Chapter 9
Zzt! Zzt! Zzt! Zzt!
Four dense, luminous energy cables shot through the night.
Two of them, from Nirmala, found their targets at the "wrists" of two of Mydra's relatively intact massive arms.
The other two, from Arya, wrapped tightly around the "ankles" of its formless lower mass.
The energy cables tightened on their own, forming an emergency harness that emitted a steady, low hum.
"Anchored!" Arya shouted, his voice cutting through the roaring wind generated by Mydra's continued ascent.
"Pull and guide!" Nirmala replied, her tone flatter yet no less firm.
Simultaneously, they applied pressure to the controls on their devices.
The energy cables did not merely bind; they became steering lines.
With the force of the temporal traction units mounted on their backs, Nirmala and Arya began to reel in the wild, colossal body.
It was like restraining and redirecting a wounded, raging whale in midair.
Their own bodies were dragged violently, their shoes screeching against the glass façades of buildings.
Yet with trained balance, they pivoted, altering the direction of the pull, forcing Mydra's uncontrolled vertical trajectory into a wide curve that arced away from the population center.
When they reached the apex of the pull, at a height where the city lights resembled a field of fireflies, they glanced at one another and nodded.
The moment had come.
In unison, their free hands pressed a sequence of buttons on their opposite wrists.
There was no explosion, no dramatic flash.
Only a sudden visual distortion, like heat shimmering above asphalt, but on a massive scale.
The sky around them seemed to wrinkle briefly, space folding inward.
The buildings, city lights, and simple star-strewn night of 1950s Djakarta faded rapidly, replaced by the sensation of motion without movement that tingled along the spine.
Then, stillness.
They had landed.
Or rather, emerged.
In a vast, empty field far on the outskirts of 1950s Djakarta.
The ground was dusty, bordered by tall, dark trees that tore jagged silhouettes into the sky.
Only moonlight illuminated the scene.
At the center of the field lay the powerless body of Mydra 9-C, now utterly still, still bound by the four energy cables whose glow slowly faded.
Nearby stood Nirmala and Arya, slightly bent forward, their breathing heavy but gradually returning to rhythm.
The silent field held a tension that slowly dissolved.
The final hum of the fading cables disappeared, replaced by labored breaths seeking steadiness.
With her body still taut and vigilant, Nirmala stood near the collapsed form of Mydra 9-C, her hand gently brushing the white bandage covering her right eye—a birth wound that had become part of her identity.
Her loose blue hair was damp with sweat and night dew.
She turned toward Arya, her single visible eye gleaming with weary light beneath the moon.
"Energy," she said, her voice hoarse yet clear.
"And bread. Three slices."
Arya, examining the readings on his device, nodded without question.
His hand swiftly opened a small compartment on his combat belt.
From it, he retrieved a small bottle containing a softly glowing neon-blue liquid, along with three compact foil-wrapped square packages.
He stepped closer, handing them to Nirmala.
"Energy displacement from the last jump was considerable," Arya said, taking one bread pack for himself.
"But you're right. Compared to the incident in the Siberian Ice Age, or the chaos in Constantinople in 1204, this mission… was smoother."
A small, tired smile touched the corner of his mouth.
Nirmala accepted the bottle and bread.
Her slender fingers opened the foil seal of one slice with efficient movement.
She took a bite, chewing slowly but steadily, while her remaining eye never left Mydra 9-C.
The bread, though ordinary in appearance, was packed with high-density nutrients and calories designed for rapid recovery.
Meanwhile, Arya unwrapped his own portion.
With natural discipline, he consumed it in measured bites, precisely fifty seconds between each, as though following an invisible internal rhythm.
After swallowing his first bite, Arya twisted open the cap of his energy drink.
Click!
The sound cracked through the field's silence.
He tilted his head back and drank the neon-blue liquid in one long, deep pull.
"Gulp… gulp… gulp…"
The liquid seemed to ignite in his throat, delivering an instant surge of refreshment visible in the way his tense shoulders eased slightly.
He exhaled in satisfaction, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Five minutes for stabilization. Then we transfer."
Nirmala nodded, finishing her first slice.
Her full attention shifted to their captive.
Mydra 9-C lay like a grotesque heap of discarded time.
With swift hand movements, Nirmala retrieved a set of energy restraints from her belt—rings of solid orange light.
With the precision of a surgeon, she guided the rings over Mydra's body.
They descended and locked firmly around the remnants of its limbs and dim energy core, emitting suppressive frequencies that kept the creature in total unconsciousness.
Once certain the restraints were secure, Nirmala took position on one side of Mydra's body.
Arya, having finished his bread and stored the empty bottle, positioned himself opposite her.
They raised their hands, and from the devices on their wrists projected a purple light grid that enveloped Mydra 9-C entirely.
"Coordinates for Delta-9 prison cell locked," Arya said, his tone formal, once again the procedural time guardian.
"Transfer of temporal anomaly object, code Mydra 9-C, in three… two… one…" Nirmala counted.
There was no sound.
Only a subtle visual shift.
The purple grid flared brightly for an instant, and Mydra 9-C's massive body seemed to melt from its edges, shrinking and vanishing from the dusty field of 1950s Djakarta, drawn into a prepared extratemporal containment space—a prison crafted within the folds of time, unreachable by any law except the one they themselves enforced.
The silence that follows a storm is always the heaviest.
In the dusty empty field, after the purple transfer light faded, a new and different quiet descended.
There was no longer the hiss of energy, the shriek of anomaly, or the hum of futuristic equipment.
Only the night wind moving gently through the palm leaves at the field's edge, carrying the scent of damp earth and faint woodsmoke from a distant village.
Nirmala Surdaya did not move immediately.
She stood with her back to the place where Mydra 9-C had vanished, her weary frame facing the faint shimmer of the distant city.
Djakarta of the 1950s stretched before her like a fragile and precious diorama.
The sparse streetlights formed simple patterns, not the flood of neon from her own era.
The sound of car horns drifted softly, like the hum of harmless bees.
There was a naive peace there, an ignorance of the complexities of space-time and paradoxes threatening from the future.
Her right eye, covered by bandage, could not see the light, yet her sharp temporal perception sensed the "feel" of the era—a calm vibration of a nation newly learning to stand, filled with innocent dreams and grounded determination.
To be continued…