Page 37 of Knot Your Fated M.U.S.E.

Business as usual.

Atlas noticed first. He always does, somehow. Maybe it was a change in my scent or the way my footsteps faltered slightly. Maybe it was just that uncanny sixth sense he's developed since losing his sight.

The world started spinning, colors bleeding together like wet paint. My legs...my strong, reliable legs that had carried me through countless missions, suddenly felt like they belonged to someone else. Like they were made of lead and lightning all at once.

I remember Atlas calling my name.

How desperate I tried to respond.

Recall how the ground rushed up to meet me.

Then nothing.

It was just fragments after that;urgent voices growing distant, hands lifting me, sirens wailing…machines beeping…

They put me in a medical coma, they told me later.

Said it was the only way to stop the seizures, to keep my body from tearing itself apart as whatever was attacking my system ran its course.

The official report said it was a grazing shot during the mission. Just a bullet that barely touched me, hardly worth mentioning. Shouldn't have been anything serious.

But it wasn't just a bullet.

It was a message.

A warning.

A death sentence delivered in a laboratory-engineered package that no doctor can quite figure out. No known pathogen matches its profile. No existing treatment seems to touch it. No cure on the horizon.

Just this slow, inevitable decline.

First, it was just occasional numbness in my toes. Easy to ignore. Easy to pretend it wasn't happening. Then the pain started – burning, stabbing, constant. Made it hard to walk, think, and function like a normal individual. No less an Alpha.

The doctors prescribed everything they could.

Experimental treatments, Aggressive physical therapy, and lovely cocktails of medications that could probably cure whatever this shit was.

Nothing worked.

Nothing stopped the progression up my legs; the way the disease ate through nerve endings and muscle tissue like acid through paper. Nothing halted the creeping paralysis that threatened to turn me into a prisoner in my own body.

The ice baths help, sometimes.

Numbs everything enough that I can pretend the lack of sensation is from the cold, not from my body betraying me piece by piece. Let me imagine, just for a moment, that this is temporary. That I'll step out of this tub and everything will be like it was before.

But my skin shouldn't be this red from the cold.

Wouldn't look like I've been scalded when I can barely feel the ice.

Another sign that I'm running out of time faster than anyone expected.

It makes me feel sick to my stomach.

I used to be the one who could outthink any opponent. The one who could see the patterns others missed and turn bureaucratic obstacles into advantages with a few carefully placed words or well-timed actions.

Now I can barely walk some days.

Can't run missions anymore.

---