Tigran gagged on bile as bile coated his tongue, his stomach heaving at the sight of the glass pods. He saw not children, but a grotesque energy farm, their nascent dreams converted into Vahan’s next waking moment. “No,” Anahit breathed, her jaw slung loose as she stared at the suspension tanks. Tigran ignored her, locking his gaze on the braided leads snaking from Vahan’s harness into the device's synthetic arteries. They hummed with stolen life. His muscles, twitching from the street-grade amphetamine Anahit had dosed him with, propelled him across the flagstones. Each calculated step echoed on the polished floor, a stark contrast to the distant, high-pitched whir of the dream-siphon. He closed the gap, fingers hooked like claws toward the ports where the wiring entered Vahan’s cervical vertebrae. Vahan broke his stupor, his skull jerking back as his bloodshot retinas shrank to needlepoints. A split lip peeled over teeth yellowed by synthetic uppers. He lunged, a desperate, animalistic cry tearing from his throat, “My sleep! You won’t take it!” The Chairman's emaciated frame hit like an iron girder. He slammed into Tigran, a tangle of bone and twisted muscle. A rusted, ornate letter opener, snatched from a nearby desk, flashed in his hand. He slashed wildly, a frenzied blur, aiming for Tigran’s face. Tigran parried with an arm, the cheap metal scraping against his newly toughened skin, leaving a shallow, stinging cut. He grappled, attempting to twist Vahan’s arm, to gain leverage. Vahan flailed with serrated, frantic blows born of long-term sleep starvation. Tigran’s fingers snagged an insulated lead, but Vahan drove a bony knee straight into his floating ribs, emptying his lungs. He stumbled back, gasping, the brief window for a clean sever closing. [Warning: Disconnect parameter failed. Reattempting in 00:03:00] Three minutes. Three minutes to fight a man whose every neuron fired with pure, unadulterated paranoia. Anahit moved, a blur of motion, drawing a stun-coil from her belt. But before she could fire, Vahan, with a terrifying intuition, shoved Tigran directly into the path of one of the machine’s smaller conduits. Tigran’s hand grazed the warm, pulsing surface. [Penalty: Nightmare Injection (Vahan’s Psyche)] The world dissolved. The opulent penthouse, the struggling forms of Anahit and Vahan, vanished. Tigran plummeted through a sheer chasm of ticking chronometers. Gigantic, brass-bound timepieces, their hands spinning backward and forward simultaneously, materialized and disintegrated around him. Each stroke of the escapement cracked against his parietal bone like a chisel, chiming out decades of rot. He saw Vahan’s face, bloated and grinning, superimposed over a clock face, his eyes the hands, forever chasing an elusive, vanishing present. The vertigo turned his blood to slush, pinning him against the current of dead seconds. He seized, throat locked shut, motor control flatlining. He dropped through the bottom of the abyss: Vahan’s private panic over the irrecoverable degradation of his cells. The Chairman's induced panic overran his synapses. But something shifted. The 200% cognitive processing capacity, a gift from the artificial oasis, fired like a supercharged engine. The ticking, the chimes, the grotesque, mocking face of Vahan – these were raw data. The drop, the vertigo, the crushing dread—all of it broke down into measurable sensory inputs. His enhanced mind didn’t just experience the nightmare; it analyzed it. He felt the 40-hertz thrum through the conduit beneath his palm, anchoring his nerves to the apparatus. It was a channel. A two-way street. If the nightmare could flow in, it could flow out. He bypassed the panic, isolating the signal's oscillation curves. He locked onto the primary carrier wave of Vahan’s mania. And then, he found the reverse. With a superhuman effort of will, a mental surge that felt like ripping a hole in reality, Tigran pushed back. He compressed the feedback loop, focusing the mental hemorrhage into a single spike. He slammed the reversed chronophobia back through the siphon leads into the Chairman’s frayed cortex. Vahan shrieked. It was a sound beyond human, a raw, tormented bellow that echoed through the penthouse. He clutched his head, his eyes rolling back, his body seizing. He stumbled backward, nails gouging into the skull-cap as he tore the junction lines from his scalp. The letter opener clattered to the floor. Foam frothed at his lips, and he began to convulse, a sickening, violent dance of pure mental anguish. His pupils dilated until the irises vanished, locked onto empty air. He crumpled to the floor, a broken, twitching husk, his mind completely shattered, consumed by the weaponized echoes of his own fear. [Objective Complete: Sever Vahan’s Neural Link to the City Grid. Direct transfer of amplified nightmare successful. Target neutralized.] [Reward: Infinite Slumber Unlocked. Cellular Regeneration 100%. Neural Pathway Integration Complete. Somnolence Ledger: Primary Function Concluded. Secondary Functions Available.] A profound calm washed over Tigran. The chemical burn in his veins cooled into smooth, effortless circulation. Every twitch, every ache, every tremor that had plagued him for months, for years, vanished. He felt not just healed, but *more* than healed. His senses sharpened, his thoughts crystalline, his body vibrant with an energy he hadn’t known since childhood. The penthouse doors exploded inward. A dozen heavily armed Tavush security officers, clad in matte black armor, stormed in, their assault rifles raised, targeting him. The laser sights, tiny crimson dots, settled on his chest, his head. Their visors reflected the laboratory lights. Anahit, stunned by Vahan’s collapse, spun around, raising her stun-coil, but they were too many, too fast. Tigran simply smiled. His eyes, now clear and bright, took in the scene. The broken Chairman, the bewildered security, the pulsing, quiet machine. The silence of pristine delta-waves filled his restored brain stem. He closed his eyes.

The Nightmare Injection