Chapter 159
"Apathy—Apathy, I can't—"
Apathy's voice cut off midway, replaced by the deliberate impact of his head against the floor—a desperate attempt to replace a dizziness with no direction with a pain that at least had a source.
Shaqar wanted to say something, wanted to grab the man by the shoulders and stop him, but his hands refused to obey his mind. They moved according to a nonexistent rotation, reaching for something that was not there.
And amid the chaos, he heard Makakushi shouting from a place he could not pinpoint, his voice breaking at the edges like cracked glass that had not yet fallen apart.
"DON'T LET GO OF YOUR THOUGHTS—THEY'RE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING INSIDE YOUR HEADS—DON'T—"
But before the sentence could be finished, Makakushi's own voice turned into a long groan, drowned out by the sound of his body striking the floor knee-first.
After that, no one spoke.
No one screamed.
There were only eighty-seven bodies rolling, vomiting, and trembling beneath the shadows of more than a hundred entities who still stood with their eyes closed, waiting for something they had not yet decided to find.
Five seconds—no more, no less.
A pause too short to be called an opportunity, yet too long not to be felt as torture.
Then the Angels above began to move with a synchronization that was no longer surprising, yet somehow devastating in a new way every time it happened.
It was not their bodies that moved.
Not their wings.
It was their hands, rising in a harmony that no choreography born from practice could ever imitate.
And from within the folds of robes that never seemed to wrinkle, they drew out books that, to the Satanists, symbolized everything wrong with the world before they were born.
Pale leather-bound volumes whose pages were not white but completely transparent, like glass too thin to bear the words written upon it.
Then, within the silence that still draped the room like an unfinished shroud, Shaqar heard Apathy's voice beside him become something that was no longer a whimper.
It sounded more like the groan of someone watching his home burn from afar, knowing there was nothing left to save.
"The Book... they brought the Holy Book..." Agatha whispered.
Her voice was no longer sharp, no longer filled with anger, but flat in a way that was far more terrifying than any scream.
Beside her, Zhulumat felt the knee pressing against the floor begin to tremble.
Not from weakness.
But because his entire body was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that what came next would leave no room for resistance.
Only room for survival.
And even that might be asking too much.
Then they began to read.
The hum did not begin as a sound.
It began as something crawling beneath the skin, a vibration not perceived by the ears but translated directly by the bones of the skull into a frequency nature had never taught any nervous system to endure.
Zhulumat felt something warm flowing from his nostrils before realizing he was bleeding.
Yet the pain that should have accompanied it never came.
What arrived instead was a void behind his eyes, a pressure with no location that continued to expand like a balloon being inflated too quickly, one that no one dared to puncture.
Around him, the hum began filling the room not with sound, but with presence.
A choir without a melody, yet one that possessed weight.
And with every passing second, that weight increased, as though something were building a tower from their bodies—bodies that could no longer distinguish the floor from the ceiling.
"C-COVER YOUR EARS!" Onigakure screamed.
His voice no longer sounded human.
It resembled the shriek of metal being forced to bear a load that would inevitably crush it.
He pressed his palms against his ears with such force that the joints in his wrists cracked like branches on the verge of snapping.
But the hum did not come through the ears.
It came through everything.
Through open pores.
Through closed eyes.
Through ribs still trying to protect a heart that now beat to a rhythm its own body had never requested.
Makakushi, who only a second earlier had been trying to invoke names that should have served as shields, now fell to his knees.
Both hands clutched his own hair, pulling it left and right in movements no longer under his control.
And from his wide-open mouth came not words, but only air forced outward by something squeezing his chest from within.
Not a single one of the eighty-seven could still be called soldiers.
They were a collection of bodies writhing across the floor, biting their lips until they bled, smashing their foreheads against cracked marble in the hope that real pain would overpower pain without a source.
Yet none of it worked.
Because the hum did not fight back.
It did not attack.
It simply existed in a way that made everything within them feel like an unwanted guest.
Like something that should never have occupied the same space as a holiness that required no violence to destroy.
Shaqar felt blood flowing from both nostrils, from the corners of his mouth, and from beneath his fingernails where they scraped against the floor as he tried to crawl toward a destination that did not exist.
Beside him, Apathy had stopped moving.
Not unconscious.
Frozen.
His eyes were wide open, his pupils reduced to tiny black dots in a sea of white that no longer blinked.
And when Shaqar reached out to grab his shoulder, he felt Apathy's body vibrating at exactly the same frequency as the hum filling the room.
As though something inside him were being tuned to become part of a choir he had never wanted to join.
"Apathy—Apathy, look at me—"
Shaqar's voice emerged in a tone he had never used before.
A tone caught somewhere between a command and a plea.
But Apathy did not respond.
He did not blink.
He did not breathe the way he should have.
And within that silence, Shaqar's memories were dragged backward.
Back to the days when he still stood as an ordinary member of Team Xirkushkartum, watching one comrade after another fall across dozens of missions that had never truly given him time to grieve.
Then, out of every death he had ever witnessed, out of every face he had ever left behind, none had made him feel this helpless.
For the first time, even after all of it, Shaqar did not know what to do except continue calling the name that had now sunk into a silence no one could reach anymore.
Onigakure felt the fingers clutching his own hair begin to go numb.
Yet he could not let go.
Because letting go meant allowing his hands to fall to his sides.
And allowing his ears—which now leaked thin droplets of pale blood—to remain exposed to the hum.
A hum that seeped through even the tightest pressure of his palms, like water finding cracks in a dock that had grown far too old.
To be continued…