Chapter 147
"Previous instructions," Nirma continued, her voice unchanged—neither louder nor softer, remaining at the same tone as when she spoke about the troops who died in the Quagmire Lands—yet there was something shifting in her eyes, something like an awareness that she had let herself linger too long in a sense of gratitude that had never been a good companion to her, "about the agency's latest activity data. Before we departed for Heraclea, before we knew that Ashita and Tegar would be there waiting with a circle already prepared to trap us, I told you to investigate. The results should have been ready before the battle with that five-headed creature began, but you never told me anything."
She did not ask, nor did she demand, because between the two of them—between Nirmala Surdaya, who had killed far too many to still believe there was any way other than survival, and Arya Wiratama, who had abandoned everything he had built to stand beside the very woman who killed his parents—questions never needed to be spoken in a threatening tone, and answers never needed to be given defensively.
They had gone through too many battles, too many escapes, too many nights where the only sound was their own breathing in a room just like this—a room with no name, yet the only place in the entire timeline they could call their own—to still require more words than necessary.
Arya, who had been sitting with a calmness that almost made Nirma forget that the man before her had once been one of the highest-ranking figures in the institution she despised the most, suddenly moved in an unusual way—not like his movements on the battlefield or when his hands held a weapon, but more like someone who had just realized he had forgotten to do something that had been his responsibility hours ago.
He shifted his weight, just slightly—no more than a centimeter perhaps—but enough for Nirma, still in full alertness, to sense that something had changed in the air between them, something like a small wave rippling from Arya toward her, a wave that was not threatening yet could not be ignored.
"I forgot," Arya said, and for the first time since Nirma had known him, the man who always spoke in a slow and controlled rhythm sounded like someone trying to admit a mistake he could not forgive himself for, "the information from that report, which I should have conveyed before we landed in Heraclea. I had read everything the night before departure, had already stored it here."
He pointed to his temple with an index finger that never trembled, yet at the corner of his eyes, within the folds of skin he never allowed to reveal anything, there was something moving—something like the shadow of guilt he did not wish to show yet could not fully conceal.
When we arrived, when the Crusader forces began pouring in from Constantinople, when the Seljuk troops emerged from a direction no one expected, when everything happened so quickly with blood and dust and screams that did not cease until that five-headed Abnormal truly rose from the ground in the midst of a battle that should never have occurred there, I chose not to inform you. Not because I intended to hide it, not because I wanted you to step into the battle unaware of what lay behind all this, but because at that moment, amid ruins that suddenly came alive and creatures emerging from dimensions we had never visited, telling you something that would not change what was happening before our eyes felt unnecessary—an act that would only break our focus on the one thing that truly mattered at that time: survival and bringing that creature back.
He stopped, drawing a long breath—a breath that felt as though he was trying to calm something within his chest that could not be restrained by the discipline he had built over years as a former soldier—and when he exhaled, something in his eyes changed, something like a door opening just slightly—not wide enough to see what lay behind it, but enough to know that something had long been hidden there, even from himself.
"I'm sorry," he said, the words heavy, forced out as though he had to push them from the depths of his throat with considerable effort, "I should have told you anyway, even if at the time it seemed unimportant. I should not have let a single battle make me forget that among everything we face, information is the one thing that can keep us alive longer than those who pursue us. But this was unintentional, Nirma—an oversight difficult to avoid, because at the very moment I opened my mouth to speak, the Crusader forces began shouting, swords clashed, and dust swallowed the sky, and within that chaos that left no room for words unrelated to the death coming from all directions, I chose silence. I swear, this will not happen again."
Nirma listened to everything without moving, her hands still resting on her thighs with her palms facing upward, her breath flowing in and out in the same steady rhythm since she had chosen to sit in this place, and when Arya finished speaking—when the final words of an apology she had never once heard from him in the years they had been together still lingered in the air without echo—she did something Arya did not expect.
She moved her right hand in a motion so relaxed, so slow, so much like someone brushing against empty air because there was nothing more important to do—a movement no more than a simple rotation of the wrist, fingers spread as if to show that between them there was no weapon, no threat, nothing that could harm.
"You don't need to apologize," she said, her voice carrying the same tone as when she spoke of the fallen troops in the Quagmire Lands—flat, without excess emotion—yet something shifted in her eyes, something like relief that amid all the lies and betrayals she had encountered along the timeline she had walked, there was still one person who felt the need to apologize for failing to deliver a report she had never even asked for with urgency.
"I truly don't mind, Arya. If you chose not to speak in Heraclea, then at that moment, in that place, with everything happening around us, silence was the right choice. And I have never needed information that arrives at the wrong time—when I cannot use it for anything except satisfying a curiosity that would not alter the trajectory of a single bullet."
To be continued…