Chapter 2: The One Who Remembers
[CONFIDENTIAL – INTERNAL LOG | NEW ERA CORP]
ASSASSIN ID: EROS-07
MISSION STATUS: INCOMPLETE
OVERRIDE REPORT: INSTABILITY DETECTED
RESPONSE TIME: 0.87 SEC
EMOTIONAL DEVIATION: +3.5%
VERDICT: FLAGGED FOR REVIEW
ACTION: RETURN FOR ASSESSMENT
Eros stood on the hover platform, silent as the wind tore past him.
The city below stretched wide and disinterested—neon veins of a world that no longer bled for anyone. Noise buzzed in his commlink, then fell quiet.
His orders had been clear.
Kill the anomaly.
Eliminate all trace of Prion.
And yet… he hadn't.
Not because he spared him. But because his body refused to move at the exact moment it should have.
The override warning had pulsed—red, bright, final—but too late. The mission window had closed.
And now, he was going back.
Not as a victor.
As a variable.
The gates of New Era's Upper Sector loomed ahead, smooth black alloy pulsing with bio-lock veins. The scanner recognized his ID, and the steel parted like a surgical incision.
He stepped inside.
No guards. No welcome.
Only glass corridors and the hum of machines far too sentient for comfort.
The hall opened into a gray room.
Not quite an interrogation cell.
Not quite a lab.
Too clean for fear. Too sterile for truth.
A voice filtered in from nowhere.
Female. Synthetic. AI. Patient.
"Eros-07. You failed."
"I hesitated," he corrected.
"The anomaly was not neutralized."
"I'll return. I'll finish it."
"Will you?"
A low hum. The walls flickered faintly—images flashing for a split second: Prion's file, a neural graph, his own face mid-glitch.
"This is not your first encounter."
He said nothing.
"Subject Prion has destabilized thirty-seven prior assassination attempts. Each failure was followed by memory wipe and neural resets."
Eros's spine stiffened.
Thirty-seven?
"You've met him before, Eros. You just don't remember."
"I would've known," he said flatly. "I never fail twice."
"You've failed thirty-seven times."
The silence that followed was colder than the metal beneath his boots.
"Your mind was reset. But your body has begun retaining fragments."
Another flicker. His own hand trembling. Prion's voice: "You always hesitate."
"This is a deviation we can no longer suppress."
"What do you want me to do?" Eros asked.
"Observe. Lure. Maintain proximity."
"We want to see what breaks first—him… or you."
He turned his face slightly toward the mirrored glass—knowing someone was watching.
"Is that an order?"
"No, Eros," the voice said.
"It's an experiment."
Far below the tower, in the deadened warehouse where no one should've survived the night, Prion stood in the doorway. His hoodie fluttered in the static wind.
He looked up.
Straight toward the direction of New Era's towers—though they were miles away.
And he smiled.
Thirty-seven assassination attempts. Thirty-seven failures. And only Prion remembers every one of it.
Eros stepped into the debriefing corridor with a face carved from ice.
Three surveillance drones hovered above, but none dared drift closer. He moved like a weapon still primed for use—discharged, but not holstered.
The hall was white, echoless, forgettable.
By design.
A corridor meant to erase sensation. A space for resetting soldiers before they realized what was missing.
He walked through it without pause.
But something in his chest pulled sideways. A subtle ache behind the ribs.
On the wall, he passed a reflection. Not a mirror. Just glass. Just enough to catch the edges of himself.
Short brown hair. Uncreased uniform. Expression neutral.
The perfect killer.
He stopped.
Not for himself—but for what he thought he saw.
A flash of black beside him. A hood. A pair of pale eyes.
Gone.
He turned his head.
Nothing.
Only his own gaze staring back—until he looked down and saw a smear across his wrist.
Faint.
Like a name had been scrubbed away.
His hand rose slowly to touch it.
He didn't know why.
"You used to call me something else…"
Prion's voice slid through his thoughts like smoke—quiet, poisonous.
Eros dropped his hand and moved on.
He emerged onto a private terrace atop the New Era tower. The air was cold, sharp against his throat.
This wasn't part of the usual post-mission routine. But then again, nothing about Prion was usual.
He leaned against the rail, overlooking the city. Lights blinked in patterns, coded signals hidden in beauty. The Organization's control spanned far beyond this sector.
And yet they couldn't contain one man.
A man who smiled at death like it was familiar.
A man who spoke like they'd met before.
A man who—
"Still alive?"
The voice behind him was familiar. Bored. Laced with static.
Rin.
A fellow asset. Same class. Different temperament.
Eros turned slightly.
Rin wore a thin, silver collar and smirked like everything was beneath him. His fingers spun a tracker ring around one hand.
"They said you flinched," Rin continued. "Didn't believe it until I saw the logs."
Eros didn't respond.
"So," Rin said, leaning beside him, "what's he like?"
Eros's jaw clenched.
Rin laughed. "Oh... That bad, huh?"
He looked out at the skyline.
"They call him the One Who Remembers," he said. "You know why?"
Eros didn't answer.
"Because he's the only failure that remembers every loop. Every reset. Every time they wipe us, he holds on."
A pause.
"He's not dangerous because of what he can do. He's dangerous because of what he won't forget."
Eros turned to face him. "You've met him?"
Rin smirked. "I had the contract once. Like you."
"What happened?"
Rin's smile thinned.
"I don't know."
Then he left.
Later, in his quarters, Eros sat alone. He stared at the file projected on the wall—Prion's image. Static danced at the edges of the photo.
Every surveillance file on the man degraded within hours. No one could explain why.
Only this one fragment remained:
Prion, sitting cross-legged in a chair, face half-hidden by a hoodie, looking up at the unseen camera with a faint, knowing smile.
Eros stared at it for minutes.
Then without understanding why, he reached out… and traced the outline of that smile.
His hand trembled again.
Eros didn't sleep.
Assassins didn't need much. And when they did, it was engineered—dreamless, synthetic, efficient.
But tonight, it failed.
The rest pod hummed beneath him, lights dimmed, body stilled by protocol—but his mind refused to shut off.
Not because of noise.
Because of silence.
That same silence from the warehouse.
When Prion stepped forward without fear.
When he said, "You always hesitate."
That voice still echoed—not just in his ears, but somewhere deeper. Older.
Like he'd heard it in another room, long ago, when his eyes were still open but his heart was not.
"You used to call me something else…"
His fingers flexed under the sheet.
He shouldn't care. Shouldn't fixate. This was a delay. A misfire. A bug.
He should've reported himself for recalibration.
He didn't.
Instead, he accessed the file again.
PRION: LEVEL BLACK CLASSIFIED.
No age.
No origin.
Just a designation: "Asset R_0."
Then, reclassified: "Anomaly 01."
Then one word: Glitch.
The final mission note made him pause.
"Cognitive Resistance Detected. Total Memory Immunity: Partial. Recommended for Elimination or Extraction."
Below that, in encrypted red:
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONTAIN WITHOUT STABILIZER.
He frowned.
What stabilizer?
He closed the file, paced the length of his chamber, boots silent on the concrete.
And then he stopped in front of the mirror.
Something itched behind his ear.
He turned his head, pulled back the edge of skin just above the base of his neck—where the datajack met his spine.
A scar.
Fine. Invisible unless you were looking.
But it was old.
Older than it should be for someone of his cycle.
You've met him before… thirty-seven times…
He didn't believe it.
But his body did.
The next morning, he was called into the test wing.
Not for a mission.
For an evaluation.
He was guided—wordlessly—down sterile halls until he reached a sealed chamber.
Inside: light, table, two chairs.
And a device.
Thin, sleek, and sharp as a lie.
A memory extractor.
They wanted to pull whatever trace had been left by Prion—before it corrupted more.
He sat. Let them attach the probes. Let them scan.
But the moment they accessed the last layer of neural data—
Everything glitched.
A flash of white corridors.
A scream. His own voice.
"Don't touch him!"
Pain across his temple.
A hand—Prion's—on his wrist.
Etching something into skin.
Then blackness.
Eros ripped the probe off mid-scan. Blood dripped from his nose. The techs shouted.
He didn't wait.
He walked out.
Back in his quarters, he stood under cold water, uniform stripped, letting the chill bite into his spine.
He didn't know what disturbed him more.
That he remembered something…
Or that it felt like a relief.
He pulled on fresh clothes.
Black. Neutral.
But when he opened the drawer, something new lay folded there.
A thin white note sat on top.
He didn't recognize the writing.
But it said:
"You remembered enough to leave me alive. That's a start."
No signature.
No explanation.
Just one word scrawled at the bottom.
–P
He didn't react.
Didn't smile.
Didn't breathe differently.
But his fingers held the note longer than they should've.
And when he let it go, it didn't flutter to the ground.
He folded it.
Carefully.
And kept it.
He doesn't trust the anomaly—but why is he protecting his message?
Eros sat in silence long after the note disappeared into his sleeve.
The thin white paper shouldn't have meant anything.
It was unsigned. Unverified. Impossible to trace.
And yet, somehow, it had arrived inside his locked quarters—within one of the most secure facilities in the world.
No alarms tripped.
No movement detected.
No witnesses.
The note simply... existed.
"You remembered enough to leave me alive. That's a start."
It unsettled him more than the failed kill.
Because this—this meant Prion had reach.
Inside New Era.
Inside their systems.
Or worse—
Inside Eros's head.
He scanned the entire room manually. No bugs. No interference. No signs of forced entry. The auto-restock hatch showed its last update occurred three hours ago—before the scan session ended.
Which meant the message had been delivered during the chaos.
While his mind glitched. While his memory flared.
Prion had planned it.
He reviewed the footage of his return.
Paused. Enhanced.
There—just one frame, blurry, background.
A utility drone rolling past the hall corner. Not part of medical.
Wrong designation.
Its ID tag was corrupted, reading:
ECHO-00
And then it vanished.
Eros didn't report it.
He didn't erase the footage either.
He saved it to an offline drive and tucked it beneath his pillow.
Then, he sat back in the dark and stared at the ceiling for an hour.
Maybe more.
The next day, New Era summoned him again.
This time to a smaller chamber, windowless.
A voice—different from the last. Male. Older. Clinical.
"You're stable again. Good."
Eros didn't answer.
"We're authorizing re-engagement."
"Same mission?"
"Same target. New approach."
"You'll stay close. Observe. Track all behaviour."
Eros raised a brow. "What if he notices?"
"Let him."
"You're not just an assassin anymore."
A pause.
"You're a variable. And he's our constant."
Eros's mouth tightened.
"You'll carry the remote stabilizer implant this time."
"He was designed to need you. Let's see if that instinct still exists."
Back in his quarters, he stared at the word "need."
It clung to his thoughts like rust.
Prion.
Always three steps ahead.
Always watching—no cameras, no tags, no trace.
But somehow, always present.
"You always hesitate."
"You used to call me something else."
"That's a start."
Eros picked up his blade, checked the edge.
Then, without thinking, he whispered to the empty air:
"What exactly are you planning?"
No answer.
But somewhere in the city below, a hooded figure sat in a shadowed alcove, eyes closed, lips barely curved.
The smile didn't reach his eyes.
It never did.
But it didn't need to.
Because the game had already started again.
They sent the weapon to the anomaly. Now they're sending him back... as bait.
Prion didn't run. He planned.
And now, Eros isn't the hunter. He's the thread being pulled loose.
What's more dangerous—someone you don't remember, or someone who remembers everything about you?