Chapter 142
Now their departure no longer carried the same tension.
Perhaps because they had conveyed what needed to be conveyed.
Perhaps because Zhulumat had granted permission in a way that did not need to be questioned.
Perhaps because, within the chest of each person left in that room—including Shaqar, including the high-ranking officials, including Zhulumat himself—there was a growing awareness that whatever would happen next, they would not be able to face it without people like Apathy, who stood at the borders, who became the eyes and ears, who dared to report the truth even when that truth was too vast to be accepted by common sense.
Huuuuh!
Zhulumat Katamtum did not need to ask.
He already knew everything long before Apathy and the representatives finished whispering into each captain's ear.
The ability he possessed, known among a limited circle as the Telepathic Reader, worked without sound, without movement, without any sign that could be captured by ordinary senses.
He sat at the center of the circle with half-closed eyes, his posture unchanged since the first thunderous explosion resounded, and within his mind, in a space never revealed to anyone, thousands of whispers flowed in like small rivers converging into a boundless ocean.
He heard what Apathy told Shaqar about the loosening guard at the border.
He heard what the other representatives conveyed to Makakushi about the number of Angels surging beyond the trillions.
He heard all the same reports that now made the captains around him sit with expressions they tried to hide, yet utterly failed.
Not a single word escaped his reach.
Not a single whisper failed to reach his inner hearing.
He knew everything, and precisely because of that, he chose to remain silent.
The silence he created was not born from confusion or an inability to respond.
It was a silence born from conscious decision, from a choice carefully weighed despite the time available being only a matter of seconds.
He asked nothing of Shaqar even though he knew that Shaqar had just received information that would change his entire perspective on everything they had debated for hours.
He did not turn toward Makakushi to seek confirmation, even though he could feel how the captain gripped his own knees slightly tighter than before.
He did not glance at Onigakure, or Idtagram, or the other captains whose expressions were beginning to change under the weight of the news they had just received.
He let them all sit in the same silence, in the same space, in the same tension, because he knew that questions would change nothing.
That the same information had reached everyone's ears through different means.
That what was needed now was not repeated questioning, but a decision.
A decision that could only be made by one person, and that person was himself.
"There is no need for anyone to repeat the report. I have already heard it."
Ssshh!
"The border is loosening. The castle, on the other hand, is being fortified beyond any reasonable calculation. That means the center of events lies there. And we do not have the luxury of time to argue further."
Hhhh!
"From this moment on, for the time being, we hold onto the two most probable possibilities: the resurrection theory proposed by Onigakure, and the experimental conspiracy contained in the letter read by Shaqar. We treat both as operational hypotheses. Not because we accept them blindly, but because the surge in concentration of Angels and Holy Beings around the castle demands an immediate response. If they are gathering in the trillions, then something at that center is worth more than the entire city's perimeter."
Fhooooh!
"So save your skepticism for later. Hold your questions until after we confirm what is being born—or what is being prevented from being born. We move as one. There are no factions. No sides. Only one focus—the castle."
Ten seconds passed like ten years in that frozen room.
Time, which had once seemed to flow so slowly, suddenly reached a point where silence could no longer be tolerated, where the breaths being held began to feel like a burden too heavy to bear any longer.
And when that invisible hand of time finally reached its precise mark, when Zhulumat's patience had reached the limit he had set for himself without ever telling anyone, the voice filled the room once more for the first time since the envoys had left them.
Zhulumat Katamtum's voice did not emerge as a thunderous roar, nor as a shout that shattered the silence, but as a calm current that could not be denied, like an underground river suddenly surfacing after flowing in darkness for so long.
The words he spoke were not long, not convoluted, not adorned with rhetoric typically used by leaders to wrap their commands.
They went straight to the point, piercing directly into the heart of the issue that had been gnawing at the room since Onigakure first spoke and Shaqar began reading the letter.
Zhulumat ordered them all to firmly hold onto the resurrection theory proposed by Onigakure.
He ordered them to accept the wildly improbable conspiracy that had just been read through Shaqar's mouth as a truth to be upheld, at least for the time being.
He gave no room for questions, no opportunity for further debate, no space for the skepticism that had flourished in the room like mushrooms in the rainy season.
The reason he gave was simple, yet undeniable.
They were racing against time.
They no longer had the luxury of sitting for hours debating whether something sounded like a fairy tale or a fact.
They no longer had the right to doubt when out there—at the border whose guard was beginning to loosen, around the castle that had become the center of all their attention—the number of Angels and Holy Beings had exceeded percentages that could no longer be expressed with ordinary numbers.
Trillions.
That word echoed in the mind of everyone who heard it, echoing in a way that could not be stopped, echoing with a weight no scale could measure.
Shaqar felt Zhulumat's words enter his chest like a blade—not sharp, yet enough to snap him out of his prolonged daze.
He, who had been wrestling with his own doubts, who in the depths of his heart admitted that Hopsly's skepticism had a reasonable foundation, who pondered whether all of this was merely a grand tale wrapped in symbols, was now forced to face the reality that doubt was a luxury they could not afford tonight.
He looked at the letter in his hand, the same letter he had doubted just hours ago, the same letter that had felt like a foreign object in his grasp minutes ago, and for the first time, he saw it differently.
Not as a document whose validity needed questioning, but as a map that might guide them out of the labyrinth they were entering.
Not as a collection of words that sounded like a fairy tale, but as clues that might save them all from whatever was happening in Thalyssra, in the heart of the capital blessed by the Great Sanse, in the place where that explosion originated and where the number of Holy Beings continued to surge beyond the limits of imagination.
To be continued…