A grayish curtain of snow hung down from the clouds to touch the ground to the north. Gusts of wind blew flakes down to swirl and sweep across the icy slope. The snow increased in intensity, quickly reducing Asura’s visibility to zero.
A ceaseless wind screamed in Asura’s ears. In the few moments when the snow let up for a moment, she spotted a vast number of shadows moving across the white glacier in the distance. In between gusts, she saw the shadows multiplying, approaching. Then she spotted an object in the distance, a strange shape like a flattened disk with a complicated protrusion on its top. From its tip a blinding light erupted. The light formed a revolving beam that swept across the snowy plain, transforming snow and ice to scalding steam that drifted up toward the gathered clouds. Off to her left, a cannon mounted atop an igloo-shaped base began to fire. Plumes of snow shot up into the air like trees in a forest, incandescent light flaring between them—cannons on the hills engaging each other across the glacier.
Off on the distant horizon to the west, a river with a name Asura didn’t know undulated slowly, the color of lead. If only she could reach the river, she might awaken from this nightmare.
She took stock of her surroundings. Her enemy had already advanced onto the icy plains beneath the rise on which she stood. Thin wisps of smoke rose from impact points halfway up the low ridgeline to her right, spreading until the entire side of the mountain was veiled. Her enemy’s armored vehicles were already advancing onto the plains. The dozen or so vehicle-mounted heat-ray cannons that formed Asura’s final line of defense at the base of the rise were already engaged in combat. Pale arrows of light crisscrossed in the sky, and tanks and armored vehicles spit sparks like crucibles between the billowing clouds of steaming snow and ice.
Asura gathered her infantry amidst the flames and the steam and sounded the retreat. They went around the foot of the ridgeline, making for a snowy valley between two ridges to the west. Missiles skimmed across the tops of the high cliffs, making the air shake around them. An incredible explosion sounded from the entrance to the valley ahead. The blast wave hit the walls of snow and ice like a hammer, echoing like thunder in the distance. The enemy was asserting his control of her escape route.
Another missile exploded ahead of the infantry, sending shattered chunks of ice and rock up to ricochet off the cliff walls; fragments continued to fall back down into the valley for what seemed like several minutes. Columns of flame rose around her line, blocking their advance.
Their route into the valley was now piled high with shattered ice and rock. Asura turned the column and led her men up the cliffs on her right, climbing until she reached the top of the ridge where she could look down across the entire battlefield. It appeared that now their only possible route for retreat was via the great river to the west.
With a start, Asura realized she had no idea where she was, nor how great her own forces were. Was this a small section of a vast battlefront, or was this the only engagement, the struggle on which victory or defeat would hang? The only thing that was clear to her was that the enemy army covering the snowy plains behind them was led by none other than Maitreya.
There was not much hope to be found here. Surely she would never reach the river with the dozen or so foot soldiers remaining to her now. They stumbled along, ice forming like cold flowers on their chests and limbs. She called for them to move faster, directing them along the ridge toward the west. Yet it was not long before she noticed that her troop was no longer visible—though she guessed that the burning pyres that dotted the ridgeline behind her were their remains.
“Well, Asura? You know you will never make the river. Join my forces, Asura. It is the only future remaining to you in which you survive.”
The familiar voice echoed in Asura’s chest. She raised her snow-encrusted face toward the western sky. Not a single living shape moved in that uninterrupted vista of snow and ice. Suddenly, she was reminded of another battlefield from another time, beneath a dark night sky.
An aurora had rippled in the distance on that battlefield, colors of light crossing through the frozen air. In that bleak place only death had thrived.
Where was that again?
When was that again?
Here, there was only the white landscape as far as she could see in every direction. No night. No aurora.
What was that?
What?
What?
The image she held in her mind’s eye burst abruptly into flames—this was a nightmare battle from which there was no escape. Everything had begun here. Everything returned here again.
Memories of bitter fighting for long, long years against the forces of Śakra crawled across her vision, intermingling with the white wasteland before her. The giant statue of the god hidden in the depths of the Pearl Palace was nothing more than a promise of destruction, and yet those she fought believed it to be a symbol of their salvation. The distant memories burned in Asura’s breast. She was trapped in a phantasm of struggles past. Trapped!
Asura stood.
✦ ✦ ✦
Wrapped in its protective barrier, the strange sphere loomed above the sea of flame. Hatred and enmity swirled through the tongues of fire, burning Asura more than the heat that flooded over her.
This is all part of Maitreya’s psychic assault! I must be strong!
She held a hand to her forehead and shut her eyes tight. She felt the inside of her skull grow suddenly cool as her supplementary processor employed a secondary circuit to transmit high-frequency waves into the gray matter of her cerebrum. Filters activated, absorbing the hypnotic electrical emissions that were targeting her, reflecting them back at their source.
Even under the brunt of the psychic assault, she retained her control over the barrier around the sphere.
Using the brainwave detector attached to her tertiary semicircular canal, she searched for Maitreya. Unable to pinpoint him, Asura measured the hypnotic wave patterns and fired a hand missile back along their trajectory. She lamented the lack of any form of psychic attack in her own personal arsenal. Compared to Maitreya’s mental assault, even an antimatter proton bomb and an antigravitational barrier were sticks and stones.
Asura’s missile flew, trailing a long tail of fire behind it, the power of a splitting lithium atom turning one of Maitreya’s radiation shutters into scalding steam. Before the light from the blast had faded, Asura fired another. But the jet of super-hot gas following the second missile struck the metallic fastenings of another shutter and reflected back, sending a wave of molten metal splashing toward Asura’s face fast enough to cross the distance in a few hundredths of a second.
Asura twisted her body. No time to raise a barrier—her processor went into hyperspeed, rerouting her reflex pulses from her cerebrum down toward her spinal column, shaving milliseconds off her reaction time.
Danger!