After Phoebe left, he stood there for a moment, taking all the information in.
Ideally, the first move was reconnaissance. They couldn't strike at the head of the church without losing their own heads. But they could cut off the fingers. They needed to hunt down the gang operating in the shadows of Theron City, specifically the cell responsible for the recent kidnappings mentioned in the suppressed file.
Slowly, a blueprint of violence began to take shape in Solace's mind.
"Tracking them won't be the issue," Solace muttered to himself, his fingers drumming a rhythm against his thigh. "Between Phoebe's connections, Nolan's vendetta, and the sheer reach of the Noble houses, locating a street-level hideout is trivial. The problem is the engagement."
"What about weapons?" he whispered.
He considered his options. His sword was decent, but conspicuous. Using Chains or Glass in a crowded slum or a covert infiltration would leave a heavy essence residue, a signature that the Imperial Court's inquisitors could track. He needed something analog. Something crude, effective, and silent until the moment of impact.
"Guns," he decided, the word feeling foreign yet nostalgic on his tongue.
In a world dominated by Essence and flashy affinities, firearms were often looked down upon as the tools of the weak. A Layer-3 Thread user could reinforce their skin to bounce small-caliber rounds or move faster than a trigger pull. But Solace wasn't planning on fighting Layer-3 Elites in the back alleys. He was dealing with grunts, thugs, and low-level zealots.
Most street-level enforcers hovered around Essence Rank F or barely E+. Their threads were mostly undeveloped, mostly passive stat boosts. Against a suppressor-equipped pistol, their reaction times would be insufficient. A bullet travels faster than a conscious thought to activate a defensive barrier.
"Easy to carry. Easy to conceal. No residue to track unless a special team investigates," Solace mused. "And with Lily's Eclipse shroud and my Refraction Cloak, we won't just be invisible; we'll be ghosts with ballistic capabilities."
The tactical plan was sound. It was efficient.
Now for the stuff related to the church and the elder of the Imperial court. Solace genuinely thought he was going insane.
Because no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember anything close to this.
The strange thing was that he felt like he was beginning to forget his memories related to his previous life, like you forget a dream after you wake up.
Panic, cold and sharp, spiked in his chest. It wasn't just a lapse in concentration. It felt as though an eraser was being dragged across the chalkboard of his soul, methodically wiping away the lines that defined who he used to be. The memories weren't just fading; they were being evicted.
He grasped for the memory, but his mental fingers closed around mist.
There was nothing there.
He tried harder. He tried to remember the face of his own Grandmother. He tried to remember the name of the university he had attended on Earth. He tried to recall the smell of the air in his old city.
Blank.
"Shit!" he cursed.
He calmed himself, pushing down the pulsing anxiety that throbbed in his head.
After a moment, he whispered with a hoarse voice. "I am Alexander Quill! I am Alexander Quill."
This gradual erasure of memories, the only thing that felt real was his own name, Alexander Quill, or maybe that was an illusion too. Maybe Alexander and Solace had merged with his transmigration and created whatever Solace was today.
He wasn't naive like the old Solace, nor was he reckless like Alexander. He wasn't weak like the previous Solace, and he also wasn't as detached as Alexander.
He became a being existing on the edge of dream and reality.
The more he tried to think about his previous life, the more he strayed away from the thought. It was like someone was purposefully playing with his head.
Then a question arose, "Why am I just realising this?"
Looking back, he realised there was always something strange with his train of thought. Like someone was purposefully planting ideas in his head. He would always think something strange at unusual times.
Memories resurfaced, but this time he viewed them through a lens of suspicion.
Something on the Mountain, or the time he stopped to talk to a stranger, telling her to struggle, though I couldn't pinpoint what felt wrong with the memory.
He also felt something was wrong after Lily and Vivi's match. When he was thinking about Noah and Luna. When he was speculating on how they could be half-Angels.
He felt that the answer to that question was hiding in plain sight, yet he wasn't able to grasp it. Like he was kept just out of reach.
Like every time, his mind would look at the answer and decide to stray away from the thought.
Another instance surfaced, and this time, he became more certain of the entity playing with his head.
The memory was fresh, sharp, and utterly inexplicable.
He froze. His hands began to shake uncontrollably. The blood drained from his face, leaving him looking like a corpse.
He felt stupid. Incredibly, profoundly stupid for not seeing the strings attached to his limbs sooner.
"I am such a fool," he breathed, his voice trembling. "How could I not realize this? I pride myself on logic."
He spoke the sentence aloud, testing the weight of the impossibility on his tongue.
"How... how in the hell did I come to the conclusion that Nicole Richards is a Regressor?"
"It's not just memory loss," Solace realized, a chill seeping into his bones that had nothing to do with frost. "Someone or something is playing with my head."