In the absolute darkness of the penthouse, Vikram was blind. He couldn't see his own hand in front of his face. The freezing air stung his eyes, and the hum of the spinning dark-matter core was the only sound in the room.
Suddenly, a heavy fist caught Vikram in the jaw, sending him crashing into a marble pillar. He tasted copper.
"You are fighting like a baseline human," Javed's voice mocked from the dark. "You rely on your eyes. You think shadows are just dark areas on the ground. But shadows are a physical force."
Vikram scrambled to his feet, activating his Prana. He tried to draw upon the ambient shadows in the room, attempting to fold them into a defensive shield around his chest.
But the moment his bio-electric energy touched the surrounding dark space, his mind recoiled.
The Law of Light Recoil was absolute. A shadow cannot be defined without light to mark its boundaries. In the pitch-black penthouse, there was no light, no contrast, no edges. The dark matter was an uncontained, chaotic ocean.
When Vikram tried to structure it, the chaotic dark photons rushed back into his nervous system, overloading his spirit channels.
"Agh!" Vikram screamed, clutching his head as a wave of intense, blinding pain tore through his brain. It felt like his eyes were being burned from the inside. The blue Prana sparks on his knuckles vanished, short-circuited by the photonic backlash.
"Vikram!" Rohan yelled from somewhere to his left. A split second later, the sound of Rohan's gun firing echoed, the bright orange muzzle flashes lighting up the room for a fraction of a second.
In those brief flashes, Vikram saw Javed. The enforcer was moving with unnatural speed, his body sliding through the darkness like liquid. The bullets passed through Javed's shadow-armor, their kinetic energy absorbed by the dark matter and turned into frost.
Javed caught Rohan by the throat and threw him across the room, his body crashing through a glass coffee table.
"Your father taught me everything he knew," Javed said, his voice approaching Vikram. "But he was weak. He refused to merge his Prana with the dark core. He wanted to remain human. That is why he died, and that is why you will follow him."
A cold, heavy hand gripped Vikram's collar, lifting him off the ground.