The Dark Blade: Return Of The General.

Chapter 23: Reality Breaks

Jacob staggered backward as the bridge beneath his feet began to shimmer and distort like heat waves rising from summer asphalt. Elijah's form wavered, becoming translucent. The woman in the chair flickered between Anna and someone else entirely. The floodlights dimmed and brightened in a rhythm that matched Jacob's racing heartbeat.

"No," Jacob whispered, pressing his hands against his temples. "This is not real. None of this is real."

The fog around him thickened impossibly, becoming solid walls that pressed against his consciousness. He could feel something foreign in his mind—tendrils of external influence that had been controlling his perceptions, feeding him false sensory input while his body remained trapped somewhere else entirely.

Memories crashed through the illusion like waves breaking against rocks. The explosion at the Tate mansion. Flying through the air. The impact that should have killed him. But after that, everything became fuzzy and disconnected, like watching events through frosted glass.

Jacob forced himself to think past the drugged haze clouding his thoughts. The hospital had felt wrong. Too clean, too perfect. The doctor's diagnosis had come too quickly. Anna's sudden pregnancy had made no medical sense despite his mystical healing.

Because it had all been a lie. A sophisticated illusion projected directly into his brain while he lay unconscious somewhere, probably for days.

"Fight it," Jacob growled to himself, digging his fingernails into his palms until blood welled up. Physical pain was real. Physical sensation could anchor him to reality when everything else was lies.

The bridge world around him began to fracture like broken glass. Through the cracks, he caught glimpses of something else—darkness, cold metal, the smell of mildew and old blood. That was the real world trying to break through.

Jacob focused on those sensations, pulling at them like threads he could follow back to consciousness. The harder he fought, the more the illusion broke apart. Elijah's face melted like wax. The fake Anna dissolved into nothing. The entire bridge construct shattered into fragments that fell away into void.

For one terrifying moment, Jacob existed in absolute nothingness—no sight, no sound, no sensation at all. Then reality rushed back like a tidal wave.

Pain exploded through every nerve in Jacob's body as real sensations replaced the carefully controlled illusion. His head throbbed with a migraine so severe it made his vision blur. His wrists burned where restraints cut into skin. His mouth was dry as sand, suggesting he had been unconscious for far longer than a few hours.

Jacob's eyes snapped open, though opening them felt like lifting impossible weights. The room swam into focus slowly—a dark concrete space lit by a single bare bulb hanging from exposed pipes. Industrial, abandoned, probably a warehouse basement or old factory.

He was strapped to a metal chair with leather restraints around his wrists, ankles, and chest. The bindings were professional-grade, designed to hold someone with enhanced strength. Jacob tested them carefully and felt no give at all.

To his right, another chair held Anna. She slumped forward with her head down and hair covering her face, apparently unconscious. She wore different clothes than the fake hospital gown from the illusion—tactical gear that looked like it had been put on her while she was unconscious.

Relief flooded through Jacob so powerfully he almost wept. She was alive. Here in the real world, breathing, her chest rising and falling with steady rhythm. Whatever was happening, whatever trap this was, at least she was real and alive.

But something felt wrong. The way she was sitting, the angle of her shoulders, the rhythm of her breathing—it was too controlled, too perfect for someone supposedly drugged unconscious.

A third presence in the room drew Jacob's attention. A man sat casually on a metal crate fifteen feet away, watching Jacob with the satisfied expression of a scientist observing a successful experiment.

Henry Keaton. Head of the Keaton family, one of the men on Jacob's revenge list. In his fifties with silver-streaked hair and expensive clothes that looked absurdly out of place in this grimy basement.

"Impressive," Keaton said, slow clapping echoing in the empty space. "Most people never break free from the Neural Prison. The technology is quite advanced—feeds false sensory input directly into the brain while extracting information through guided subconscious responses. You are the first subject to fight through it in less than seventy-two hours."

Seventy-two hours. Three days. Jacob had been prisoner here for three full days while his mind lived through false events.

"Where are we?" Jacob asked, his voice rough from dehydration.

"One of my private facilities," Keaton replied, standing and brushing dust from his suit. "Off the books, unregistered, unknown to anyone except my most trusted associates. You could scream for a week and no one would hear you."

Jacob tested his restraints again, subtly probing for weaknesses while keeping Keaton talking. "What do you want? Information about the artifacts?"

"Oh, I already have that," Keaton said with a smile that made Jacob's blood run cold. "The Neural Prison extracted everything during your unconscious state. Your memories of the artifacts, their locations, their capabilities—I know it all now. Every secret you fought so hard to protect, I plucked from your mind like fruit from a tree."

Rage burned through Jacob's exhaustion. All his planning, all his careful preparation—Keaton had bypassed it by simply reaching into his brain and taking what he wanted.

"Why keep me alive then?" Jacob asked. "If you have what you need, why not just kill me?"

Keaton walked closer, pulling a syringe from his jacket pocket. The liquid inside was pale blue and seemed to glow faintly in the dim light. "Because I am a thorough man, Jacob. And because there is poetry in using the same method to kill you that I used on your father."

Jacob went completely still. "What did you say?"

"Your father was quite resilient too," Keaton continued conversationally, as if discussing the weather. "He lasted almost an hour after the injection before his heart finally gave out. The drug is a fascinating compound—undetectable in autopsy, mimics natural heart failure perfectly. The coroner ruled it a tragic accident during the chaos of the massacre."

"You killed my father personally," Jacob breathed, understanding dawning like poisoned light. "You were there that night. Not just funding the conspiracy—you were one of the executioners."

"I was the lead executioner," Keaton corrected proudly. "The Krigg family had to go, and it had to look like the work of your enemies. Your father was the hardest to kill. He knew someone had betrayed him from the inside. With his dying breath, he cursed me. Said his sons would avenge him." Keaton laughed. "But there is only one son left now, and in about two minutes, there will be none."

He approached Jacob with the syringe held like a weapon. "This is poetic justice, really. Father and son, killed by the same hand with the same method, fifteen years apart."

Jacob struggled against his restraints with desperate strength, but they held firm. Keaton was three feet away, then two feet, raising the syringe toward Jacob's exposed neck.

Then Anna moved.

Her eyes snapped open—not groggily like someone waking from unconsciousness, but instantly alert like someone who had been awake the entire time. In one fluid motion, she broke free from her restraints. The leather straps fell away as if they had never been secured at all.

Keaton stumbled backward, the syringe dropping from his shocked fingers. "Impossible! You should be sedated! The drugs should have kept you unconscious for another six hours!"

Anna stood up slowly, rolling her shoulders and cracking her neck with casual violence. When she looked at Keaton, her eyes were different—harder, colder, filled with something Jacob had never seen in his wife's gentle gaze.

"I was never sedated," Anna said, but her voice was wrong. The pitch was the same, but the cadence and tone were completely different. This was how someone else would sound speaking through Anna's body.

She took a step toward Keaton, moving with predatory grace that was nothing like Anna's normal walk. "And I have news for you, Mr. Keaton."

Her face shifted—not physically, but something fundamental changed in her expression and bearing. This was not Anna's personality looking out through those familiar eyes.

"I am not Anna."