Chapter 170
Zhulumat felt the fine hairs on his arms curl and fall away before he could even feel the pain.
Beside him, Shaqar, who had been gripping an exorcism tool with both hands only a second ago, dropped it. Not out of shock, but because the metal had suddenly become too hot to hold, glowing red as though it had just been pulled from a forge.
When the tool struck the marble floor, which strangely did not crack, the marble hissed and began to melt, forming small smoking holes like wounds upon the face of a world that had never asked to receive guests such as these.
"The Holy Beings alone are troublesome enough, and now there's this thing too?!" Makakushi shouted, his voice nearly swallowed by the hiss of burning air.
Behind him, Apathy felt something strange.
Although the heat felt as if it would melt his ribs from the inside, he was not sweating.
Not because his body failed to respond, but because the sweat evaporated before it could even form, leaving white salt deposits in his pores, which gaped open like tiny mouths screaming soundlessly.
"It... it looks like an Angel, but one created from the fires of Hell," Onigakure muttered.
His eyes could not leave the figure before them, a figure with no fixed face, because the flames composing it never stopped moving, never stopped changing.
At times, they revealed sharp cheekbone-like contours.
At other times, there was only darkness within the blaze.
Sometimes, it formed something that could not be called a face at all, and yet it still stared.
It stared in a way that made Zhulumat feel as though his spine was being crushed by a hand that possessed no fingers.
The creature had not moved.
It merely stood there.
It merely beat its wings slowly.
It merely existed.
Yet its presence alone was enough to make the rear ranks of Zhulumat's forces retreat three steps without being ordered to do so.
Not because they were cowards, but because of instinct.
An instinct that told them approaching something made of eternal fire was a mistake that would never be forgiven by the ancestral genes of those who had perished in fires never recorded by any history.
The ten Holy Beings raised their pale-blue scythes in unison.
It was a movement that required no command, no signal, only the certainty that this was the moment to cut, to divide, to turn the remaining eighty-seven Satanists into memories that even dust would fail to remember.
Behind them, the fiery creature beat its wings once.
Hard.
Far too hard.
A wave of heat burst forth, causing the marble floor to vaporize rather than melt, vaporizing like water striking a pan heated beyond reason.
Amid the deafening hiss, Zhulumat noticed something strange.
The shadows before him suddenly changed shape.
Not because the creatures had moved, but because something had fallen from above.
Something traveling at an absurd speed.
Something that landed precisely between Zhulumat and the enemy ranks with a sound that resembled neither impact nor collision, but a recitation, like the turning of a page in a sacred book by fingers that had never trembled.
"You—!" Agatha shouted.
But her words were swallowed when the fiery creature's wings abruptly ceased moving.
As the smoke began to clear, the figure standing before them was neither a new creature, nor an Angel, nor a god.
It was Nebetu'u.
With both heads facing opposite directions.
With the pulsating flesh pendulum still moving in its hand.
And with something none of them had ever seen before.
A tattered cloth bag hanging from its shoulder.
The bag was made of a material that could not be called leather, cloth, or paper, but somehow all three at once in mutually contradictory states.
From within it came the pungent scents of exorcism: salt, sulfur, dried blood, and failed prayers.
"Weren't you supposed to—"
Shaqar tried to speak.
But Nebetu'u's female head turned toward him with a smile whose meaning shifted into something entirely new.
Something Shaqar had never seen before.
A smile that declared nothing was ever supposed to happen.
A smile that said the universe owed explanations to no one, least of all humans who, only five minutes earlier, had been rolling across the floor with blood pouring from every opening in their faces.
Without answering.
Without explaining.
Nebetu'u slipped its left hand into the tattered bag.
Not hurriedly, but with the gentleness of someone selecting a book from a shelf they had not visited in years.
When the hand emerged, it held something that made Onigakure flinch.
A small gray sphere.
No larger than a child's palm.
Its surface was not smooth but porous, like pumice stone that had absorbed too much sweat, blood, and the desperate prayers of Satanists who died before they could say goodbye.
"What is that?" Apathy whispered.
As his answer, Nebetu'u tossed the sphere upward.
Not toward the enemy, but toward the ceiling that was not truly a ceiling.
Toward the blue sky with racing white clouds on one side and the violet sky with two moons on the other.
When the sphere reached the peak of its arc, it burst.
Not with sound, but with silence.
The voices of the ten Holy Beings and the fiery creature vanished instantly.
Not into quietness.
Into nonexistence.
As though someone had unplugged an amplifier in the middle of the most epic guitar solo imaginable.
The resulting silence was more terrifying than noise itself.
For within that silence, Zhulumat could hear his own heartbeat for the first time.
And it sounded like knocking upon the door of a house he had not lived in for a very long time.
The fiery creature reacted faster than anyone expected.
Its wings beat.
Not once, but three times in succession.
The rhythm was irregular, like someone panicking despite lacking a face complete enough to display panic.
With each beat, tongues of black flame shot toward Nebetu'u.
Black as the abyssal holes at the bottom of an ocean untouched by light.
Their speed was so immense that even light itself seemed slow in comparison.
Nebetu'u did not dodge.
It merely swung the pendulum in its right hand in a wider, faster arc.
Strangely, the black flames changed direction midway.
Not by curving, but by being pulled.
Pulled toward the pendulum like iron drawn into the embrace of a magnet.
When the flames touched the pulsating surface of the flesh-like pendulum, they were not extinguished.
They were absorbed.
Absorbed with a sound like someone drinking water after days without a single drop.
Absorbed with a satisfaction so unsettling that Makakushi shivered despite the surrounding heat still being intense enough to melt glass.
"He... he's using exorcism tools?" Zhulumat muttered.
His voice carried equal parts disbelief and confusion.
Since when did a Balancer, a being whose power surpassed everything ever taught in the Satanist academies, need outdated objects such as a tattered cloth bag and a pumice stone sphere?
As if answering that question, Nebetu'u's male head spoke a single word.
Its voice was no louder than a whisper, yet every person in the room heard it.
Even the ten Holy Beings whose pale-blue scythes had begun to crack beneath a pressure they could not explain.
"Borrowed."
To Be Continued...