Chapter 138
With an unhurried motion, Ashita turned toward Tegar, the man clad in jarik who had been standing silently beside her, his glasses now useless and the bazooka long discarded.
"Tegar," she called, her tone suddenly shifting—more formal, more resolute, like a commander issuing orders on the battlefield, "the rivalry between Nirma and me will be put on hold. This time, I expect your participation in our impromptu cooperation, between our team and theirs."
Tegar did not question, did not ask for clarification, did not show the slightest hesitation.
He simply nodded—a short nod, yet full of meaning, a nod that conveyed he fully understood what the young commander in her twenties intended, that he was ready to momentarily set aside differences in duty and loyalty, that he was ready to stand alongside Arya and Nirma, whom he had long regarded as rivals in this race, because before a being capable of burning future technology with nothing but a song, differences were a luxury no one could afford.
While Ashita and Tegar began preparing something with movements whose purpose could not yet be discerned, Nirma moved her right hand toward Arya.
Not a weapon, not a piece of advanced technology, but a book—a book with a thick cover worn along the edges, with pages that seemed frequently opened and closed, with paper beginning to yellow with age, even though the book itself came from a future not too distant from their present time.
Arya caught it with both hands just before it could fall from the height still separating them from the Muddy Land below, and the moment it rested in his grasp, he felt an unusual weight—one that came not only from paper and ink, but from something denser, heavier, as if the entire history of prayers and curses in the world had been compressed between its covers.
"What is this?" Arya asked, his eyes shifting from the book to Nirma's face, searching for clues, for explanations, trying to understand whether Ashita's proposed cooperation had anything to do with the object now in his hands.
Nirma nodded once, firmly—no hesitation in her gaze—and began to speak in a flat yet weighty voice, as if reciting something she had memorized long ago.
"That book is a compilation of every exorcism from all religions and beliefs throughout history, including Islam and Christianity, including those no longer practiced by anyone, including those followed by a single family in a corner of the world never recorded on any map."
After explaining that to Arya, Nirma turned her gaze forward, toward where the five-headed Abnormal still stood motionless below, as if waiting, as if observing, as if eager to see what these four now unarmed agents would do.
Her hand moved to her waist, retrieving a sheet of paper from within the folds of her clothing—a document unlike an ordinary letter, but something more formal, more official, like those carried by state envoys delivering messages from one ruler to another.
She opened it—though she did not need to read it, for she had already memorized its contents—and for the first time since the battle began, Nirma spoke not with command nor threat, but with prayer, with supplication, with the tone of one who believes that beyond all weapons and technology, there exists something older, stronger, eternal.
She uttered a liturgy—but unlike the Abnormal's liturgy, this one did not curse, did not mock, but was a collection of prayers to every Supreme Being, to every God ever named by humanity, to everything ever worshipped in every belief and religion that had risen and faded upon this earth.
Nirma delivered them one by one, unhurried, unforced, as if offering the most precious thing she possessed, and when she reached ninety-nine percent of all the prayers she had gathered, when her voice began to grow hoarse from speaking too long, Arya took over.
Arya spoke in a different voice—not soft as when he had received the book, but sharp, piercing, filled with satire and insult woven with strange elegance.
He fused his words with prayers from religions and beliefs across the world, creating something that had never existed in any holy scripture—something born from the need to fight hatred with the same weapon, to counter liturgy with liturgy, to confront a being that mocked the divine with prayers intertwined with insults more intelligent, more refined, more lethal.
Nirma listened as Arya spoke, listening to how his words became not only a response to the Abnormal's liturgy, but also a kind of incantation rebuilding something that had been destroyed, something that had been burned, something they perhaps never realized they possessed.
Ashita chose to descend.
Her body, still hovering with remnants of anti-gravity technology not yet fully extinguished, began to move slowly downward, toward where the five-headed Abnormal stood with its necks swaying gently, toward where its feet were planted in the ground still bearing traces of storms and burning.
She no longer had advanced weaponry, no longer had the M20 Browning capable of firing faster than light—what she had now was only her body, only the training she had undergone for years, only the belief that in a world where technology could be burned by liturgy, there existed something older, more primitive, more deadly that no fire could ever consume.
The distance closed—one meter, half a meter—until she could clearly see how the creature's skin wrinkled around its legs and calves, how its texture was neither human nor animal, but something that had once lived in an age when the world was still young and the boundaries between the sacred and the cursed had not yet been formed.
And when only inches remained, Ashita's right hand moved behind her back, retrieving something that had been tucked within the batik cloth wrapping her body—something untouched by the burning because it had never been activated, something older than all the technology she carried, older than the Linear Time Police itself, older than civilizations that had ever known electricity, machines, or firearms.
The katana emerged from the folds of cloth with a soft hiss—but not an ordinary katana, not a blade with a single edge like those used by samurai in feudal Japan.
The sword now gripped in Ashita's hand was something else—something born from the fusion of two traditions, between the sharpness of a katana that could slice through air and the strength of a European sword capable of shattering bone.
To be continued…