Chapter 173
"Five apostles have fallen unconscious. Seven apostles have disappeared. Five companions of the Messenger of Allah have vanished—without a trace, without news, without any certainty as to whether they are still alive or have already become flesh floating in a pool of blood three stories deep."
And when Nirma was almost losing her ability to feel shock—because one piece of news after another had fallen like a hammer that never stopped striking—Arya's wristwatch vibrated with a pattern different from before.
It was not an alarm, nor a voice transmission, but a light that appeared on its screen, a golden glow moving like water flowing across glass, forming letter after letter in two scripts that could never be mistaken by anyone who had spent time on two different sides of the world.
"This isn't a report from an agent," Arya said, his voice suddenly becoming colder than the desert air at night. "It's a message. Addressed to us. To Nirma and me—and to you, Ashita and Tegar. As if they knew exactly that we would be here, at this very moment, beneath the same palm tree, receiving one grim report after another while the pressure in our chests keeps growing heavier."
Hearing that, Ashita stepped closer, her eyes fixed on the screen on Arya's wrist with an expression she had never shown during duty.
It was not professional curiosity, but fear she could barely conceal—a fear like that of a child seeing a storm up close for the very first time and realizing that no shelter is strong enough to withstand it.
"Arabic," she whispered as she read line after line. "The Hijazi dialect. And beside it... Aramaic. The Judean dialect, or perhaps Palestinian—I can't tell for certain, but it's clearly the same language used in the land where Jesus was born, a language on the brink of extinction, known only to a handful of people who have devoted their lives to studying ancient manuscripts untouched by modern hands."
"We will no longer hide."
Tegar read the translation from the screen on his own wristwatch—because the same message had arrived on his device as well, and perhaps on the watches of every agent still breathing in this era, as though the Great Abnormals wanted everyone to hear their voices at the same moment, wanted everyone to know that they no longer cared about secrecy or disguise.
"We, the Great Abnormals who have witnessed ten million apocalypses, who have served ten million masters, who have mutilated ten million bodies in the name of powers we never asked for—we will do whatever it takes to bring back our leader. Not because we love her. Not because we are devoted to her. But because without her, we are nothing more than a collection of monsters with nowhere to go, and it is better to be a monster with a purpose than a god with no reason to keep living."
Hearing those words, Nirma felt the bandage over her right eye throb so violently that she had to close her left eye as well, and within that darkness she saw faces.
Not human faces, not demonic faces, but exhausted faces—exhausted like herself, exhausted like Arya, exhausted like every person who had ever been forced to become something they had never chosen to be.
"Sinta Melina Ningsih," she whispered, and the moment the name left her lips, the wind blowing through the palm fronds turned into a chilling cold that pierced straight to the bone, as though nature itself acknowledged that the name carried a weight that could not be ignored by anyone—not even those who had never read a novel written by Theo Vkytor, not even those who had never believed that the world could merge with a story that existed only inside someone's mind.
"They want to bring her back. Not because they miss her—although perhaps some of them do. But because without Sinta, they have no reason to keep moving forward. And a creature with no reason to move, Arya, is the most dangerous kind of creature, because it fears neither death, nor destruction, nor anything else except the silence that will greet it if it stops."
Ashita, standing beside Tegar with hands that were still trembling despite her attempts to hide them within the folds of her robe, suddenly let out a long breath—a breath that escaped her chest like a wind carrying news from a battlefield too close to ignore yet too far away to see.
"They're no longer hiding," she said, her voice no longer flat like that of an agent of the Temporal Cross-Police, no longer warm as it was when speaking to her grandfather, but empty—empty like a room that had just been abandoned by all hope, leaving behind nothing but dust that no longer knew where to go.
"This message is a declaration of war. Not a war between Abnormals and humans, not a war between the Temporal Cross-Police and fugitives, but a war between those who want this world to keep turning despite its imperfections and those willing to destroy everything just to bring back a single person who isn't even sure she wants to return."
Tegar, standing beside her, gripped his own wrist.
Not to calm himself, but to remind himself that he was still whole, that he could still feel pressure, that he was still alive even though the world around him felt as though it could collapse at any moment.
"They'll do anything," Tegar repeated, his voice hoarse like sandpaper scraping against dry wood. Yet beneath that raspiness lay something deeper—something that could perhaps be called resignation, or perhaps a fear that had been buried for so long that it had transformed into something without a name in any language.
"And 'anything' in the dictionary of the Great Abnormals, Nirma, doesn't just mean kidnapping apostles or making companions disappear. 'Anything' means they will slaughter anyone who stands in their way. 'Anything' means they will shatter the very foundations of time itself if necessary. 'Anything' means nothing is sacred, nothing is taboo, nothing is too precious to sacrifice—because for beings who have lived through ten million apocalypses, nothing is truly valuable except one thing: a reason to keep living, even if that reason is the most selfish, blind, and irrational reason imaginable."
And when Ashita finished reading the final portion of the message—about how the Great Abnormals had never intended to spill blood, had never intended to wound souls, and only wished to plant a single name deep within the minds of those historians, like a farmer sowing seeds into soil that had never asked to be fertile—Nirma felt something strange in her chest.
It was not resentment, nor explosive anger as she should have felt upon hearing that the twelve disciples of Jesus and the companions of the Messenger of Allah had become targets of mental manipulation, but something more complicated, something like watching a child cry not out of anger but exhaustion, or hearing an elderly person apologize not because they were guilty but because they no longer knew what else to do.
To be continued…