Chapter 15
Nirmala fell silent for a moment, feeling her own words echo through the timeless void.
She knew that what she was about to say might sound arrogant to some.
Yet deep within her heart, she understood it as a truth she had long kept to herself, nurtured like a small flame amid a storm of doubt.
"And now," she whispered, her lips barely moving, "now it is my turn."
She slowly opened her eyes, looking at Arya who still stood asleep in his strange slumber, then shifted her gaze toward an indistinct point in the distance—toward where the layers of time continued to breathe, where thousands of years were separated by a single millimeter, where all reality lay spread out like fragile sheets that could be torn apart by one wrong motion.
"He completed the six arcs of Flo Viva Mythology. He returned us all to the real world.
But that real world has now merged with Abnormality—the work he also wrote."
Within the silent space untouched by time, Nirmala once again felt the sensation of the eighteenth-century pistol's trigger beneath her index finger.
Not an advanced temporal weapon, not high technology from the future, but an old fragment of metal and wood she had stolen from a museum display in the year 2047 before returning to the past.
She smiled bitterly at the absurdity of that moment.
A time warden using an antique pistol to shoot a being born from fragments of literature made real.
Five shots.
Directly into both eyes of Subject Mydra 9-C.
And the man—the creature—fell not because he died, but because he became ensnared within the energy network she and Arya had secretly set around the meeting site.
"Arya," Nirmala whispered, her voice trembling with memory still fresh, "do you remember how he looked at us? How his eyes—those two pitch-black orbs—did not stare at us with hatred, but with relief?"
She shook her head slowly, still unable to fully believe what they had done hours ago—or centuries ago, depending on which perspective one used to measure time.
"He knew. He knew we were not from the Temporal Cross-Police. He knew we did not come to display him as a trophy, but to stop him before he fulfilled what was already written in the script of his fate."
Nirmala drew a long breath, feeling the layers of time around her tremble with the emotion that suddenly flooded her chest.
She was not someone who angered easily, not someone who allowed rage to cloud her judgment.
Yet whenever she thought about the Temporal Cross-Police—about that grand institution claiming to safeguard historical order—something within her simmered.
Not a raging inferno that consumed everything, but a quiet ember that refused to die—born from witnessing incompetence, from seeing how an organization of such scale repeatedly created new chaos with hands too confident in their own capability.
"And they will do it again," she muttered, her voice suddenly sharp in the silent space.
"If we do not intervene, they will capture him. They will bring him to headquarters beyond the timeline, display him as proof of their superiority, open his cell daily for high-ranking officials who wish to feel secure against abnormal threats."
Nirmala clenched her fists, her nails nearly piercing the temporal gloves she wore.
"And when the poison finally works—when the black-eyed man accomplishes what he has planned since escaping from 2005—they will not realize what has happened until it is too late."
Behind her closed eyelids, Nirmala saw again the visions she had studied in secret alternative history records.
Not official history, not the version approved by the Temporal Cross-Police, but severed branches of time—lines of reality that split and died before they could fully grow.
She saw arrogant Temporal Cross-Police units in their advanced uniforms, standing around a restrained Subject Mydra 9-C, laughing and joking about how simple the mission had been.
She saw how the poison worked—not as liquid or gas, but as something creeping through the air they breathed, through the water they drank, through the reflection of light in one another's helmet visors.
She saw them collapse one by one within seconds, their still-warm bodies becoming the source of an unstoppable spread.
"Ten years," Nirmala whispered, her voice nearly a hiss of wind.
"The disease will spread for ten full years. Through the air we breathe together.
Through the water we drink from the same sources.
Through the reflection of light in our windows, in passing car mirrors, in puddles left after rain."
She imagined Jakarta in the 1950s, a city only a few years independent, suddenly struck by something no medical science could explain.
She imagined hospitals overflowing with patients whose eyes darkened before they exhaled their final breath.
She imagined mothers cradling feverish children, unaware that the sickness came from the future—from the corpses of temporal officers too arrogant to admit their own inadequacy.
"I will not allow that to happen," Nirmala said, and for the first time since she began speaking in this silent space, her voice was no longer a whisper.
She spoke loudly, firmly, with conviction filling every chamber of her chest.
In the timeless silence, Nirmala contemplated the irony long settled at the base of her thoughts.
The Temporal Cross-Police—an enormous organization with military outposts in every nation recognized or unrecognized by the world—was born not from brilliance in predicting the future, not from visionary founders, but from an absence.
The Society of Abnormal Secret did not exist.
Sinta Melina Ningsih did not exist.
The real world that had merged with the novel Abnormality had somehow lost its protagonist, lost the special unit meant to stand at the forefront against incomprehensible absurd life.
And from that void the Temporal Cross-Police grew, like wild vines creeping across the ruins of a building never finished.
"You know, Arya," Nirmala murmured, her eyes still closed though her thoughts churned on, "sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Sinta Melina Ningsih and SAS had been present in this world from the beginning.
Perhaps we would never have known the Temporal Cross-Police.
Perhaps the duty of guarding order against abnormal incursions would have been theirs, not the domain of the grand institution now hunting us."
She smiled bitterly, imagining an alternate reality in which she and Arya might have worked alongside Sinta, rather than becoming fugitives for attempting to complete a task that should have already been handled.
"But they are not here. They vanished somewhere unknown, leaving this world with a gaping void that had to be filled by anyone willing—or forced—to step in."
Nirmala imagined how the Temporal Cross-Police built their empire from that emptiness.
At first, perhaps only a small group realizing that the abnormal did not merely disturb the balance of reality, but had begun to travel through time itself, disrupting history, leaving trails of chaos in every era they visited.
Then the organization grew—recruiting, training, arming.
Military posts emerged like mushrooms after rain—in the hearts of great cities, in untouched wilderness, in nations recognized by the United Nations and in territories existing only on secret maps.
To be continued…