“Asura. There is something I would ask you.”
Asura smiled, revealing a glimmer of white teeth. “You have quite the nerve to say that when it is I who have come such a great distance with so many questions.”
“Answer me, and I will have no reason to destroy you. I will send you wherever you wish.” There was a tone of peaceful kindness in Maitreya’s voice that might have been interpreted as curiosity.
“But not before reducing me to a husk of my former self, devoid of memory.” Asura laughed as though she were talking about someone else’s fate entirely.
“Don’t be greedy.”
Asura felt the tension between her and Maitreya quietly increase. “Fine,” she said, breathing out a long sigh. “What’s your question?”
“You are here with two others. Who is it that gave you your mission? What organization maintained your sleeping webs for some five thousand years?”
The instant Maitreya’s words rang in Asura’s mind, she switched off the circuit that connected her brain to her supplementary processor’s neural memory web. Asura became empty, filled only with the darkness of night. A feeling of release spread from her emergency circuitry, making her feel lighter than the wind itself.
“Speak, Asura! Who gave you your mission? What is the name of your organization?” Maitreya’s voice grew increasingly irritated.
By the time the first blast hit, Asura had already become one with the night around her. The fear in her heart fled into the darkness, leaving nothing in its place but an empty hollow.
“Well? Asura? You cannot escape. I will give you another ten seconds.”
In the unmoving silence that followed, even the wind died. It lasted for exactly ten seconds, during which Asura stood, quiet, her mind frozen and unchanging.
The second blast hit.
Asura felt herself plummeting at a terrifying speed through endless space in which there was no up or down, left or right. No stars shone in the monotone darkness around her.
Somewhere off in the distance, the aurora flickered a lonely red. She tried to focus on the color but it slipped away, and her consciousness followed.
Neural memory web still off-line, Asura’s supplementary processor activated a secondary metabolizer, designed to handle massive expenditures of energy. Her processor began to rapidly analyze her situation. Once all internal systems had been checked and no abnormalities were found, the processor turned its attention outside. With the neural memory net inaccessible, this was an extremely difficult procedure. The processor was forced to pick targets for analysis based on an endless reiteration of basic logic patterns.
One of her eyes saw only the darkness of a deep night sky with a scattering of stars. No cause for her current state could be found there. The other eye looked out over the cold basin. The faint sound of wind stimulated her auditory nerves, then both of her eyes moved together, focusing on the giant shape that loomed ahead of her. Her processor noted the animosity radiating from that figure like a tidal wave, and all became clear. Only a sliver of time remained.
Her supplementary processor connected directly to her cerebellum. In a flash, Asura sprang to her feet. Her right hand reached up to pull out the hairpin from the back of her head and fling it forward. The hairpin left a faint trail of light, golden ions scattering into the night behind it. At almost exactly the same time, the god-figure towering in the darkness began to waver like a mirage. The hairpin burst into flame and fell to the ground.
Asura regained consciousness. She welcomed the ache in her head—though it felt as though her skull had cracked wide open, it was the surest sign yet that at last the advantage had passed to her side. This was a chance she could not afford to waste.
Bands of pale blue light swept between Maitreya’s form and her own. She could feel her body shivering under the terrifying brunt of her enemy’s psychic attack. If her supplementary processor hadn’t been engaged to run her systems automatically, she would have died without ever waking again. Quickly she cranked her micro-reactor to full and extended the agitator from the magnetic field generator on her bracelet. Its tip touched the next band of blue light as it approached. There was an incredible flash.
The high-voltage stream generated by her agitator arced between the two gravitationally sealed spaces between her and Maitreya, and both barriers collapsed. Before the sparks had even faded, Asura dived into the remains of the crystal building. The floor was now a sea of flame, but she felt no pain or discomfort. She stood with the sphere of translucent pipes at her back. Supported on short metallic bars, the sphere appeared to be floating over the intense flames that licked along the floor.
“Maitreya! How can you possibly destroy me, you who have come from another world? To me you are void, like the sea of darkness from which you emerged.”
There came no answer.
Moving swiftly, Asura wrapped the sphere inside a dimensional barrier. There it flickered faintly like a failing neon sign. She could sense a violent struggle taking place somewhere nearby in the remains of the building—but though she knew this was likely Siddhārtha and Orionae engaged in a battle to the death against Jesus of Nazareth, it was far too dangerous for her to pay any attention to their combat. If she lost her own engagement, she would have no way of ever knowing the true nature of the being that had turned this world into a wasteland.
Outside the translucent walls, the sky began to lighten until it was as bright as day. Its color shifted from yellow to green, from green to blue; then the basin and the sky arcing above it were filled with a shimmering purple radiance. That too faded and was replaced by a faint, pale light suffusing sky and land.