Chapter 158
Around them, the sounds of shattering filled the chamber in a symphony of destruction too rapid to follow.
The Ruhutha in Shaqar's hand snapped in two, and before the broken ends could even settle, they continued fracturing into four, eight, sixteen pieces within the same second.
At the same moment, Apathy screamed—not from pain, but because the tool in his hand, Turaiqah, was melting like a candle placed over a flame, even though the temperature around them had not risen by a single degree.
"IMPOSSIBLE—THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE!"
One of the captains in the rear ranks shouted, his voice drowned out by the roar of dozens of exorcism tools breaking apart at once.
Onigakure watched as the Karmutha in his hands crumbled into tiny pebbles that slipped through his fingers.
He managed only a single sentence, one that froze every soldier still capable of hearing it.
"He isn't destroying our tools—he is forgiving them, and that forgiveness is more deadly than any curse."
Not a single exorcism tool remained intact among the eighty-seven people standing in that chamber.
Zhulumat looked from side to side, no longer attempting to hide what was unfolding within his chest.
Everywhere he looked, he saw only empty hands clenched into useless fists, fingers still grasping dust from tools that, only seconds ago, had been their sole assurance that they possessed something with which to fight.
That they were more than flesh and bone standing before something that had existed long before flesh and bone had names.
Shaqar continued staring at the dust of Ruhutha trickling through his fingers—the dust of the one object he had believed would never abandon him.
Then realization began creeping from his fingertips to his spine.
Something in that room had just shifted in a way no physics he knew could explain.
He raised his head just as the white figures moved.
Not by stepping.
Not by rushing forward.
But by changing position in a way that made his eyes feel as though they were watching a film with several frames missing.
One moment the Angels stood before them, their wings half-spread in an encircling formation.
The next, they were already above.
Dozens of winged figures hovered at an altitude far beyond the reach of any weapon they no longer possessed.
Their positions spread into a looser circle, yet one that felt even more lethal.
No longer surrounding them from the sides.
Now they merely watched from above, with a silence that had no intention of explaining itself.
"They're... retreating?"
One of the captains on the left muttered, his voice caught somewhere between hope and disbelief.
The thought died in his throat almost immediately when he realized that not a single Holy Being had followed the Angels upward.
They remained where they were.
Hundreds of radiant figures still stood before the Satanists at the exact same distance, in the exact same formation.
But their eyes were beginning to change.
They were no longer merely present.
They had become something more intense, something that felt as though it were gripping the chest of every person brave enough to meet their gaze.
Apathy felt Shaqar's fingers tighten around his arm in an irregular rhythm.
When he turned, he saw that his captain was not looking at anything.
His eyes were empty—not because of fear, but because his mind was struggling to process what had just happened to the space around them.
To the air that suddenly felt heavier despite nothing changing.
To the silence that suddenly possessed weight.
As though something unimaginably vast was drawing a breath beside their ears, yet no one was brave enough to turn and confirm it.
And then the Holy Beings closed their eyes.
Not one by one.
Not hesitantly.
But with a synchronicity possible only for beings that had never known the distinction between self and other.
Hundreds of eyelids descended in a single shared motion.
Within the silence that followed, Zhulumat felt something he had never experienced even during forty years of a life spent closer to death than to his own breath.
Dizziness.
Not in his head, but deep within his chest.
A vortex twisting his insides as though the gravity inside his body had suddenly decided to stop obeying the same laws as the gravity outside it.
He opened his mouth to say something.
Perhaps an order.
Perhaps a prayer.
Perhaps merely the name of someone he would never admit was important.
But what emerged was not words.
It was a long exhale that transformed into nausea halfway through.
Stomach acid surged up his throat in a wave he could not restrain.
He pressed his empty palm against his mouth with a motion he had never imagined performing before his own troops.
"Commander...?"
Agatha's voice came from somewhere that felt impossibly distant, despite the fact that he knew she stood no more than three steps to his left.
When he attempted to turn toward her, the world spun around him in a way that defied reason.
The cracked floor seemed to become a wall.
The fractured ceiling seemed to become an abyss.
And for the first time in his life, Zhulumat—the Satanist High Officer who had never wavered through one hundred and twenty-seven cleansing operations—felt his knees buckle.
Not by choice.
By necessity.
His body had suddenly forgotten how to stand upright before something it did not wish to face.
Behind him, the sounds of bodies collapsing began to echo like rain striking dry earth.
Not loudly.
But with a wet, heavy resignation.
Among those sounds, he heard Shaqar vomiting something he could not fully expel before he shoved Apathy's back far too hard.
The two of them fell together in a tangle of limbs and knees that no longer possessed coordination.
The effect did not arrive as a wave that could be resisted.
It arrived as a fundamental alteration in the way their bodies understood space itself.
A hijacking of the balance system that had always functioned without conscious thought.
And for the captains of Team Xirkushkartum—for those who had trained their bodies into weapons sharper than any metal—the devastation felt ten times deeper.
Shaqar felt as though his chest were being pulled in two directions at once.
Upward toward something he did not want to see.
And downward toward the floor that seemed to spin beneath his palms.
Amid the nausea that made his throat feel coated with something too hot to be called heat, he heard Apathy gasping beside him with a sound he had never heard before.
The sound of someone trying to remember how to breathe while their own body relentlessly insisted that they were falling—
even though they were already lying on the floor.
To Be Continued…