Chapter 133
With a movement so fast it was nearly invisible, the man in the jarik cloth slipped his hand into the left pocket of his attire, pulling out a long, slender needle with a tip sharp enough to pierce anything—an artifact from the year 1999 AD, simple in form yet concealing complex technology behind its metallic gleam.
He threw the needle straight upward, and within a fraction of a second, it exploded into four points of light that scattered toward the four cardinal directions.
Then, with extraordinary precision, thin lasers shot from each point of light, striking Ashita and Tegar simultaneously.
There was no pain, no heat—only a sensation like being touched by a cool breeze in the middle of summer.
Suddenly, the gravity that had been pushing them so harshly turned gentle, became tame, became something they could control with mere will.
Ashita exhaled in relief, her body that had been thrown helplessly before now able to remain still at a single point, able to drift slowly left and right, able to float gracefully like a goddess surveying her domain.
From above, the four agents from the future watched as the storm that had once merely enclosed the borders began to reveal its true fangs.
The northern wall of wind, which had appeared like an invisible barrier, suddenly expanded, extending tendrils of wind spinning at insane speeds toward the center.
From the east, a similar storm advanced with equal ferocity, carrying dust and small stones that flew like nature's ammunition.
The west and south followed, all four moving in terrifying synchronization, like a beast that had starved for ages and had finally found its prey.
Ashita and Tegar observed everything without blinking, their minds working rapidly to process possible scenarios.
Yet they did not move, did not attempt to stop it.
They knew the limits of their mission, knew what could and could not be altered in the flow of time.
The Crusader forces and the Seljuk Dynasty forces lying unconscious on the Bogged Land—they were part of history that was meant to die on this battlefield, to die by sword and spear, to die by strategy and courage.
But due to intervention from future technology, due to their presence in hunting the Abnormal, that small fate had changed.
Now, those armies would not die by human hands, would not be recorded in history books as ordinary casualties of the Crusades, but instead would be swallowed by the storm, vanish without a trace, become missing numbers that historians of the future would never be able to resolve.
From the height where all of Heraclea Cybistra lay spread out like a carelessly folded, worn map, Nirma forced her eyes to pierce through the raging vortex of dust and wind below.
She blinked once, twice, three times, trying to filter the visual chaos covering the Bogged Land, trying to find something—anything—that should not exist in the year 1101 AD.
But all she saw was wind devouring the unconscious bodies of soldiers with a greed she had never witnessed before, a massive vortex spinning with power that could still be felt even from this height, and the emptiness gradually replacing the existence of thousands of humans who, mere minutes ago, had still lain in chemical slumber.
Nirma was almost about to sigh in disappointment, almost about to order Arya to prepare another option, when a fragment of words slipped from the other side—from Ashita's lips, whom she saw suddenly pointing downward, straight toward the densest center of the vortex, toward the point where the wind spun most violently as if protecting something the world was not meant to see.
Tegar, hearing Ashita's words, immediately raised a binocular device from within the folds of his jarik cloth—an instrument with dual lenses not originating from the medieval era, capable of piercing fog, dust, even illusion itself.
He narrowed his eyes, adjusted the focus, narrowed them again—and for a while, he did not move at all, his body frozen in midair with the binoculars pressed against his eyes, as if processing something difficult to believe even for his own technology.
From afar, Nirma could see how Tegar's jaw tightened, how the muscles along it stiffened, how his breath was held longer than usual.
Then, at last, Tegar spoke, his voice hoarse yet firm, as if every word carried a weight he had to release.
"That's it. The Abnormal that rules this Bogged Land. I cannot possibly mistake its energy pattern."
Hearing that, Nirma and Arya simultaneously shifted their gaze, their eyes piercing toward the same direction—toward the center of Heraclea Cybistra, toward the heart of the storm they had previously considered nothing more than a natural phenomenon.
Gradually, like a stage curtain being drawn back by unseen hands, the violent vortex began to open itself.
The rapidly spinning dust thinned at a single point, forming a narrow corridor that allowed sight to penetrate into its core—and there, Nirma saw it.
The creature stood unmoving, about one meter tall, its body roughly resembling a human yet feeling utterly alien, utterly outside the order of nature she knew.
From its narrow, tapering shoulders—like the peak of a small hill—rose five unnaturally long necks, each moving in a different rhythm: some swaying slowly to the right, others drifting to the left, one rising and falling like a snake dancing to a silent flute.
At the end of each neck, a head.
Not a human head, not an animal's either, but something in between, with features that kept changing every time Nirma tried to focus on them, as if its form refused to remain fixed, as if it rejected being captured by sight or memory.
Nirma felt something strange when her eyes locked onto the creature—a sensation she could not explain, like hearing a whisper that was never truly heard yet kept creeping at the edge of her awareness.
And then she realized—it was not a whisper, but a sound emanating from the creature's body, from the pores of its grayish skin, from the air around it vibrating at the wrong frequency.
Like a liturgy, like an ancient church hymn sung by an unseen choir, the sound moved in waves inaudible to the ears yet felt in the bones, in the marrow, in the deepest part of consciousness.
Nirma endured it for two seconds before forcing herself to look away—and in those two seconds, she felt her sanity brushed by something cold, not taken, not destroyed, merely touched, as if to remind her that she could lose everything if she allowed that sound to seep any deeper.
She quickly turned toward Arya beside her and saw his face pale, his eyes empty for a fraction of a second before he shook his head violently, breaking the trance that had begun to bind him.
On the other side, Ashita felt the same thing.
Her free right hand suddenly rose to cover her ears, but she quickly realized it was useless—the sound did not enter through the eardrums, but directly into the mind, into thought, into the most private domain that should have been inaccessible to anyone.
To be continued…