Chapter 523
But before the fourteen Disturbers could utter another word, before the plan had the chance to become something more than a desire suspended in empty air, something happened.
It was not an explosion, not an earthquake, not a miracle, but a sudden silence followed by a movement so perfectly synchronized, synchronized like a choir that had rehearsed for thousands of years to sing a single note.
The Gods, from the lowest among them to the Ten Greatest Gods whose robes radiated with the light of authority, began to float.
Not by flying with wings, not by leaping with strength, but by drifting like leaves carried by an unseen wind. Their bodies rose effortlessly, without resistance, without cries, without a single one of them appearing surprised or afraid. They simply floated, silent and passive, like puppets whose strings were being pulled by impatient hands.
And around their floating bodies, something enveloped them, something unfamiliar to the four races that knew only hatred, hypocrisy, lies, and sin, yet something profoundly familiar to the fourteen Disturbers, something that made Bes stop smiling, made Enlil's eyes widen, and for the first time in his history, made Mictlantecuhtli lift his head upward.
"That... that's Sa," Lamashtu whispered inwardly, and even her inner voice trembled, not out of fear, but out of awe, the awe of someone witnessing the sunrise after spending a thousand years inside a cave.
"But not just any Sa. That is the true essence of an Administrator. Someone is rewriting reality on a level that even we cannot reach with the RWIA we absorbed from Theo."
Fwoooosh!!
The left hand, its black hair neatly tied into a bun like the crown of an executioner who had never known hesitation, slashed through the air with fingertips that transformed into invisible blades. Meanwhile, the shorter right hand spun like a top whose axis had been broken, creating a vortex that sliced not through flesh but through memories. And the youngest one's personal assistant, whose face changed every thousand heartbeats, released whispers that poisoned the space around Aldraya until every step backward felt like walking across glass that never truly shattered.
"You will not reach My Lord tonight," the left hand said in a voice that never rose or fell, as flat as a gravestone, while unleashing its eighty-fourth strike, a blow Aldraya blocked with his left arm that had begun to crack, not like bone, but like porcelain used far too often in ceremonies that never reached their conclusion.
Aldraya Kansh Que, the former Highest Angel, his silvery white hair now whipping wildly, his unblinking eyes reflecting three shadows moving far too quickly for anyone who still possessed fear to follow, was not tired.
He was never tired.
What he felt was not exhaustion, but something far stranger.
A cold confusion, born from the realization that the three gods before him were not fighting like beings desperate to win, but like beings following a script they had memorized by heart. Every movement had already been calculated. Every attack had already been measured. Every breath had already been scheduled long before Aldraya decided to betray Quil-Hasa.
"You... are not unfamiliar," Aldraya murmured between blows as another strike slammed into his right shoulder, producing a crack that failed to make him even flinch.
"Not because I've met you before, but because you move like characters in a dream that never changes, no matter how many times the dream is repeated."
The shorter right hand merely smiled, a smile devoid of meaning, a smile that existed simply because its lips had been shaped that way, then leaped once more, this time delivering a kick that split the air into two colliding layers. Aldraya twisted his body to the left to evade it, feeling those layers tear through the edge of his silvery white robe, leaving behind marks that bled no blood but shimmered like chalk scraped across a blackboard.
Then, when the silence arrived, not a silence preceded by explosions or screams, but one born from the air suddenly deciding to stop vibrating, Aldraya halted the hand that had been preparing to block the next attack, because the attack never came.
The left hand, the right hand, and the youngest one's personal assistant, whose face now resembled that of a small child with eyes far too large for its skull, began to float.
"What..." Aldraya uttered, but his voice drowned beneath the sight before him.
The three bodies that only a second ago had been moving with a speed that made the air scream now hovered like balloons with severed strings. Their legs dangled aimlessly, their arms hung limp like broken branches, and their eyelids, which only moments earlier had been wide open with murderous intent, were now tightly shut, far too tightly shut, like someone forcing themselves not to witness something they never wished to see.
"This... wasn't me," Aldraya muttered inwardly. Even his inner voice sounded unfamiliar to himself, like an echo within a chamber too vast to be filled by a single voice. And when he looked down at his own raised hand, still held in a defensive stance, there was no light, no vibration, no sign that he had released anything capable of making three gods lose control of their bodies at once.
Around the three floating Gods, something began to take shape.
It was not fire, not water, not wind, not earth, not light, not darkness, but an aura with no color because it did not belong to any spectrum known to the eyes of humans, gods, or angels. It flowed like oil across the surface of eternally restless water, an aura that made the surrounding air appear nauseated, as though reality itself were trying to vomit after swallowing something that had never belonged within its own digestive system.
"That's... Sa," Aldraya whispered, and this time the words emerged not from his throat but from his chest, heavy and profound, resembling Theo's voice whenever he spoke of things he wished he did not have to discuss.
"But this is no ordinary Sa. This is the trace of an Administrator rewriting code in the middle of a program's execution, without pause, without recompilation, and without anyone's permission."
Aldraya stood motionless among the three floating gods, their eyes closed as the unfamiliar aura wrapped around them like funeral shrouds woven from endless mist. Deep within his mind, in the innermost chamber where he had stored every memory of his devotion to Quil-Hasa that had slowly transformed into a hatred he himself had never fully understood, a memory surfaced.
Not as a sudden flash, but like water seeping through cracks in a dam that had borne an immeasurable burden for far too long.
"Aldraya," Theo had said back then, somewhere between moments in time, somewhere while the fourteen Disturbers he had just saved were undergoing the process of being assimilated by RWIA.
"There is one thing you must remember about the world of Flo Viva Mythology. Every character who appears, even those who appear only briefly, even those who merely pass through the background, even those who have no names, carries the potential to bear the seed of an Administrator within them. Of course, there is one condition: that character must continue to maintain a correlation with the ongoing storyline. The greater their role in a particular event, the greater the chance that seed will grow. And do you know what is most terrifying? They themselves often never realize it. They think they're using the power of gods, magic, or curses, when in reality, they're accessing the source code."
To be continued...