Chapter 134
She bit her lower lip until it nearly bled, trying to replace one pain with another, struggling to maintain the boundaries of her consciousness against the ancient liturgy that continued to echo without end.
Beside her, Tegar had already activated the dampener in his glasses, a technology capable of blocking certain frequencies, yet from the tension still visible on his face, it seemed the dampener was not working completely.
The four humans from the future now floated in the air, trapped at a distance close enough to see their enemy, yet near enough to feel its power.
Arya moved without waiting for orders, without asking whether this was the right moment or whether Nirma agreed.
Both of his hands, which had been gripping the XM8 rifle in a ready-to-fire position, suddenly released one grip.
His hand darted toward the upper pocket of his clothing with a speed that made the folds of fabric look like wings briefly unfolding.
His fingers retrieved a single date seed, a small object that looked identical to the seed he had used before, yet Arya knew the difference—knew that this seed had been programmed with a different function, with ballistic data that no ordinary seed could produce.
He tossed the seed upward, high, like a gambler flipping a coin to decide fate.
As the seed spun in the air and descended back into his open palm, a blue light enveloped his grasp for a fraction of a second before vanishing, leaving behind a heavily modified M4A1.
Its barrel was longer than that of a standard M4A1, extending with millimeter precision achievable only by 31st-century weapon manufacturers.
At its tip, however, there was a release-like structure that made it look vicious, terrifying—like the muzzle of a beast ready to spew death in its most destructive form.
Arya raised the weapon, aiming downward, toward the point where the five-headed Abnormal still stood calmly at the center of the weakening vortex.
His finger rested on the trigger, ready, waiting for a single word, a single command, the slightest signal from Nirma.
Nirma herself was no less swift.
Her left hand, which had been holding a standard M4A1, now moved down toward her waist.
Her fingers searched for the grip of the pistol that had long hung at her side, a sidearm she rarely used but always carried as a last resort.
She felt the cold touch of metal at her fingertips, gripped it, and drew it from its holster with a motion she had practiced thousands of times—a movement that had become reflex, a part of her body that no longer required thought.
She began to raise the pistol, aiming downward, aligning her sights toward the creature still standing motionless in the emptiness of the Bogged Land.
For a brief moment, she thought it was too easy—that a creature with five heads and the power to turn liturgy into a weapon would not allow itself to become such a passive target.
But before her finger could pull the trigger, before Arya could fire the first shot, the liturgy began to change.
The sound that had resembled an ancient church hymn, flowing with high tones that felt sacred despite their horror, suddenly shifted.
There was no pause, no transition—only a change that happened instantly, like someone deliberately replaying a recording at a different speed.
The tones dropped lower, becoming heavy, filled with something she could not identify yet immediately made the hairs on her neck stand.
The words that had once been incomprehensible now became clear, vivid, piercing into her mind with painful sharpness.
Praises and prayers that should have been directed to Jesus Christ, that should have risen to the heavens like burning incense, now transformed into a literary chant—ninety percent of its contents being the opposite of all that was holy.
Every word spoken by the creature's five heads, from every corner of Heraclea Cybistra that had suddenly joined in resonance, was an insult, a curse, a blasphemy woven in language so beautiful, so poetic, that it almost felt a shame not to listen.
Nirma felt those words entering her mind not as sound, but as poison slowly seeping in, whispering doubt, whispering anger, whispering the desire to cease being herself.
From above, the four humans could see how Heraclea Cybistra transformed within seconds.
The western border, once silent after the storm passed, now echoed with corrupted liturgy—voices emerging from the ground, from the rocks, from the empty air, as if the entire region had become a grand stage designed solely to sing hatred in perfect harmony.
The eastern border followed, then the north, then the south, until the entire horizon separating Heraclea Cybistra from the outside world turned into a wall of sound that could not be penetrated, avoided, or silenced.
The air above Heraclea Cybistra felt like thick oil, difficult to breathe, as the second liturgy began to resound from the mouths of the five-headed creature.
Nirma felt it first—a strange vibration traveling from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head, a sensation she had never experienced in all the battles she had fought.
The four individuals barely had time to brace themselves.
Their bodies hovered in ready positions, each pair of eyes narrowing in vigilance—Arya with his modified M4A1 still raised, Ashita with her right hand gripping something she had yet to draw, Tegar with the glasses at his temple continuously emitting increasingly chaotic data.
Only Nirma appeared different among them.
Her right eye, covered by a white bandage, seemed to share in the vigilance despite its inability to see, as if the wound there had become some kind of antenna detecting what ordinary eyes could not.
And when the second liturgy broke—when the blasphemy against sacred scripture flowed from the creature's five heads in language so fluent it felt like a curse studied for thousands of years—Nirma knew that this time it was no longer just about words.
There was something more tangible, more physical, more lethal coming toward her.
The wave formed in the air like an arrow drawn from a colossal bow—yet not an ordinary arrow, but something made of sound, hatred, and energy she could not identify.
She saw it shoot forward—not zigzagging, not curving, not spiraling—only moving straight with a speed the naked eye could not follow.
And within a second that felt stretched into minutes, Nirma realized the wave was heading toward her—directly at her, not at Arya beside her, not at Ashita and Tegar several meters away, but toward her chest, her heart, the very core of everything she called herself.
She had no time to question why, no time to consider the reason the creature had chosen her among the four equally threatening agents.
There was only reflex—the reflex she had honed over more than a decade as a fugitive, the reflex that made her body move before her mind could form a plan.
Nirma acted with a movement never taught in any combat manual—a motion born from the fusion of survival instinct and years of facing impossible situations.
To be continued…