Chapter 162
Behind Zhulumat, among the eighty-seven bodies still sprawled across the floor or beginning to crawl back to their feet with knees not yet fully recovered from the vertigo that had shattered their sense of balance, something began to move—not physically, but emotionally.
A wave invisible to the eye yet as palpable as the shift in air pressure before a storm swept through them.
A wave of rejection spread from one soldier to another without the need for words, without the need for signals, carried only through exchanged glances and subtle nods of bitter understanding that they had spent far too long as spectators in a battle that should have been their stage.
Onigakure was the first among those who still possessed enough courage to speak before a being to whom even the Angels bowed.
His voice was not as loud as Zhulumat's, but it was deeper, trembling at its edges like the strings of a cello plucked far too hard.
"We don't need any balancer," he said.
Beside him, Makakushi nodded firmly, even though blood from his ruptured eardrums still stained his chin.
Then Shaqar moved.
Not by standing up like Zhulumat, but by taking a single step forward.
A step that felt heavier than a hundred steps taken during any mission he had ever undertaken.
Within that step lay everything he had buried over countless missions.
Since watching Nebetu'u complete exorcism assignments alone while he and his nineteen subordinates stood at the sidelines like unnecessary props.
Since nurturing a hatred he could never direct anywhere, because there was no one to blame except the simple reality that the balancer was stronger, more efficient, more everything than the team he commanded.
All of it emerged not as a shout, but as a growl.
A growl rising from his chest like the voice of a wounded beast that still possessed teeth sharp enough to bite.
"GET OUT OF HERE, NEBETU'U!"
His voice was not as loud as Zhulumat's, but it was sharper, more piercing, like a knife that did not need a wide swing to wound.
"BEFORE WE FOCUS EVERY EXORCISM DEVICE WE STILL HAVE ON YOU—AND THIS TIME, NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU FROM THE CURSES WE HAVE RESERVED SPECIFICALLY FOR INTRUDERS LIKE YOU!"
Apathy, still seated behind Shaqar, felt his captain's back tense in a way he had never experienced before.
When he looked left and right, he realized it was not only Shaqar.
Dozens of soldiers had begun pulling out whatever exorcism equipment remained intact.
Not to fight the Angels.
Not to fight the Sacred Beings.
But to point them upward, toward Nebetu'u.
Their eyes no longer held fear.
Only a decision that no longer cared whether it amounted to suicide or not.
Amid the storm of blind rage erupting from eighty-seven throats made hoarse by blood and vomit, amid exorcism devices raised like thorns that already knew they would never be sharp enough to pierce anything, Nebetu'u remained standing—or rather, floating—with a calmness that neither insulted nor acknowledged.
The female head smiled with a smile whose meaning shifted with every blink.
The male head remained engrossed in the pulsating flesh pendulum, which now swung slowly.
Very slowly.
Like the heartbeat of someone asleep who had no desire to be awakened.
"You point those objects at me as though I were your enemy," whispered the female head.
Its voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once, soft as velvet rubbed against an open wound.
"Yet I merely came to see who would cry."
Shaqar was about to speak again.
Another curse already rested at the tip of his tongue, still bitter from stomach acid.
But before the words could take shape into a wave of sound worthy of being called an insult, Maharaja Krata—who had remained silent until now, who had existed only as a shadow behind the throne of everlasting light—finally began to open his mouth.
When Maharaja Krata's flawless jaw parted, it was not sound that emerged.
It was silence.
A silence with weight.
A silence that fell upon the chamber like an enormous timber dropped from an impossible height.
It forced every other sound—every insult from Shaqar, every curse from Zhulumat, every despairing breath from the eighty-seven satanist soldiers still recovering from the devastating vertigo—to suddenly feel small.
Insignificant.
Like the whispers of children standing beside an enraged waterfall.
"Angels," said Maharaja Krata.
And his voice was something that could not be resisted.
Not because it arrived as a wave that eardrums or hands could block.
But because it arrived as certainty.
As fact.
As truth requiring no proof.
"Begin. Slowly."
The instruction had not even fully left Maharaja Krata's lips.
The word slowly still lingered in the air like a fog uncertain of where to drift.
Yet the Angels above had already moved with perfect balance between speed and grace.
The hands that had once held transparent books rose forward in a motion no military academy in the underworld had ever taught.
From the center of each palm, light began to emerge.
Not as flashes.
But as accumulation.
Like droplets of water gradually filling a stone basin until it overflowed on its own.
"They're going to fire—!" Agatha shouted, her voice still hoarse.
Before the word protect could leave her mouth, five different colors erupted from the Angelic formation.
Red like boiling blood.
Yellow like an angry sun.
Green like a poison too beautiful to be called dangerous.
Blue like ocean depths untouched by light.
And purple like bruises upon the night sky.
The five colors did not shoot forward as straight beams.
Instead, they intertwined into a woven lattice, a net of death advancing with unhurried certainty.
Exactly as commanded.
Slowly.
Beneath that five-colored web of light, the Sacred Beings began to stare.
Yet the word stare was far too inadequate to describe what happened to those flawless faces.
For when their eyelids opened wide, what emerged was not merely a gaze.
It was something deeper.
Older.
More primitive.
A frequency that could not be heard by ears yet was felt immediately by the bones of the skull as pressure squeezing the brain from within.
And strangely, the frequency emerged not from their mouths, but from their eyes.
From pupils no longer round, but stretched vertically into shapes resembling the slit of a freshly forged dagger.
Zhulumat felt the vibration strike his chest before he could even raise an arm to block it.
For a moment, it felt as though his heart had stopped beating.
Not because it had ceased.
But because it had begun beating in the wrong direction.
Inward.
Toward his own ribs.
As though something within his chest had suddenly forgotten that its purpose was to pump blood outward, not drag it back into a space never designed to withstand such pressure.
"DON'T JUST STAND THERE—MOVE YOUR BODIES!"
Onigakure shouted.
His voice was no longer beautiful.
No longer structured.
Only the raw voice of someone desperately trying to remind himself that he could still move.
Meanwhile, both forms of attack—the lasers descending from above and the frequency advancing from the front—continued forward like two different hands of the same body.
One colored.
One invisible.
Yet both intent on transforming them into something they had never asked to become:
Victims.
To be continued...