Chapter 167
"Five... six..." Zhulumat continued.
This time, Onigakure, still kneeling on knees he no longer recognized as his own, watched his commander's lips and suddenly understood.
"He's—HE'S COUNTING TIME!" Onigakure exclaimed to Apathy beside him.
His voice emerged not as a whisper but as something between a cough and a prayer. And Apathy, whose eyes were still hollow with questions about whether his name truly belonged to him or was merely borrowed from parents who might never have existed, suddenly felt something he had not experienced since this mission began.
Hope.
A dirty, inelegant hope. An uninvited hope that nevertheless slipped through the back door of his consciousness. A hope that whispered that perhaps—just perhaps—Zhulumat was not losing his mind. That perhaps their commander, who always had a contingency plan for his contingency plans, was calculating something invisible to eyes too busy staring at death standing before them.
"Seven, eight, nine."
And with every number that left Zhulumat's mouth in silence, something in the room changed without permission.
Nebetu'u, who was still in the process of moving his left hand toward the left with terrifying gentleness, as though stroking the hair of a dead lover, paused for a moment.
Not because he heard Zhulumat's counting—because no one did—but because he sensed something within the pattern of Maharaja Krata's blasts shift, like an ocean wave suddenly realizing there was now a reef where yesterday there had been none.
His female head, whose smile constantly changed its meaning, now stared toward Zhulumat with an expression that could only be interpreted as uncomfortable curiosity.
A curiosity asking a single question.
Why was such a tiny creature still busy counting while the world around him was being dismantled and rebuilt by two gods who did not care whether he was torn apart in the process?
"Ten, eleven."
Zhulumat continued counting.
And on the eleventh count, Maharaja Krata's blast suddenly changed frequency—becoming higher, sharper, more like a scream than an explosion. Nebetu'u, whose hand was still suspended halfway through the air, felt the pendulum in his right hand vibrate in a manner he had never experienced before.
"He is accelerating," whispered Nebetu'u's male head, his voice sounding like stone grinding against stone in perfect darkness.
Below them, upon marble that no longer dared call itself marble because it resembled a wound upon the face of the earth, Zhulumat drew a breath that felt like his last.
Then he spoke the twelfth number with trembling lips—not from fear, but from concentration.
The concentration of a surgeon cutting between two arteries, knowing that a single millimeter of error would cause the patient to bleed to death upon the operating table.
"Thirteen... fourteen..."
And when Zhulumat reached fourteen, Agatha felt something she could not explain.
The blast stopped.
Not stopped like a sound that had ended, but stopped like a held breath.
As though Maharaja Krata himself was gathering something from within himself deeper than before, darker than before, deadlier than the combined force of every blast he had unleashed since deciding to abandon silence.
And within that sudden silence—a silence even more terrifying than the blasts because it was a promise of something worse—Zhulumat opened his mouth wide.
For the first time since he had begun counting, his voice emerged not as a whisper but as a scream.
A scream that tore apart the remnants of his already-damaged vocal cords.
A scream that burst from his chest like something trapped between his ribs for far too long and had finally found a way out because there was no longer any room to contain it.
"NOW—GET TO THE THIRD FLOOR! EVERYONE! NO ONE STAYS HERE!"
And the eighty-seven sprawled bodies moved, not like trained soldiers, but like a flock of birds suddenly remembering they possessed wings.
Zhulumat felt Agatha seize his hand.
His legs began running even though he could not remember the moment he had decided to run.
And behind them, the fifteenth blast—the blast that never had the chance to occur because Zhulumat finished counting before Maharaja Krata finished gathering his intent—echoed through the emptiness left behind by eighty-seven pairs of feet choosing life.
Two steps.
Only two steps.
Their right feet lifted. Their left feet followed.
The eighty-seven bodies running on pure instinct had only just felt the cracked marble beneath their shoes for the second time when the ceiling above them suddenly seemed closer.
Not because the ceiling had descended, but because the shadows that had long floated high above with transparent scriptures in their hands were now diving downward at inhuman speed.
Their perfect wings spread not for flight, but to block.
To seal.
To transform a room that had possessed an opening for eighty-seven pairs of feet only a second ago into a cage with no door.
"They're—THEY'RE BLOCKING THE WAY!" Makakushi shouted, his voice breaking midway through the sentence.
Before those words could finish disturbing the already-exhausted air, the line of Angels had formed a wall that was not merely solid, but alive.
For within every gap between their perfect bodies, lights began to form.
Not ordinary light.
But light born from faith.
Faith in the One Accursed.
The lasers no longer emerged from palms as they had before.
Nor from eyes, mouths, or fingertips trembling beneath the burden of excessive holiness.
They emerged from faith itself.
From the spaces between the Angels' ribs where their belief in the One Accursed dwelled like a parasite that had nested there for so long that its hosts no longer remembered what life had been like before carrying it within their chests.
And when those lasers touched the air, they were not red, yellow, green, blue, or purple as before.
They were the color of absence.
They were nonexistence forced into becoming something.
Wherever they passed, the air was not burned.
It was forgotten.
Forgotten by the universe itself, as though it had never been permitted to occupy the spaces between things deemed more important.
Amid the vortex of faith-born lasers that continued erasing pieces of his subordinates one by one—a soldier to Agatha's left lost his arm not because it was severed, but because reality forgot it existed; another behind Shaqar suddenly had no face, only a smooth flesh-colored surface where eyes, nose, and mouth should have been, though his mouth had managed to scream before his consciousness was erased as well—Zhulumat sensed something strange occurring within the ranks behind him.
It was not a counterattack.
Nor was it another collective prayer like before.
It was a shift.
A change in weight that could not be explained by physics but could be felt through his spine, already cracked by the blasts.
Thirty.
Forty percent of the eighty-seven bodies running behind him suddenly stopped.
Not because of fear.
Not because of paralysis.
But because of a decision.
A decision born from the realization that not everyone could reach the stairs leading to the third floor.
That some would have to stay behind so that others could leave.
To Be Continued…