Chapter 139
Its blade curved beautifully—yet thick, heavy, lethal—and as Ashita raised it above her head, the sunlight struggling to pierce through the mist of Heraclea Cybistra reflected upon its surface, creating a flash that made the five-headed Abnormal blink, something it had never done since the battle began.
With a single motion born from thousands of hours of training, from muscles forged never to hesitate, Ashita struck.
Her first target was the leg—not to kill, not to cripple, but to sever, to destroy, to make the creature that had stood arrogantly amidst destruction feel what it meant to lose its footing.
While Ashita focused on her first downward strike, Tegar chose a different approach—bolder, crazier, more like himself.
He no longer relied on the remnants of anti-gravity technology, no longer floated gracefully like Ashita, but instead deactivated everything that made his body light and let gravity do its work.
He fell—not uncontrollably, but with calculation, with purpose, with legs already prepared to step onto something.
And when his body reached the precise height, he stepped onto the outer skin of the Abnormal's left arm, using the creature's limb as footing, as a stepping stone, as a way to reach a higher position without flying.
His feet, clad in wooden sandals, landed with precision, and in an instant he was already running—running along the wrinkled, undulating arm of the creature, moving with a speed only possessed by someone who had never feared falling, never feared death, never feared anything because he had witnessed horrors far greater than this five-headed being.
Tegar ran past the elbow, past the upper arm, approaching the left shoulder, and when he reached exactly where he intended, something emerged from behind his back—something he had never revealed before, something older than all the weapons he had carried, older than the bazooka from 4444 AD, older than the 42nd-century glasses, perhaps even older than civilizations that knew writing.
A Mesopotamian mace—a weapon that existed around 3000 BCE, used by warriors in the land between two rivers, forged from stone, wood, and metal shaped by hands that knew no machines.
Tegar grasped it with his left hand, and as his fingers touched its handle, he felt something he had never experienced when holding his bazooka or advanced glasses—he felt the weight of history, the burden of thousands of years, the echoes of every battle ever fought in Mesopotamia, every drop of blood spilled, every prayer uttered by warriors before stepping onto the battlefield.
The mace held no technology, no laser, no targeting system—only weight, only momentum, only the conviction that it had been used to crush enemies' skulls since before Christ was born, since before Muhammad received revelation, since before the world's great religions even had names.
The sky above Heraclea Cybistra was no longer a sky.
It transformed into something else—something resembling a vast dome made of sound, rage, and hatred that the five-headed creature had held within itself for thousands of years.
The dust that once drifted aimlessly now moved in structured patterns, following a rhythm created by the five mouths that began opening one by one, and Nirma, still hovering above with the exorcism book in Arya's grasp, felt something she had never experienced in all her battles—a sensation like being inside a room whose walls were closing in, drawing nearer, crushing anything that dared to oppose its existence.
The creature's five heads slowly lifted—not in unison, each with its own rhythm, as if they were five singers who had trained for centuries to achieve perfect harmony—and when those five pairs of emotionless eyes began to gaze, Nirma felt a weight she could not explain, a weight not from gravity or air pressure, but from something deeper, older, more personal.
Four pairs of eyes looked in four directions at once—north, east, south, west—as if ensuring all of Heraclea Cybistra lay within its grasp, while the fifth pair, the central one, the calmest, the most unmoving, stared directly at Nirma in a way that made her feel this creature had known her longer than she realized, that something in her past, in a future yet to occur, in timelines she had never visited, connected her to it.
Then the five mouths opened, and what emerged was not one liturgy as before, not two liturgies that had burned future technology to ash, but three liturgies at once—three voices flowing simultaneously from five heads, three currents of hatred merging into a horrifying harmony.
The first voice was the earliest liturgy, one that distorted prayers and praises to Jesus Christ—but now it no longer sounded like a creeping whisper at the edge of awareness, but like a choir echoing within a cathedral whose walls were built from the bones of those who once believed.
Its tone was gentle—gentle like a caress, gentle like a mother's hand brushing her child's hair before sleep—yet every word was the inversion of everything ever taught in the scriptures believed by billions.
Prayers that should have been praises turned into mockery, into insults, into something no longer recognizable as prayer but as curses woven in the most beautiful language, and Nirma, hearing it, felt something within her chest being pulled—drawn outward, drawn into a vortex of sound that never ceased.
Meanwhile, the second voice slipped into the gaps of the first—not replacing it, not overpowering it, but merging seamlessly with its rhythm.
The second voice was a liturgy she had heard before—a liturgy that cursed every holy scripture ever known on Earth, from the Bible to the Qur'an, from the Vedas to the Tripitaka, from the Torah to revelations unknown to modern humanity living in towering cities, with technology that made them forget something older existed beyond all they created.
But the most terrifying—what sent a chill from the tips of Nirma's hair to the ends of her feet—was the third voice.
The third voice did not distort, did not curse—it did something far more vile, more absolute, more lethal than mere mockery.
The third voice erased.
Every word spoken by the creature no longer spoke of scripture, no longer of revelation, no longer of God or religion or belief—but of nothingness, of the concept that everything once considered sacred had never existed, that all truths humanity clung to were illusions created to shield themselves from a greater darkness, that there was no scripture, no revelation, no hand that wrote, no voice that spoke—only eternal emptiness, an emptiness that existed before the universe was born, and would remain long after the universe had died.
To be continued…