The Dark Web adapted.
If it couldn't kill Brush…
It would make sure he could no longer experience existence.
A new command echoed—quiet, absolute, irreversible.
"EXECUTE: SENSORY DELETION."
There was no explosion.
No light.
No sound.
Because sound was the first thing to go.
Brush opened his mouth—nothing came out.
Not silence.
Absence.
Then sight collapsed.
The battlefield didn't fade to black.
Black itself vanished.
No color.
No darkness.
No light.
Just nothing.
Touch followed.
Brush reached for the ground—
and felt no resistance.
Not emptiness.
Not air.
No feedback at all.
Smell.
Taste.
Balance.
One by one, every sensory thread connecting him to reality was cleanly erased, like lines of code being commented out.
"ENTITY STATUS UPDATE," the Dark Web intoned.
"TARGET CAN NO LONGER PERCEIVE."
Trojan Horse screamed his name—
Brush never heard it.
The Dark God watched calmly.
"You rely on awareness," it said.
"Without senses, you cannot react."
"Without reaction, you cannot resist."
Brush stood motionless.
From the outside, he looked frozen.
Inside—
There was no inside.
No up.
No down.
No time.
Even thought began to fragment.
Memories blurred.
Language lost meaning.
Identity threatened to dissolve.
This was worse than death.
Death still allowed experience.
This allowed none.
The Dark Web waited.
Seconds passed.
Then—
Something impossible happened.
A signal appeared.
Not sight.
Not sound.
Not touch.
A decision.
I exist.
Not felt.
Not heard.
Declared.
Binary code ignited—not around him, but as him.
When senses are deleted, only one thing remains:
Will.
And Brush's determination—
the thing that revived him every time he died—
was never a sense.
It was a constant.
"ERROR," the Dark Web stuttered.
"DETERMINATION IS NOT A REGISTERED INPUT."
Brush took a step.
He didn't feel it.
He didn't see it.
But reality responded anyway.
"You erased my senses," his voice echoed directly into the system itself, not through sound.
"So I stopped using them."
The Dark Web recoiled.
Brush was no longer reacting to reality.
Reality was reacting to him.
"If perception defines existence," he continued,
"then I'll exist without it."
A new title propagated through every layer of the system:
⚠ ENTITY EVOLUTION DETECTED
STATUS: PERCEPTION-INDEPENDENT
The Dark God's smile finally disappeared.
Because for the first time—
The Dark Web realized it had created something worse than an anomaly.
It had created something that didn't need to experience reality to overwrite it.