Chapter 7
Mydra, still shrouded in fury and a sense of loss, was late in realizing this seemingly "primitive" threat.
It had just triggered a shadow-shift, yet the crystal arrow had already reached its critical point—half a step away from piercing the transparent membrane of its abdomen, splitting through the swarm of repulsive creatures and touching the core of the turbulent energy vortex within.
At a height where even birds would think twice before passing, Mydra 9-C unleashed its rage.
Not a burst of flame or blazing energy, but a distorted primordial exhalation escaping from every crevice of its malformed body.
The breath was dim gray, transparent like demonic mist, nearly invisible to the city's inhabitants below who were absorbed in their 1950s lives.
Yet its power was real and terrifying.
The shockwave it generated was equal to five thousand TNT grenades detonating simultaneously, a force capable of leveling entire city blocks and turning history into a silent crater.
But Arya had anticipated it.
Before the wave of death could travel more than ten meters from Mydra's body, a silver disc emitted a low hum as it shot from his wrist.
The object glided like a loyal timekeeper, placing itself directly in the path of destruction.
The moment the lethal gray breath touched it, the disc awakened.
From its edges radiated an electric-blue barrier field, transparent yet dense like an invisible wall of glass.
The shockwave collided with the field, and instead of continuing its terror toward the city, the immense energy was dampened, absorbed, and reflected back into the sky in ripples of light and a rumble that sounded like distant thunder rolling from a far-off mountain.
"Level Five Dimensional Stabilizer active," Arya muttered, his eyes fixed on the readings on his wrist display.
"Containment successful. No temporal or physical leakage into civilian zones."
Amid the echo of the contained shockwave, the air felt thick with static energy and lingering fury.
Arya gave no pause.
His steady hand shifted from the stabilizing disc to an object holstered at his waist.
At first glance, it appeared to be nothing more than an antique pistol from the Napoleonic era, its engravings intricate and its aged steel reflecting the moonlight faintly.
A weapon that should have been a museum relic, silent beneath the dust of centuries.
Yet in Arya's grip, the relic breathed.
The moment his finger curled around the cold trigger, the pistol of 1790 trembled violently, like a heart beating furiously for the first time after a long slumber.
Its metal seemed to melt and refreeze in an instant, evolving at a speed that strained the eye.
From the left side of its body emerged the stout, short barrel of a wrought-iron medieval cannon, reeking of coarse gunpowder and heated iron.
From the right protruded, with cold precision, a miniaturized yet lethal M4A1 composite barrel, its holographic sight faintly pulsing.
The evolution did not stop.
More barrels burst forth in crowded layers, stacking like metal roots thirsting for violence.
A blunderbuss barrel from the pirate age, a plasma emitter nozzle from the twenty-third century, a sonic wave projector tube from a temporal cold war.
The once simple pistol swelled and mutated into a near one-meter monstrosity of weaponry, a palimpsest of violence drawn from multiple eras and unified by a single will.
"Temporal accuracy locked," Arya whispered, his voice nearly drowned by the low hum emanating from his hybrid weapon.
Both hands, now bearing the weight of past and future fused together, restrained the powerful vibration threatening to break free.
Through his projection glasses, his eyes saw not merely the physical form of Mydra 9-C ahead, but also the weak points within the paradox energy lattice surrounding it.
Then he pulled the trigger.
The world seemed to be sucked into silence for a fraction of a second before the storm.
Then, from every fused barrel of the monstrous pistol, an unharmonious symphony of destruction erupted.
Not a single thunderous blast, but a chaotic chorus from across the entire history of warfare.
There was the crude roar of black powder from a medieval cannon, followed by the muted "thwip-thwip" of modern suppressed rifles, accompanied by the hissing moan of blue plasma energy and ultrasonic waves that shattered distant windows.
Each projectile, each beam, each wave—though born of different eras—flew toward the same target with horrifying precision.
They were not mere bullets.
Each was a fragment of a specially chosen threat.
Silver-guided rounds for paradox entities, matter-fracturing waves for energy cores, and micro-temporal mines set to detonate within open wounds.
The bombardment was no ordinary attack.
It was a concentrated storm of time, a lexicon of violence extracted from humanity's darkest chapters and unleashed all at once upon a single entity.
Mydra 9-C, its body a grotesque mosaic of biological remnants and paradox energy, had no opportunity to evade or adapt.
Eighteenth-century silver rounds tore into its shifting flesh, creating wounds that smoked gray and reeked of burning ozone.
Modern bursts from the miniaturized M4A1 barrel followed, each guided, seeking the energy junctions between its many heads, severing neural links one by one with horrific little detonations.
Behind the booming thunder of the ancient cannon, the fractured shrieks of pain from Mydra's twenty-seven mouths could be heard.
The blue lights in its remaining eyes flickered wildly, no longer filled with rage but now overtaken by panic and disbelief.
It was a creature born of chaos, yet the chaos unleashed by Arya was something different.
This was measured chaos, directed and deliberately distilled from the essence of human warfare.
Every projectile that struck it did not merely wound its body, but seemed to erase a fragment of its unstable existence.
Another head, attempting to spew a distortion wave, exploded under the impact of a reduced yet still lethal iron cannon blast.
Now only twenty-six remained.
"NO… NOT… THIS…" its voice echoed, broken and no longer mighty, more like wind wailing between dimensions.
Its massive body was hurled from one rooftop to another, crushing antennas and leaving trails of dark energy slime that corroded concrete.
All plans, all dark gratitude for the city's innocence, evaporated, replaced by the most primal instinct: survival.
In its total desperation, that instinct took over.
The remnants of its chaotic energy were drawn inward, into the dark core pulsing at the center of its body.
All remaining heads, all mutated limbs, withered and were pulled inward, as if its own body were collapsing and devouring them.
Then, in the brief silence before total annihilation, Mydra 9-C released everything.
No longer a controlled exhalation as before, but a nuclear eruption of pure and desperate paradox energy.
From every remaining pore burst the "Gray Breath" in its rawest and deadliest form.
This was no mere shockwave.
It was the substance itself—a lethal, dense mist capable of negating matter, twisting local time, and erasing memory.
Its color was so dense that even in the darkness of night, it appeared as a moving shadow, an expanding void that swallowed light and sound around it.
The mist made no sound.
It simply spread rapidly, devouring air, concrete rooftops, and iron towers, turning all it touched into lifeless gray static dust before dissolving into nothingness.
This was its final weapon, a cosmic act of self-destruction meant to drag everything—including the merciless time guardians—into oblivion with it.
To be continued…