Chapter 175
"Someone has to blow themselves up," Apathy said, and those words fell into the room like a stone dropped into an impossibly deep well, their splash heard only after an agonizing delay.
Among Shaqar's nineteen soldiers, someone drew a sharp breath as though they had just been stabbed in the back.
"At the center of the ritual."
"With every exorcism tool we can gather."
"We detonate everything at once, in a single explosion powerful enough to disrupt the ritual's flow of energy, to stop it... or at least delay it long enough for us to..."
Apathy never finished the sentence because he knew there was no such thing as "long enough."
Whatever that explosion might buy them would only be seconds, perhaps minutes, or perhaps nothing at all.
"I'll do it."
The voice did not belong to Apathy.
Nor to Zhulumat.
Nor to Agatha.
It came from Shaqar.
When Zhulumat turned around, his eyes widening in utter disbelief, when had Shaqar changed?
The steadfast captain who had always placed the lives of his subordinates above his own, the man who was awkward even when attempting a joke, was now volunteering to die.
He saw an expression on Shaqar's face that felt completely unfamiliar.
It was not courage, because courage was merely a mask worn by those foolish enough to ignore fear.
This was a decision.
A decision born from cold calculation.
A calculation that among everyone still standing within this chamber, from Zhulumat, who was too important as their commander, to Agatha, who was too indispensable as their strategist, to Apathy, who was still far too young to die, to the nineteen subordinates who were too loyal to be left without their captain, Shaqar alone was the one whose absence mattered the least.
"You can't..."
Apathy tried to interrupt, but Shaqar raised a hand.
That single gesture felt heavier than the hundreds of orders he had given throughout his entire career as captain of Team Xirkushkartum.
Apathy froze, not out of obedience, but because he saw something in Shaqar's eyes that he had never witnessed before.
Peace.
When someone decides to die, there are two kinds of peace.
The first belongs to those who have surrendered.
The second belongs to those who have settled every unfinished matter and have nothing left behind except a body ready to be abandoned.
Shaqar possessed the second.
"Apathy," Shaqar said.
His voice sounded unlike anything Apathy had ever heard from him.
It was neither loud, angry, nor sarcastic.
It was gentle.
Gentle in a way that suddenly reminded Apathy that beneath the captain's uniform, the exorcism equipment, and his hatred toward Nebetu'u, Shaqar was a father.
A father who left home every morning carrying a promise he had never truly been able to keep.
That he would come home.
"Listen carefully."
"Because I won't repeat this."
Still frozen with one hand half-raised, Apathy felt warmth gathering behind his eyes.
Not because of the distant flames, but because of something far older than tears.
Something that could only be called grief, grief that had entered uninvited through the back door of his heart because he had forgotten to lock it.
"Miara," Shaqar said.
The name escaped his lips like a prayer he had never dared to speak aloud before his soldiers, afraid it would make him sound weak.
Afraid it would make him sound human.
"My daughter."
"My only child."
He drew a breath.
A breath that felt like inhaling memories.
Memories of Miara's long hair that she had never wanted to tie back no matter how many times he had asked.
Memories of the smile he missed every time duty forced him to leave in the middle of the night.
Memories of her laughter, soft as tiny bells falling onto a cushion, never loud, yet always enough to make the whole world feel lighter.
"Tell her..."
"Tell Miara..."
Shaqar stopped.
For the first time since volunteering himself, his voice trembled.
Not because he feared death, for he had stared death in the eyes far too many times to fear it anymore.
But because he did not know how to say I love you with words powerful enough to last an entire lifetime without him there to repeat them every single day.
"Tell her that her father loves her more than anything."
"More than any mission."
"More than this world."
"More than..."
He let out a slow breath.
Within that breath, Apathy could almost hear the sound of a front door closing forever upon a house whose owner would never return.
"More than anything she could ever imagine."
"And I'm sorry..."
"I'm sorry I couldn't tell her this myself."
Shaqar did not walk toward the ritual's center with hesitant steps.
He ran.
He ran like a man unwilling to give himself even a single moment to reconsider.
He gathered every exorcism tool offered by his nineteen frozen subordinates, each of them silently handing over whatever they possessed because words were no longer enough to fill the emptiness their captain was about to leave behind.
The sickly golden light pouring from the fractured marble grew brighter with every step he took.
Hotter.
Denser.
It felt as though the very air within the ritual vortex itself was rejecting his existence.
Yet Shaqar never stopped.
He never slowed.
Not even when the skin along his arms blistered and peeled away like paper burning from its edges.
Not even when blood streaming from his nose no longer formed two thin trails but became a branching crimson river flowing across his colorless lips.
"He's... he's really going to do it," Apathy whispered.
His voice no longer knew what it wished to become.
It hovered somewhere between prayer and lament, between hope and despair.
Beside him, Zhulumat stood perfectly still.
His fists were clenched so tightly at his sides that his fingernails pierced the flesh of his own palms.
He paid the pain no attention.
That pain was insignificant compared to the agony of watching one of his finest captains walk toward a death that would not even grant him enough time to speak his daughter's name one final time.
At the center of the chamber, where the ritual's pulse thundered like the heartbeat of a giant that had never intended to stop beating, Shaqar carefully laid down every exorcism tool he had carried.
The pumice sphere.
The square-linked chains.
The small bone knives engraved with inverted prayers.
The glass bottles filled with black liquid that writhed as though something inside remained alive.
Then he knelt.
Not to pray to the God he had spent his entire life denying.
But to prepare himself to become part of the explosion that would tear this ritual apart from within.
"From this moment onward," he said.
His voice no longer trembled.
There was no hesitation left.
Only calmness, flat and still like the surface of perfectly unmoving water.
Then he began chanting exorcism incantations.
Not loudly.
Only in whispers.
Whispers that grew faster.
More intense.
Less human.
As though someone were attempting to recite an entire sacred scripture within a single breath.
When the incantations reached their climax, when every exorcism tool began glowing not with light but with vibrations, vibrations powerful enough to crack the marble beneath Shaqar's knees, not through force but through sheer presence, vibrations that traveled into his bones and slowly transformed them into something no longer entirely flesh...
That was the moment the resurrection ritual of the One Accursed responded.
Not with an explosion.
Not with a scream.
But with rejection.
A rejection that emerged from the golden vortex of energy like a colossal hand forged from despair itself.
A hand unwilling to release its prey.
A hand struggling to force Shaqar out of the ritual circle before he could finish what he had begun.
To be continued...