k-bar recovery

His first attack came so fast I didn’t even see it. The flashlight beam was high-powered, but narrow. I blinked and he unleashed a second incredible leap, this time sideways, and vanished into the darkness. I jerked the flashlight, desperate to find him, and caught a nine-and-three-quarter-inch serrated blade in the stomach. The force of the blow pitched me backward. I stumbled and slammed into the steel ladder, glanced off, spinning, and fell to the stone floor. The flashlight flew from my fingertips and clattered across the ground, throwing out a dizzying swirl of blinding light before slamming into something hard and blinking out.

I was on the ground, in complete darkness. With him.

At that moment, my adrenaline detonated like Tsar Bomba. In a blink I was up, grasping blindly through the darkness, fingers searching desperately for the steel ladder, finding it, clutching it before me like a shield. The floor had solidified beneath my feet. I couldn’t see, but my other four senses snapped into starling focus. The metallic taste of blood. The smooth coldness of fingered steel. The icy waft of stale air. Quite suddenly, I realized that seeing didn’t matter. The Dzhaggernaut was too quick to keep in the flashlight beam anyway, and holding onto the damn thing eliminated the use of one of my hands.
-Sledge vs. The Labyrinth pg. 293