The fight raged around you—chaos, movement, yelling. Your teammates were all in their element, fighting like clockwork, moving swiftly from target to target. But you? You couldn’t move.

You saw the gun. The cold barrel of the weapon gleaming under the dim lighting, aimed straight at you. It was like the world around you collapsed into a single, sharp focus: that gun.

Your breath caught in your throat. Everything else, the shouting, the gunfire, the thumping of feet, faded into nothingness. It was just you and the weapon, and the world around you felt distant—like you were watching it happen to someone else.

A tightness formed in your chest. Your hands clenched at your sides, but they felt heavy—too heavy. You couldn’t lift them, couldn’t move, couldn’t reach for your own weapon. Your legs felt like stone, rooted in place, as if the ground had swallowed your feet whole.

It was the sound of the safety clicking off that did it. That soft click reverberated in your skull, dragging you further into a nightmare you couldn’t escape. Every nerve screamed for you to run, to fight, but you were paralyzed—trapped in a flash of time where you couldn’t even think.

The world seemed to stretch. The figure holding the gun didn’t seem like a person anymore, just a shadow with a weapon aimed at your chest. You couldn’t make out their face, couldn’t focus on anything except the cold, unrelenting sight of the muzzle, the trigger.

Then—

A gunshot.

You didn’t move. The sound of it was a distant echo in your ears, as if it came from another life.

You were still frozen. Still paralyzed by the fear that had gripped you the second that gun came into view. It was a sound, a trigger, a moment in time that you couldn’t shake.