Chapter 5
Its weight rested in her grip with perfect balance.
With a single smooth motion, she lifted it, braced the stock against her shoulder, and pressed her cheek to its cold pad.
Her narrowed left eye stared through the scope, which projected data regarding the invisible temporal mothership hovering in the sky.
The next announcement from the Temporal Cross-Police echoed out, more urgent and edged with threat.
"Temporal entity Nirmala! Lower your weapon and surrender immediately.
This is your final warning before we initiate active containment measures!"
The voice attempted authority, but Nirmala had already made her decision.
Her finger did not pull the rifle's trigger.
Instead, her left thumb pressed a small button along the rifle's frame.
From the muzzle emerged not a bullet, but a small silver grenade projectile that shot forward in near silence, almost invisible.
It did not travel directly toward the unseen mothership, but toward an empty coordinate point in the air precisely between them and the source of the voice.
"Jump!" Arya shouted, already positioned at the edge of the gaping hole in the apartment wall.
The silver grenade detonated at exactly the right moment, not with fire and shrapnel, but with a massive release of electromagnetic energy and temporal disruption.
An invisible shockwave burst outward, deafening in force and, more importantly, scrambling the sensors and portal-lock mechanisms of the Temporal Cross-Police for several critical seconds.
The holographic display within Nirmala's scope suddenly filled with static interference before going dark.
Without hesitation, Nirmala tossed the sniper rifle aside and sprinted toward Arya.
Without exchanging another word, the two leapt from the edge of the eighth-floor apartment.
The night wind, which should have felt cold, struck their faces as they plunged into darkness.
In the rush of air during free fall, the truth unfolded.
The temporal grenade that disrupted the Temporal Cross-Police systems was Arya's creation—a contingency plan prepared from the beginning.
His "late" arrival at the apartment had not been negligence, but the fulfillment of Nirmala's precise instructions.
Before the confrontation with Mydra 9-C had begun, Nirmala had ordered Arya not to intervene immediately, but to disperse and plant several small timed devices at strategic points around the block.
Her instructions had been clear.
Activate them within the next ten minutes, for the arrival of the Temporal Cross-Police—with their anomaly sensors—would be impossible to avoid after such an immense display of energy.
"Boom," Nirmala murmured inwardly as the disruption blast confirmed her calculations.
Even as the ground rushed closer at terrifying speed, her face remained calm.
Her free left hand reached into her pocket and retrieved a small object.
Not a pistol nor a rifle, but a phone of impossibly thin and transparent design—a technology from the 3400s resembling a sheet of intelligent glass.
Her fingers danced swiftly across its glowing surface, activating a sequence.
Simultaneously, Arya, gripping his temporal navigation device, coordinated their movement.
"Now!" he called, his voice nearly swallowed by the roaring wind.
With perfect synchronization, they twisted their bodies midair.
Instead of bracing for impact or completing a chaotic time jump, they redirected themselves toward the glass wall of an office building not far from the destroyed apartment.
Only a few stories above the ground, Arya's leather shoes and Nirmala's pumps touched the vertical glass surface.
There was no crash, no shattering.
Instead, their soles adhered firmly, as if locked by powerful magnets or a manipulated adhesion field.
It was the technology within Nirmala's phone that made it possible, emitting a frequency that altered the frictional properties between sole and glass for a brief yet critical window of time.
They now stood—more accurately, clung—vertically to the building wall, facing the street below in an impossible pose, like two colossal spiders from the future.
Nirmala glanced to her right, the white bandage over her eye contrasting against the bluish sheen of her black hair in the night wind.
Arya, fluent in her subtle body language, nodded immediately.
A wordless communication sharpened through battles across eras.
"Tracker active," Arya confirmed, his voice calm amid the wind at that height.
"The signal is strong. He's carrying it without realizing."
Amid the chaos—when Nirmala had been thrown and fought to cling to the apartment floor—she had managed to deploy a microscopic tracking device, perhaps embedded within debris or disguised within a failed strike, now attached to the form of Mydra 9-C.
Maintaining balance against the glass wall, Arya activated the device on his wrist.
A small holographic display projected outward, revealing a grid-map of 1950s Jakarta marked by a rapidly moving red dot.
"Data incoming," he said, eyes scanning the scrolling information.
"After colliding with and disrupting the Temporal Cross-Police mothership's sensor systems, Mydra 9-C made a sharp turn.
He's fleeing west. His velocity remains extreme, but his trajectory is predictable."
Arya's brow furrowed as he analyzed further.
"If he continues on this path, he'll reach central Djakarta within minutes.
He looked at Nirmala, and this time a real urgency entered his usually controlled voice.
Nirma, it's more than temporal distortion.
I'm detecting high anomalous biological emissions from the tracker.
He's not just a paradox storm. He's like… a carrier.
There's some kind of unstable virus or pathogenic agent embedded in his abnormality, possibly a byproduct of his mutation or an intentional weapon."
Arya's breath tightened slightly.
"If that spreads in the population center of the 1950s… the medical experts of this era lack the tools, the knowledge, the immunity to counter it.
This wouldn't just be an event erased from history.
It could become a mass slaughter that permanently alters the timeline, spawning a branch of reality saturated with disease and death."
Nirmala absorbed the report without visible change in expression, though the intensity in her eye deepened.
Their mission had shifted in priority.
No longer merely the capture or neutralization of a dangerous temporal anomaly.
Now they had to prevent a cross-era pandemic capable of destroying an age and poisoning the future.
She looked westward, toward the innocent glow of city lights unaware of the rocket-speed danger approaching.
"Then we change the plan," Nirmala said, her voice forged like steel.
"We cannot wait or narrow probabilities any further.
We cut him off before he reaches the first population concentration.
And we do it without drawing the Temporal Cross-Police a second time."
The challenge bordered on impossible, yet her tone carried only assignment, not doubt.
The time for breathing space was over.
The decisive hunt had just begun.
Fhuuuuh!
Subjekt Mydra 9-C streaked across the night sky of Djakarta like a nightmare unleashed.
Its body, now more a core of dark energy encased in residual biological distortion, sliced through the air at a speed rendering it nearly invisible to untrained eyes.
It moved in broken patterns—appearing for an instant as an elongated shadow between the peaks of clock towers, vanishing behind factory smoke, then reemerging above the tiled roofs of crowded shop houses.
To be continued…