—was yanked away by an invisible, piteous hand.

And in that instant, the world had gone dark. Or as good as.

At first, he had thought that such blindness was temporary, that his vision would return, that the sharp ringing of tinnitus would fade, that the tightness in his chest would loosen and allow him to breathe deeply again. He had waited for the sensation of the individual parts of his body to return, for the warmth of his power to flood back into screaming limbs.

But it didn’t. Not then. And, until that brief renewal of his abilities, not ever again.

He remembered stumbling forward, hands outstretched, grasping at nothing but the cold, empty air before him. The floor beneath his feet had felt suddenly unstable and uneven like he was standing on shifting sands. His legs had wobbled as if they were suddenly too weak to support his weight, and he had collapsed, his knees hitting the mosaic tiles with a crack that he hadn’t even heard. But it hadn’t hurt, that he remembered. The impact hadn’t registered at all. He couldn’t feel the pain. It was as if he couldn’t feel anything at all.

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It was like being erased. That was how he had later explained it to Arebella.

His once sharp mind, so brimming with ideas and possibilities and deductive leaps, had been scooped clean. Everything that made him who he was—his thoughts, his insight, the web of connections he could always see in his head—had vanished. His Intelligence, his Wisdom, his Spirit, even his Strength and Agility, had plummeted down to nothingness. He was deaf, dumb, and blind all at once, as if someone had taken a knife and severed the strings of his consciousness, leaving him dangling, unmoored in his own mind.

Standing here, in the Dungeon that used to be Soar Museum, Lowe could remember the voices around him that day—distant, muffled, like echoes in a vast, empty cavern. Cenorth had been there, shouting his name, but Lowe hadn’t been able to process the words. Couldn’t even find his voice to answer. The faces of his allies had been blurred, indistinct, as though viewed through a fogged window. He knew them, of course, but there had been no spark of recognition, no sense of connection. Just… blankness.

And then the fear had hit.

Real, primal fear.

Not fear of pain or death. He’d faced those a thousand times. This was the fear of being nothing. Of having no place in the world, no purpose, no identity. Without his Class, without his Skills, he wasn’t an Inspector. He wasn’t Lowe. He was an empty suit, an absence, a man who had been reduced to a husk, stripped of everything that gave him meaning.

He remembered the way his fingers had twitched on the ground, desperate to grasp at anything, at something that could anchor him to reality. He had tried to speak, to make a sound, but nothing had come out. His throat had felt paralysed, locked in silence. He had never realised how much of his own voice, his thoughts, his mind he had taken for granted until they were gone.

Time had passed in fits and starts after that—days, maybe weeks of stumbling through the wreckage of his former self. His senses had returned slowly, but nothing else had. Not his sharpness, not his insight. Not the clear mind that had once allowed him to see patterns others missed. He had become dull, sluggish, like a blade blunted by time and misuse. His world had shrunk to the basics: breathe, eat, sleep. Anything beyond that had felt impossible, unreachable.

Lowe’s mind snapped back to the present as Karolen’s voice reached him again, more distant now as she addressed Gral. The ground beneath his feet felt too solid, too steady compared to the swirling disorientation of that memory. But the sense of loss still clung to him like a second skin.

He glanced at his hands—steady now, but they had trembled uncontrollably after the Classtration. For months later, he couldn’t even hold a pen, much less wield a weapon. His body had betrayed him, refusing to respond as if each extremity had forgotten they were supposed to follow orders. And his mind... His brilliant mind, the one thing he had always relied on, had felt like a dead weight, dragging him down into the abyss.

It had been Cenorth who had first found him, lying on the cold floor. Cenorth, who had knelt beside him, his face creased with concern and confusion. Lowe had looked up at him, desperate to speak, desperate to explain, but no words had come. Just the empty feeling of a man who had lost everything.

“I’m nothing,” Lowe had managed to choke out, his voice barely above a whisper. “It’s all gone.”

Cenorth, the man he had thought of as his best friend in the world, had stared at him, the disbelief in his eyes giving way to something far worse: pity.

“You’re not nothing,” the Commander had said, his voice firm, but the words had rung false in Lowe’s ears. “We’ll fix this. We’ll prove this was all a mistake.”

But Lowe had known, even then, that there was no fixing this. No going back to who he had been. The Classtration hadn’t just taken his Skills, it had taken him. It had stolen the core of who he was, leaving him adrift, unmoored in a world where he no longer had a place.

And that was how he felt again now, standing beside Karolen in the Dungeon’s echoing halls, the memories of that day flooded back, raw and unrelenting. His hands curled into fists at his sides, the old fear threatening to rise again. The fear of losing everything, of being reduced once more to that hollow shell.

He shook his head, trying to banish the memory, but it clung to him, insistent. The silence that had once trapped him, the numbness that had seeped into his bones, all of it still haunted him. And now, even with his voice restored, even with some of his Skills slowly returning, he couldn’t shake the sense that it could all vanish again, just as easily as it had the first time.

Karolen looked at him, her brow furrowed, but she didn’t press him. She didn’t know—couldn’t know—what it had been like to lose everything that day. And he didn’t have the words to explain it to her.

But the fear remained, gnawing at him in the dark corners of his mind.

What if it happens again?

And then Director Nuroon was in front of him, wizened face creased into something akin to a grin. “So, Mr Lowe. I see from your haunted expression you have partaken in one of the Dungeon's Essences. Was it everything you hoped it would be?”

Lowe punched him in the face.