Chapter 145
The movement meant nothing—was not threatening, did not contain power or magic or technology that could harm—just a hand brushing through the air as if shooing something away, and for a moment, Ashita who still stood with her sword in hand, Tegar who still sat on the ground with his back against the stone, and Nirma who still stood with a letter at her waist and a box in her pocket, all thought that perhaps it was merely a gesture, merely a habit, merely a reflex with no meaning beyond moving a hand that had remained still for too long.
But then the air around them changed, changed in a way that could not be explained by words that only understood surfaces, changed in a way that made Nirma feel something crawling from the tips of her hair to the ends of her toes, something like the realization that all this time she had been standing in the middle of something she had never seen—that throughout this conversation, that since the battle with the five-headed Abnormal ended, that perhaps since the very first moment she opened that letter and light filled the horizon, something had been surrounding them, something silent and waiting and unmoving because it did not need to move.
And when Arya's hand movement ended, when his left palm stopped in the air as if holding something unseen, the veil that had long covered the reality around Heraclea Cybistra was lifted—lifted like a curtain drawn from a stage that had waited too long to be revealed, lifted like an illusion never meant to last forever.
And what was revealed behind that veil made Nirma's breath catch in her throat, made the heart that had been beating in a rhythm she controlled with unwavering discipline suddenly forget how to function, made her single eye—her left eye, the window through which she had seen everything she hated, everything she fought for—open wide with something she had never expected to witness in this place, at this time, after everything she had been through.
Dozens of weapons—no, more than dozens, perhaps hundreds, or perhaps a number she could no longer count because she stopped trying after forty—surrounded them in a circle no more than fifty meters away, yet it felt like five centimeters, surrounding them with muzzles all pointed at the same point: the point where she stood, where Arya stood, where the dimensional cage containing the five-headed Abnormal was still held in Arya's other hand.
Those weapons came from different years, different centuries, from civilizations that did not even share the same name across languages—there were rifles from the 20th century with wooden stocks cracked by age, energy weapons from the 44th century with light still pulsing in steady rhythm, crossbows from the medieval era with bolts coated in something she did not want to know, and objects she could not even identify, objects that might have come from futures she had never visited, from timelines she had never imagined, from civilizations whose technology and purpose were utterly foreign even to someone who had seen nearly everything a human living between time could witness.
And the distance—though still dozens of meters, though there was still space to breathe, though there was still time to think—felt nonexistent, felt as though those muzzles were already pressed against her temple, her chest, her back, every part of her body that could be pierced by bullets or lasers or arrows or things that had no name in any language she knew.
BAAAM!!
Four bullets from a pistol dated 1540 AD did not travel with the speed of modern firearms, nor did they leave trails of light like the energy weapons of centuries she had yet to visit, yet each projectile flew with a precision that did not require speed—with an accuracy born from hands that had wielded too many weapons across too many eras to still need time to aim.
The first bullet tore through the air right beside Tegar's left ear, the second split the dust still drifting between them, the third and fourth struck the stone that a second ago had supported his back, the sound shattering the silence like a hammer crashing against dry earth, and within the cloud of dust that burst from the impact, within the chaos created by four trigger pulls he had never needed to think twice about, Nirma had already moved—not forward, not to attack, but toward something she had planned from the very first second she saw the ring of weapons surrounding them, from the very first second she realized that there was no escape from this place except by doing something no one would ever expect.
Arya did not wait for a signal, nor did he glance back to ensure that Nirma was behind him or beside him or anywhere within reach, because for years now—since the first moment he chose to abandon everything he had built within the Temporal Cross-Police—he and Nirma had trained in a language that required no words, in a rhythm that needed no counting, in a synchronization that only two people who had witnessed too much death together could possess, without needing confirmation that the other would move at the exact right moment.
His body launched into the air in a flip he had never practiced in any gym or shooting range, a flip born from instinct—that in the middle of a circle of a hundred weapons aimed at his head, the only way not to die was to never remain in the same place for more than a fraction of a second.
In the air, between the gray sky and the ground that was beginning to fill with bullets coming from all directions, his left hand moved to his waist—to the place he had hidden beneath the folds of his worn jacket, to something he had never shown anyone, not even Nirma—and when his fingers touched something cold, something made of metal that did not rust despite an age he could not measure, something shaped like a door handle yet felt like a grip that never let go, he knew that this moment—the moment his body still hung in the air while a hundred bullets began to warm the space around him—was the right one.
He threw it—threw the door handle downward, to the ground right between himself and Nirma, threw it with a force neither too strong nor too weak, threw it with an accuracy that made it spin in the air along a perfect axis, spinning like something inscribing the final circle of a spell never taught in any exorcism school.
And when that door handle touched the ground, when the cold metal met the dust of Heraclea Cybistra still warm from the battle that had just ended, something happened to the surface beneath their feet—something that could not be explained by the physics he knew, something like the ground suddenly becoming water, like water suddenly becoming a door, like a door suddenly opening into a place he had never visited yet had always known existed.
To be continued…