Chapter 6
Its movement was not linear.
It veered and accelerated at random, like a particle ricocheting within a confined space, yet with a clear final destination: the heart of the city's bustle.
Below it, the streets of 1950s Djakarta lived in their own glitter.
Electric trams screeched past, leaving brief blue sparks in their wake.
Old cars like DeSoto and Chevrolet cruised slowly, their horns humming low.
Pedicabs and horse-drawn carriages crowded the street corners, their passengers occasionally glancing upward, sensing a strange gust of wind or a faint flicker, yet seeing nothing but darkness.
Crowds walked along the sidewalks, men wearing peci and suits, women in kebaya and elaborate buns, laughing and chatting, utterly unaware of the threat moving far above their heads.
Mydra 9-C descended lower, tracing the lines of darkened rooftops while occasionally rotating some of its many heads to look left and right.
Its crude internal sensors swept the surrounding temporal frequencies, searching for the distinctive energy traces of Nirmala Surdaya and Arya Wiratama, or portal vibrations from the Linear Time Police.
There was only emptiness, aside from the innocent and oblivious background hum of 1950s city life.
A strange, cold satisfaction flowed through the core of its being.
"Free," one of its mouths muttered, its voice like stone scraping across a vacuum.
"At last, no hands trying to confine me, no time-cage seeking to restrain."
The other heads nodded in eerie agreement, the blue light in their eyes blinking softly.
It slowed its pace, allowing itself to drift more casually above a canal whose waters were pitch-black, reflecting the dim moonlight.
In the distance, it saw the flicker of lights from a cinema where people lined up to watch the latest film.
It heard the chime of kroncong music from a restaurant and the shouts of a satay vendor by the roadside.
This scene, human life so simple and orderly in its routines yet so full of color and sound, radiated something that intrigued it.
For an entity born of chaos and discarded fragments of time, such naive order seemed like a miracle.
"They built this," another head whispered, watching vehicles and pedestrians flow in busy yet predictable patterns.
"They built it without knowing how fragile it all is.
How easily it could be altered, scrambled, turned into something… new."
The gratitude it felt was not warm, but rather a dark aesthetic appreciation, like a painter admiring a blank white canvas before staining it with darker hues.
Yet that dark gratitude had not fully dissipated from its awareness.
A swift motion caught the attention of some of its vigilant heads.
From the thick shadow behind a newly constructed office building, a silhouette shot out.
Not flying, but moving in a way that was almost impossible.
Leaping from one glass panel of the building to another, as if gravity and slick surfaces meant nothing.
Each step was precise, each landing stable and silent, leaving behind hairline cracks almost invisible in the glass.
The silhouette moved at an alarming speed, closing the distance with Mydra 9-C hovering in the air.
Mydra 9-C felt a deep instinct of danger, sharper than any threat from time bureaucracy.
The approaching shadow entity radiated pure intent of destruction.
Without hesitation, its energy core pulsed violently, and its distorted body seemed to dissolve into the surrounding shadows of the buildings.
It moved not with ordinary speed, but with a kind of short-range teleportation that exploited the contrast between light and dark, vanishing from one point and appearing dozens of meters away in the blink of an eye.
Its movement was so swift and unpredictable that even laser prediction systems from the 2050s would be overwhelmed, let alone able to prevent it.
In its mind, it was already safe.
Yet there, a different sound sliced through the night.
Not a roar or an explosion, but something dense, dry, and familiar.
A nearly inaudible thwip, followed by a sharp sonic crack.
The sound of a sniper rifle equipped with a high-grade suppressor from the future.
Mydra 9-C, having just emerged from a rooftop shadow, instinctively twisted its body in an unnatural manner.
Its entire mass rolled backward like a colossal pangolin, a sudden evasive maneuver that shifted its momentum from horizontal to vertical straight downward.
It dived sharply toward darker streets below.
But the shooter had anticipated it.
Before Mydra 9-C's rotation could fully stabilize, a second thwip rang out, closer, more certain.
This time, there was no room for a perfect evasion.
One head among the twenty-eight it possessed, positioned far left and slightly to the rear, suddenly exploded.
Not like a conventional blast, but as though crushed from within by invisible pressure.
Fragments of skull, remnants of flesh, and the pale blue light that had been its eye shattered into fine dust and were swept away by the wind.
There was no scream, only the abrupt and final severing of one channel of consciousness from its collective mind.
The pain was less physical and more like loss and shock tearing through its remaining awareness.
One head was gone.
The remaining twenty-seven turned simultaneously with rough motion, the blue lights in their eyes blazing with fresh fury and threat.
Someone, from an unseen location, could not only predict its movements but wield a weapon powerful and precise enough to wound it.
Mydra 9-C rotated all remaining heads harshly, twenty-seven pairs of blue lights burning with boiling rage.
A deep growl, torn by many voices, escaped its many mouths, echoing across the night sky like grinding metal and a minor earthquake.
It had believed the greatest threat was the mysterious shadow entity, yet the strike that shattered one of its heads came from an entirely different direction.
And its attackers were those it had already deemed left behind.
Nirmala Surdaya and Arya Wiratama.
Yet the two time guardians offered no chance for anger or negotiation.
They moved with lethal efficiency.
On the rooftop of a lower building, Nirmala had set down her futuristic sniper rifle.
In her hands now, with seamless transition, she held a bow that appeared ancient.
Not a replica, but an authentic weapon from the 1200s, its wood dark and veined, its string woven from powerful fibers.
Yet the arrow she nocked was no ordinary shaft.
Its body glowed with pale green energy, and its arrowhead was crafted from translucent crystal filled with swirling liquid.
Nirmala drew the bowstring to its fullest extent, her posture firm and unshaken despite the night wind.
Her left eye, aided by a temporal targeting system projected from thin glasses before her gaze, began to lock onto the target.
Not the many heads, not the mutated limbs, but the central point of Mydra 9-C's swollen abdomen, bulging like a diseased giant egg, its surface crawling with clusters of parasitic creatures continuously evolving in the dark.
With a controlled exhale, her fingers released the string.
The arrow shot forth in silence, nearly invisible, leaving behind a faint green trail in the air.
Its speed did not rival a bullet, but its trajectory was cunning, as though calculating Mydra 9-C's erratic movements on its own.
To be continued…