Siddhārtha lay half buried in sand, still as a lump of stone. His tri-D antenna opened slightly, shedding a tiny stream of dust.
He could sense his enemy nearby—everywhere, it seemed.
No—there he was, not more than a hundred meters away, moving from left to right across Siddhārtha’s field of vision.
I wonder what he’s up to?
He resisted the temptation to fully extend his antenna. In the quiet that now reigned, even the slightest movement could draw attention from a considerable distance. The release of kinetic energy was one of the easiest to detect. It would be far too dangerous to reveal himself; the last attack had proved beyond the shadow of a doubt his enemy’s hideous strength.
So what is he doing?
Unable to restrain his desire to know, he let his antenna push another ten centimeters above the top of the sand.
Unthinkingly, Siddhārtha tensed every muscle in his body.
A thousand meters ahead of where his enemy slowly made his way across the flats was his destination—a small black shadow atop a dune. Asura.
Jesus of Nazareth was moving slowly, leaving footprints in the sand. The flames and explosions had singed his already tan skin to such a brownness that he threatened to disappear into the desert landscape altogether.
Jesus was almost out of Siddhārtha’s range when his path began to curve as he headed directly toward the top of the dune where Asura was standing.
The sky and land were lit with scarlet for a moment. Then as Jesus began to climb the dune, the world faded again to its former monotone, and an icy wind blew in between the swirling flames. The brightness of the flames waxed and ebbed. Even the rapid energy shifts and massive discharges generated by the Nazarene’s weapon lost much of their power in this world near death.
Siddhārtha searched around for any sign of Orionae, but could not detect him anywhere. Finally, he fully extended his antennae, reasoning that his enemy’s attention would be fixed on the far-off dune where Asura was standing.
As he did so, he felt a terrible and urgent need to act. I have to distract him!
Siddhārtha struggled out of the sand to stand. “Hold! Jesus of Nazareth!” he cried, yet his voice only traveled from the top of his throat back down his neck into his own body, reverberating up into his ears, but never reaching the outside air. Siddhārtha panicked, realizing that if he did not draw at least half of his enemy’s firepower in his own direction, Asura would not be able to withstand another of Jesus’s attacks.
Jesus of Nazareth stopped abruptly, then slowly lifted his right hand.
Suddenly, the far edges of the flats erupted toward the sky without a sound. Higher and higher they rose into the gray atmosphere, creating a valley with impossibly steep sides, while at the same time the edges of the sky plunged toward the ground. At the limits of Siddhārtha’s field of vision, sky and land joined together, fusing into a single curved wall. Lighter than shadow, more indefinite even than the void, the flats and the gray sky formed a giant cylinder, as if the very laws of geometry had broken. Far out in that vertiginous space, like a fragile image in a kaleidoscope, he could see Asura looking very small.
The howling of the wind had ceased entirely, leaving a sickening emptiness in its place.
“Stop! Do not do this!”
Siddhārtha sprinted through the deathlike silence, lacking the time to consider why Jesus of Nazareth grew no nearer no matter how much he ran.
As Siddhā rtha sped across the sand, the battle structures in his body prepared for combat. Palisade tissues—resembling those in a plant, but more closely akin to the electroplaques of an eel—linked his processors and his core reactor to his weapons units; discharge panels on his shoulders opened like unfolding leaves. Automatically, his metabolizer revved up to maximum capacity as the circuit from the reactor connected to the roots of the panels. In an instant the leaves were ready to unleash their deadly stores.
Siddhārtha did not hesitate. Still sprinting, he released the high voltage inside his condensers in a single blast.
With a flash sky and land turned ghostly pale. The electromagnetic waves pulsed toward their target, tracing a circle of pure blue ions around Jesus of Nazareth.
Less than a breath later, Siddhārtha struck again. This time, the gray sky turned a dark leaden color. Seen from within, all the objects inside the great cylinder lost their individual colors, becoming translucent. Then, a circle of ultramarine light began to spread, enveloping all.
Siddhārtha watched as his attack ran its course.
The shining ring of the electromagnetic wave was rapidly spreading in all directions, losing its coloration as it went. It dispersed like a broken circlet of chain links, some sections clinging together, others severing completely until all had disappeared. Siddhārtha spotted Jesus’s emaciated back standing just beyond the fading circle of light.
He shook his head and resumed his mad dash across the sand.
While he ran, the gray sky and the vast desert ground into motion, moving with increasing speed until all was rotating around him. Gaping vortices formed in the sky, while the flats transformed into a faded spiral that spun at a frightening velocity. The only things not carried by their motion were Siddhārtha and the man from Nazareth.
Siddhārtha’s thoughts raced. Why, when everything around us is spinning at such a furious rate, am I and Jesus alone still able to stand? He felt cold sweat trickling down his back as understanding slipped from his grasp.
Then suddenly he understood: he had been pushed into a separate space from the one where Jesus and Asura stood—a fold in space-time, or a separate plane entirely.
“Let me out!” he shouted with all his strength. “Let me out of here!” But all his voice accomplished was to vibrate the air that closed around him.
Yet Siddhārtha’s shout reached across the swirling tumult like a single ray of light, piercing Asura’s ears.
WHEEEEEEEEN
A high-pitched vibration, too high for even Asura’s sensitive eardrums to detect, caused a slight stirring in the air. It pressed in on Asura’s body, shimmering like a mirage, assaulting the cellular structure of her body via the sensory cells at her nerve endings, causing her nucleic acids to begin to ionize. Now the space around her began to revolve at a frightening speed. Outside that whorl, Jesus shone like a primary star with a comet tail of streaming light.
Gradually Asura’s form grew more transparent. The spinning sky and land and the brilliantly shining form of her enemy were as light that coursed through her body, spreading beyond her as she dissolved.
Stretches of the rapidly spinning flats erupted in incandescent fire; fragments of molten magma rained down, trailing tails of white smoke.
Satisfied with his attack, Jesus flicked a switch on the ultrahigh frequency generator in his hand.
Deep silence returned. Several meters ahead of where Jesus stood, a number of wide, shallow trenches radiated out through the dunes toward the horizon, scars where the sand had been evaporated by the high temperatures of the ultrahigh frequency vibrations. Wisps of white smoke still rose from the trenches in places.
Ultrahigh frequency vibrations had the power to neutralize cellular activity, scramble nerves, and destroy cellular structure altogether. It seemed highly unlikely that Asura had been able to escape the attack.
Jesus of Nazareth strode across the flats, crossing a kilometer of scorched sand. When he reached the top of the dune where Asura had been standing moments before, the ashen dust lifted around his feet like smoke into the wind. No trace of Asura’s presence remained. Along the horizon beyond the dunes, the lead-colored sea spread out flat and fallen. Behind him, the ruined city stood like a giant gravestone over the flats.
An ice cold wind cut through the man’s heart. Of his appointed tasks, he had completed the first, which was also the most difficult. Yet he was left feeling a slight dissatisfaction that it had ended so easily. His dissatisfaction mingled with an uncomfortable awareness in his mind that his enemy was hiding out there, somewhere. Doubts assailed him. Surely such a long wait could not be rewarded with such a short battle. And it had been such a one-sided fight, besides. He wondered whether this was really the end of it, whether his victory was truly complete. With some effort, he restrained himself from plummeting into despair and made for his second target, heading toward the place where the waves broke against the shore.
Sand drifted like smoke, and the wind whistled like a flute around him. The sea was pressing toward him—baring its white fangs at him. The spray wet the long shore, turning it black, and drifted in a fine mist onto his tattered garments.
His enemy had hidden here, beneath these waters. He had known for a very long time that his enemy would likely come from here.
And yet, contrary to his expectations, his enemy had come all the way out of the sea and into the dying city.
Far-off to his left, he spotted a massive, angular object resting atop the sand.
“There you are.”
He quickened his pace as he approached. The object was at least fifty meters to a side. It appeared wider than it was tall, though that was likely because its base was buried under the sand. Long years of erosion had left countless fine cracks and pockmarks on its surface. It looked entirely out of place on the vast, unbroken land beneath the flat gray of the sky.