Chapter 166
And when those words left her mouth, Agatha felt the tightness in her chest suddenly loosen—not from relief, but from exhaustion. The exhaustion of holding back something that had long wanted to escape. She drew a breath that felt like the first genuine breath she had taken in the past hour, as though she had only just remembered that air existed to be inhaled, not held until her lungs screamed for mercy.
Before Zhulumat's first step could touch the cracked marble, before the eighty-seven bodies sprawled across the floor could move a single muscle to obey their commander's order to retreat, Maharaja Krata released something from within himself that no one had ever known existed—not even the Angels who had stood beside his throne for thousands of years.
The blast did not come from his mouth. It did not come from his palms. It did not emerge from any opening in his perfect and terrifying body.
It came from his very existence itself, from the simple fact that Maharaja Krata was present in that room. And for the first time since he had taken his seat upon the throne of unextinguished light, he chose to let his existence speak louder than the silence he had worn like a cloak.
And when the blast struck the air, it did not travel like ordinary sound that could be blocked by walls, prayers, or flesh—it spread like a decision, like a law of physics that had just been revoked and replaced by another law never meant to be understood by beings born from a womb.
"What—WHAT IS THAT?!" Shaqar screamed, his voice immediately swallowed by the vibration that made his eardrums feel like paper being crushed in the hands of a giant. Beside him, Apathy felt not pain, but something more primitive.
Despair.
Within that blast, he could feel every atom in his body screaming to separate, to leap free from the bonds that had always been called "himself," as though the blast were whispering to every particle that there was no obligation to remain together, that solitude was a more natural state than unity.
Nebetu'u did not have time to evade it.
Not because he was slow, but because the blast did not come from any particular direction that could be avoided by leaning away or beating one's wings.
It came from every direction at once—from within and without, from a past that had already passed and a future that had not yet occurred, from the cracks between realities that he himself had spent ages keeping sealed.
And when that wave of destruction touched his asymmetrical skin, Nebetu'u felt something he had never experienced since the moment he was first created from the darkness that never slept.
His body trembled, not from fear, but because the very atoms composing him had begun questioning whether they truly wished to remain in the same form. In his hand, the pulsating pendulum of flesh swung wildly like a heart suffering a seizure.
"He... he has surpassed the Berkeley Cardinal structure," whispered Nebetu'u's female head, her voice losing its smile for the first time. On the same side, the male head with vertically split eyes narrowed his black-and-white pupils—not out of fear, but out of awe. Awe toward something he had once believed could exist only in the mad theories written by zealots who had lost their sanity long before dying in a loneliness that no history had ever bothered to record.
Behind Nebetu'u, the eighty-seven Satanists who had been preparing to ascend to the third floor only a second earlier collapsed once more. Not because of a direct attack, but because the presence of the blast had altered the fundamental rules governing what gravity was permitted to touch and what it was not. Zhulumat felt his knees press against the marble in a way he had never imagined possible.
The marble felt soft.
Like flesh.
As though the marble itself were trying to become something else because it, too, could not endure Maharaja Krata's decision to become real.
Then Nebetu'u raised his left hand.
Not hurriedly. Not in panic. But with a motion he had calculated a thousand years before that blast was ever born within Maharaja Krata's chest—a motion born from the knowledge that within every explosion that surpassed all things, there was always one direction where the wave of destruction was slightly gentler, slightly more hesitant, slightly more human than the others.
His asymmetrical hand—with fingers of unequal lengths, joints differing in number from one finger to another, nails that ranged from pitch black to crystal-clear white untouched by sunlight—rose to chest level, palm facing forward. For a brief moment, nothing happened except an eerie silence amid the continuing thunder of the blast, as though the universe itself were holding its breath to see what the being who had always been an observer would do.
Within the vortex of destruction created by Maharaja Krata's blast—which continued to resonate not as sound but as a condition, as the fact that reality around them was slowly dying like a patient abandoned by doctors who could do nothing but wait for the final breath—Zhulumat did something absurd by the standards of any battlefield he had ever known.
He began to count.
"One," he whispered.
His lips formed the syllable perfectly, yet no sound wave emerged from his hoarse throat—or if it did, it was immediately devoured by the blast that tore apart the courage of atoms to remain paired.
"Two," he continued.
Beside him, Agatha, still struggling to straighten knees that felt like gelatin that had forgotten its original shape, turned toward him with bewildered eyes. She could see her commander's lips moving. She could see the count taking shape between the cracks of dried blood around Zhulumat's mouth. But her ears—still bleeding clear fluid from the frequencies of the Holy Beings—heard nothing except the roar of death sung by Maharaja Krata in a voice that required no lyrics.
"What are you doing?!" Agatha shouted.
But her cry was swallowed by something greater than mere sound. Zhulumat did not answer, for his eyes had already locked onto something no one else could see: a window within his own mind, a window long buried beneath the dust of panic and now opened only because he forced himself not to panic, not to be swept away by the current of destruction unleashed by two beings arguing above corpses that had not yet had time to grow cold.
"Three," said Zhulumat.
Then, "Four."
And with every count, the fingers still clutching the powerless black stone necklace began sensing something strange: Maharaja Krata's blast, which only moments ago had felt like an absolute verdict on who deserved to exist and who did not, was beginning to reveal a pattern.
Not a pattern that could be heard by ears, but one that could be felt by bones, by marrow, by something within him older than his awareness that he was Zhulumat, commander of Team Xirkushkartum.
Each blast arrived at irregular yet predictable intervals—one, two, or three heartbeats after the previous one. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but there was always a gap. Always a space between two waves of destruction where a human being brave enough—and foolish enough—could draw a breath without their lungs transforming into a question asking why they had ever believed breathing air was a right that could not be revoked.
To Be Continued…