Chapter 83


    The seed


    The fog was disappearing and the rain had stopped.


    The sky was turning light blue with shades of purple and yellow towards the horizon, where the sun was rising.


    A form from another invisible dimension floated in that sky as she watched Shin carry Mai in his arms.


    Goodbye, little fairy, Azusa said, but no one heard her.


    The moment Mai had shot that arrow her consciousness, as well as a special type of matter invisible to the eye, had detached from Mai, as she released the residual energy through her wings.


    Azusa was free. But not for long. She hadn''t survived, she was dying. But she had something else to accomplish.


    She had her last goal and she had to fulfill it with the matter she had left. It would be more than enough. After all, part of the reason for her existence had been to make sure that her body at that moment would have the right consistency to carry it out.


    The sunlight tore through the clouds on the horizon. The darkness was gone and the day was beginning.


    It would be the last time she would see that sun.


    Azusa, torn and extinguished by the sacrifice of her last intervention, hovered like a formless shadow, a blurred presence that neither common matter, nor the void, could fully embrace.


    The battle was over, the threat destroyed, but the price had been incalculable. What was to come she would not see it. But she had done her best and knew that the last thing she had to do was a part of the whole, even if it would no longer be her story.


    Mai did not know that a fragment of Azusa, a portion of her essence, a fragile strand from which the entity itself had emerged from her body. That fraction was now the only thing that remained of Azusa, the rest had dissipated, vanished in the cosmic sigh that arrow had traced, heading to its destiny, which was already a written past.


    The other part of her body would stay with Mai. And that part of Azusa may have looked like nothing more than a weakened form, but it was its consistency of material that made it unique. Billions of years just to make that part of her existence have the exact consistency for her final goal.


    The small portion of Azusa began its descent as it moved away from the lake, moving in a way incomprehensible to any three-dimensional sentient creature. No one saw her. No one could detect her, not the surveillance systems on the ground, nor those of the GSN, much less the army teams that were at what was her destination.


    She was like a whisper in space, a vestige of what had been, so to speak, crossing the void unnoticed, a fraction of will that still pulsed, even though she could feel her consciousness fading away.


    Azusa had anticipated all this. She knew that, in the end, she could not be saved, that the laws that governed her existence could not be altered in the final stretch. But there was a plan, one so old and so far away that not even Mai knew about it.


    She had arrived in Geneva and was on her way to Meyrin.


    There, in the ruins of the city that had once been the pinnacle of science, lay the remnants of a confrontation that only from the sky could be witnessed in full magnitude.


    Azusa headed through space, piercing the atmosphere and descending toward the place where the battle had reached its conclusion. The medical teams, soldiers and Mai''s companions were still there, barely aware of what had just happened at the lake. She passed Lizbeth who was heading to a ship accompanied by Philip and Zi. Azusa felt like smiling at the sight of Lizbeth, it was ironic since Lizbeth herself was related to her even though she didn''t know it.


    Lizbeth, who was running, did not notice at that moment that Azusa''s crystallization had passed close to her. Nor did she notice how that crystallization had just cut off some fine strands of her blonde hair, which Azusa absorbed inside her and disappeared.


    Genetic code obtained, she murmured to herself calmly.


    Azusa, invisible, passed by all those people and, at the moment when the sun was breaking through the battlefield, she plunged into the darkness of the CEEN facilities.


    She passed through destroyed gates and walls and came to an elevator. She passed it and plunged into the tunnel that was almost destroyed. Avoiding debris, she passed through chinks that would have been impossible for a person. Lower and lower.


    Finally she emerged from the elevator shaft. In the heart of that destruction, the void of existence opened up like a scar. She passed through the place she remembered from the past of her memories and went to the place that awaited her.


    It was a room where the destruction had not yet arrived. It was a room full of machinery that had been connected to the collision rings, as well as to the neutrino detection chambers, transformed into time travel chambers.


    The room containing the three Pening traps.


    Two traps were empty and a third whose electromagnetic sensors were flashing, revealing the decay of the particles that had been collected. The residue of a containment capsule, which had once been a prison for what should not exist, was beginning to empty, to dissolve. At the precise moment Azusa reached the site, the capsule was already about to be emptied of its contents and only a few thousand particles of those tokions were behaving like unstable quantum matter.


    Azusa became very small and went through the material of the trap to dive inside looking for what she had to find.


    The tokions were disappearing faster and faster and no electromagnetic field of Pening''s trap could stop them.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.


    Azusa became very small as she slipped through the particle soup until she found what she had been looking for.


    At the heart of the containment capsule, a quantum vacuum began to form. It was imperceptible to the naked eye, but not to Azusa whose size was almost as tiny as that of those tokions. However, Azusa perceived it instantly, with the precision of a memory of the past that now in her twilight was becoming a reality.


    In front of her, a distortion in space-time began to spin with invisible speed, as if something was being pulled by the tokions into a gravity that should not exist there. At first, the anomaly was so small that it seemed a mere flicker in the fabric of existence, a fleeting flash of matter and energy that even atoms could not identify.


    But Azusa knew. Something was being born.


    It was a black micro-hole, a singularity so tiny that it required no more than a fraction of time to manifest and die, but with a force capable of dragging with it everything it touched. Its appearance was not violent, nor cataclysmic; rather, it was like the whisper of an inevitable and ephemeral future, an opening in the fabric of the universe as delicate and unstable as a dewdrop about to fall from the tip of a leaf.


    The tokions all around began to swirl around the black micro-hole, as if a cosmic dance were beginning without a reason. A swirl of strange matter concentrated at its center, trapping light, energy and above all time, in those tokions that were drawn in.


    A dark vortex of infinite possibilities, but smaller than the smallest grain of sand on earth, but with the capacity to consume everything in a matter of seconds if someone knew how to handle it with the proper technology.


    The particle began to take shape, but the shape was that of nothingness itself: a sphere of absolute emptiness, where nothing existed except the pure absence of reality. But at the same time, with the tokions it had absorbed, it became a hope.


    That something so small could live for less than a blink of an eye and she, who had lived millions of years, was there to see that moment that would give meaning to her existence was ironic indeed. but usually the significance of life was also about small, fleeting moments.


    The black micro-black hole reached a size that was barely the size of a few tokions and Azusa approached it. The remaining matter of her body began to unfold and captured the remaining tokions that were absorbed by the black hole, while she took a spherical shape enclosing that seed of hope.


    That was what Azusa had come to capture. With a swiftness that only the ancients could understand, the matter that had once been Azusa unfolded through the layers of reality like an invisible veil embracing the tiny singularity just as it began its ephemeral adolescence and formed its core. With absolute precision, Azusa''s essence enveloped the particle, not with the violence of despair, but with the calm of one who knows she has no more time. The micro-hole began to shrink, to slow down, until its quantum dance froze, as if time had stopped.


    A black hole that should have been dead, now sat like a mosquito inside an amber. The anomaly was imprisoned in a sphere of pure matter, which took the shape of a marble: small, but infinite in its possibilities.


    The marble that looked like an ordinary glass ball grew in size and from the quantum world came to a more palpable reality.


    Azusa, in her last breath, felt a pang of relief, and then, a total stillness. The entity had achieved its final purpose: it had closed the cycle, stopped the death of all that had been known, but at a cost that no one, not even Mai, would fully understand. And if she did, that would be a story Azusa would never know.


    With what was left of her energy, Azusa moved through the dimensions. She could not return to the reality she had come from, she could not inhabit the fabric of existence again now that she had that. But there was something else: something that only those who have touched the borders of death could understand. With one last, almost imperceptible act of will, Azusa moved to her last remaining place, taking advantage of the anomaly she had just absorbed within herself.


    By her thought alone she did so.


    Inside Pening''s trap that marble grew in size for a second until it reached the size of a ball and a flash of light illuminated the room. Inside the marble a lens effect was created that distorted the black hole and made it look the same size as the ball. Around it appeared two halos of light spinning at full speed.


    The test had worked. Azusa smiled and disappeared from the place to appear in another.


    Azusa had teleported not only in space, but in time and only with her thoughts.


    She had arrived at the place she was supposed to.


    It was a room in a SID base in French territory.


    The bed had messy sheets, witnesses of the contact that its occupants had had just a few hours ago. More precisely, three people: Mai, Shin, and Lizbeth.


    The marble was reduced in size to a mere two centimeters, and fell on a black trench coat, bounced and continued to roll down the inside of the fabric of the coat.


    Azusa felt her senses fading and once again the memories of so many eras crossed her mind. Her beloved, her family, the coming and going of her memories.


    I''ll see you on the other side, she whispered as she died.


    The marble finally touched the inner fabric of the raincoat and sank into that sea of Dirac.


    A marble. An insignificant, harmless object. No one would suspect its existence, no one would guess that inside it beat the essence of a black micro-hole, the residue of a battle that no human being could ever understand.


    A future still uncertain perhaps.


    Azusa with her last thought felt like smiling.


    That coat of the one who had once saved the world would become her last room. Just as that girl had said.


    Her main body would be with Mai and that other tiny part in Shin''s coat would await its time in the future when someone would claim it.


    Azusa no longer existed. Her consciousness had dissolved, a distant echo that could never be recalled.


    Yet the seed was still there, frozen in its purest form. Frozen in time.


    A seed into the future.


    At that precise moment the marble floated in a frozen sea of darkness, surrounded by old books, strange devices, guns, a sword. Everything floated as if in the emptiness of space inside that coat.


    The marble hit an old cell phone and at that precise moment the phone began to ring. Unfortunately its owner was not there at that moment.


    The owner of that coat had just boarded a ship, together with his companions, to investigate the incident of a certain plane over Lake Lemac.


    It was Wednesday, March 21 of the 125^th.


    One day before the final battle over the lake.