Chapter 4
The ashes she had once seen in that morning park, the ashes that scattered from the body of the young man who smiled before dying, the ashes that celebrated her cries in the midst of a burning reality.
Yet behind all that obedience and conviction, an anomaly began to creep slowly, like cracks in the unseen walls of the universe.
At first, Meshya did not think much of it—one or two irregularities could still be ignored.
But the pattern kept repeating.
Every time she accelerated the destruction of a universe deemed worthy of Singularity, suddenly two, three, even five other universes—ones she had previously judged as peaceful and harmless—would abruptly shift into being worthy of destruction.
"This makes no sense," Meshya muttered one day, standing atop the ruins of a universe she had just burned, her breath still uneven from the last battle.
"I just destroyed a nest of wasps, but suddenly five beehives have turned into wasps."
The multiplication of previously stable universes continued to increase—dozens of times over every time she completed her task—and the longer it went on, the more something felt wrong.
Not only that.
Every time Meshya stepped into a new universe—or even returned to one she had visited before—everyone within it instantly forgot her name and identity.
Not as the Observer Blessed by TMOG.
Not as a friend they had once spoken to.
"The Long-Awaited Destroyer of the World," whispered an old woman in the five-thousandth universe she visited, her eyes filled with fear and a strange admiration.
"That… that is your title."
Meshya felt something prickle at the back of her neck—a premonition she could not yet name.
The main conflict began to reveal itself when, in one of her countless journeys, Meshya encountered a terror plaguing a universe.
Not an ordinary terror.
There was a figure deliberately disrupting the balance, triggering bloodshed, manipulating key characters until that universe nearly collapsed before its time.
"Who are you?" Meshya shouted when she finally confronted the source of it all in the torn sky of that universe.
And when the figure turned around, Meshya's blood froze.
Her own face.
The same face—Abyssal Transparent hair, eyes that were once clear but now pitch black like hers—stared at her with a smile far too wide.
"You… you're me?" the original Meshya asked, her voice nearly breaking.
The other Meshya did not answer with words.
She only laughed—a laugh that was not ordinary, but one that leapt between delight and madness, making the hairs on Meshya's neck stand on end.
"Do you even realize what you're doing?!" the original Meshya snapped, her pitch-black eyes blazing.
"You're dragging innocent universes into Singularity!"
But the other Meshya only laughed louder, spinning through the air like a child who had just found a new toy.
"You… you really don't remember, do you?" the other Meshya finally said, her laughter fading into soft, eerie giggles.
Her eyes—identical to the original Meshya's, yet carrying a different glint, a kind of pain that had rotted into hatred—locked onto her.
"The brainwashing done by The Monitor of God on you is truly remarkable. I didn't expect him to make you loyal again like this."
The original Meshya fell silent.
Her chest felt pierced by thousands of cold needles.
"What do you mean?" she whispered, her voice trembling despite her effort to steady it.
The other Meshya stepped closer, slowly, like a predator savoring its prey's fear.
"The Monitor of God, Meshya. He is the reason why we—you and I, and all our other versions—never have counterparts in any universe. We are alone. There are no duplicates. No parallels. Because he erased them all."
She stopped right in front of the original Meshya, close enough to feel each other's breath.
"Except me. I survived."
The original Meshya stood frozen, her chest rising and falling as she restrained the storm of questions threatening to erupt from her throat.
"That… that memory of a young man in the park. About… Edward?" her voice nearly shattered as the name escaped— a name she had never spoken, yet felt so familiar on her tongue, like something she had whispered thousands of times in dreams she forced herself to forget.
"Does all of that have anything to do with what you're saying?"
But before the other Meshya could answer, the air around them suddenly hardened—heavy, as if the entire gravity of the universe had been dropped onto their shoulders in an instant.
Yellow light flooded the gray space, no longer soft as before, but blinding, piercing, filled with cold fury.
"You should not have said that," TMOG's voice echoed, and this time there was no crack within it—only absolute, terrifying purity.
It no longer took a vague human form; now it manifested as a violently spinning vortex of light, with sharpened rays like colossal surgical blades.
"You are disrupting the balance, Meshya. This other version of you is nothing but waste that I should have eliminated long ago."
Without warning, the vortex shot forward—not toward the original Meshya, but toward the other Meshya, who was still softly laughing despite her body trembling under the pressure.
The battle was brutal and brief.
Not because it was balanced, but because it was overwhelmingly one-sided.
TMOG was the extension of the Almighty—it could not be defeated by any being of any universe, even one named Meshya Anggraini Putri.
The yellow light sliced through the other Meshya's body like paper, leaving gaping wounds that released not blood, but fragments of narratives—pieces of stories she had once visited, once destroyed, once saved.
"Run!" the other Meshya shouted, her voice breaking through coughs that expelled ash.
"Take me with you! Don't let him… finish it here…"
The original Meshya did not think twice.
Her hand grabbed the arm of her other self—it felt cold, far too cold, like touching a corpse that was still moving—and she leapt.
Leaping across the boundaries of universes, piercing through narrative walls torn apart by TMOG's rampage behind them.
She did not know where she was going.
All she knew was that she had to get far away.
When she finally stopped, in a void even emptier than the gray space before—where time did not tick and air did not exist—the other Meshya lay in her lap, her body full of cracks like porcelain on the verge of shattering.
"You… you don't have much time," the original Meshya whispered, her hands trembling as she tried to press wounds she could not stop.
"Explain everything. Now."
The other Meshya smiled.
Not the mad smile from before, but a tired one, the smile of someone who had walked too long and was finally allowed to rest.
"Singularity… is not because a universe is born from the wrong root," she said, each word forced out with difficulty, accompanied by faint bursts of ash from the corners of her lips.
"Singularity is a method. A way for new universes to exist. To multiply themselves. By… annihilating everything in the old universe. Then transferring it into a new one."
Her pitch-black eyes looked into the original Meshya's, and for the first time, there was clarity within them—a clarity long lost, one that might have once belonged to an ordinary girl at Jaya Amanah University before everything burned.
"We… we were never observers, Meshya. We are its tools. The Monitor of God never blessed us. He only… used us."
To be continued…