Chapter 118
Amid the expanding encirclement of light, the Banner of Zhulumat stood as the last remaining bastion still radiating resistance.
Their ritual torches, which had previously flickered unstably, now burned with a forced intensity, pulsing like hearts struggling against poison coursing through their veins.
The exorcism devices in their hands emitted thicker smoke than before, their metal surfaces heating to the point of nearly blistering the palms that gripped them, yet not a single one of the Satanic elites dared to let go.
They were the keepers of dark tradition, the guardians of the black flame that had to keep burning even as the storm of sanctity raged around them.
Zhulumat Katamtum himself, the leader who stood like a rock at the center of the vortex, felt a burden different from the others.
Not the physical strain of maintaining the ritual, but the weight of witnessing his ancestral legacy, the entire ecosystem of death built over centuries, now being uprooted by a force he could not oppose with pride alone.
Every breath he drew carried air increasingly thin with darkness and richer with particles of light that felt like shards of glass in his lungs.
The forces around them gradually became aware of a change deeper than mere physical surroundings.
Within each of them, in the most hidden corners of their consciousness that had long been filled with doctrines of hatred toward light, an unfamiliar silence began to grow.
Not a silence born of the absence of sound, but a silence born from the death of something that had once driven the core of their existence.
"To all members of the Anti-Tremor Line: stand guard around this area. Remain firm, stay vigilant, and do not take a single step from your position until I myself grant permission. And to the captains of Team Xirkushkartum within the Orbit Severance Line, and to you, the Satanic Elites present within the Banner of Zhulumat... close ranks immediately. We will hold an emergency council, now."
Amid the silence that enveloped the troops after their withdrawal from the front line, Zhulumat Katamtum stood motionless.
His eyes, accustomed to piercing through layers of reality, were no longer fixed on the chaos still burning at the border, but on something subtler, something far more peculiar.
His brows slowly furrowed, carving deep lines across his forehead, a canvas that had long held thousands of strategies and tactics.
A creeping irritation began to rise within his chest, not from blind anger, but from disbelief at what his meticulous observation had just uncovered.
The Holy Beings and the Angels who had relentlessly bombarded them with divine wrath, whose light had shattered the sky into thousands of lethal fragments, were not present at every point.
There were certain places left empty, left untouched for several minutes that felt like eternity.
Not because those sacred beings had moved or shifted, but because from the very beginning, since the first strike was launched, they had never occupied those gaps.
Like a painting that deliberately leaves portions of its canvas blank, like an orchestra that preserves silence between its notes.
Zhulumat spent no small amount of time confirming, testing and retesting the sharpness of his perception, and every passing second only reinforced a single, unsettling truth.
That the dwellers of the heavens, despite all their power and dominion, possessed blind spots.
And when that certainty solidified into an unshakable conviction, when the strange distribution pattern had been clearly mapped within his mind, Zhulumat Katamtum finally moved from his statue-like stillness.
He turned, not in haste, but with a calm that was far more intimidating than any shout or harsh command.
His dark gaze swept across the ranks of soldiers still standing on guard, still locked in the bitter rhythm of endurance since the order to retreat ten steps had been issued.
His voice emerged without the need to rise, without adding intensity to a reality already strained.
A brief instruction to the Anti-Tremor Line, that every individual in that formation was to stand guard around the perimeter, eyes open, ears alert, and feet forbidden from moving even an inch without permission.
They were the fence, the wall that must stand unmoving—let the wind, the light, and every incoming threat attempt to break them, but not a single step would be taken forward or back until the next command arrived.
Meanwhile, on the other side, a different call was directed to those within the higher circle.
The captains of Team Xirkushkartum within the Orbit Severance Line, the figures who had long driven the machinery of the dark war, were summoned to gather.
So too were the Satanic Elites within the Banner of Zhulumat, the keepers of tradition, the guardians of the black flame who had just held the ritual amid the rain of light.
They all moved without sound, without question, leaving their respective positions to assemble around their leader.
An emergency council at a moment like this, on ground still warm from the touch of sanctity, beneath a sky that still held the threat of the next descending strike, could mean only one thing.
That Zhulumat had discovered something, and that something would likely alter the course of the battle, or at the very least offer a fragment of hope within the despair that had long gnawed at them.
"The time has come. We will all advance."
The space around them, hastily turned into a gathering ground, was nothing more than an irregular circle formed by bodies sitting and standing in suffocating silence.
The captains of Team Xirkushkartum from the Orbit Severance Line sat cross-legged upon the ground that still retained the lingering heat of holy strikes, their heads lowered over sheets of paper spread across their laps or thighs.
Small pens moved rapidly, sketching line after line, forming rough drafts of the border's topography, the guard patterns of the Holy Beings they had observed, and the blind spots that might be exploited for infiltration.
Those sheets were filled with markings that held meaning only to their creators.
Arrows indicating attack directions, circles marking concentrations of light forces, dashed lines representing hypothetical routes toward the heart of the Sanctified City of Thalyssra.
No one spoke; there was only the soft scratching of pen tips against paper and the occasional frustrated exhale when a sketch had to be corrected or completely discarded for no longer aligning with the reality they observed from afar.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the circle, the Satanic Elites within the Banner of Zhulumat formed a separate cluster.
They did not draw on paper, but sat with eyes closed or half-open, their lips moving in inaudible whispers, chanting layered and complex probability incantations.
Their fingers occasionally danced through the air, leaving trails of dark light that vanished instantly upon forming, like smoke scattered by the wind.
Among them, several unfurled small scrolls of skin inscribed with ancient characters—scripts that, when read correctly, could open new possibilities within reality, or at the very least grant them a slight advantage in predicting the movements of the Holy Beings and Angels that haunted them.
These incantations were not simple, not something that could be uttered in a single breath or two.
They required total concentration, precise calculation, and the belief that probability was an ocean they could navigate, even if its tides were stirred by divine hands.
To be continued…