The first thing he felt was heat.
When his eyes opened, he lay among the ruins of a forge—stone blackened, metal warped, air thick with smoke. His body ached, his mind a void. No name came to him. No past. Only silence.
But his hands moved with certainty. Fingers curled, and something cold answered. A gauntlet. It pulsed with life, small whispers brushing at the edge of his thoughts.
"At last… you're awake," it said, in a voice only he could hear.
He froze. The voice wasn't his. But it was familiar.
The world around him had not waited. Monsters roamed, hunters watched, and contracts were a currency of survival. He moved as instinct demanded, the gauntlet reshaping at will—gun, shield, barrier—protecting him, guiding him, reminding him of motions he no longer remembered learning.
Each strike, each dodge, each movement felt like a memory he could almost touch. Muscle remembered what mind forgot. The whispers in the gauntlet were not just guidance—they were a tether to something he had lost, or perhaps something he had never truly known.
Days became nights. One kill became another. He adopted a name, a false identity, because the world demanded it. To those who saw him, he was a ghost in the alleys, an assassin without peer. But in the quiet moments, when contracts were done and shadows swallowed the city, the gauntlet spoke.
"You were the one who made me," it said once. Or maybe it was a question.
He did not answer. He could not. He did not know if it was truth, or a trick. But he knew this: he was not alone.
And though his past was erased, his hands still remembered the fire of the forge, the rhythm of hammer on steel, and the touch of metal bending to will. Somewhere deep inside, the truth waited—along with the secrets of the living gauntlet that would follow him through every shadowed step of the path he now walked.