Chapter 1
Kawedanan of Greater Jakarta, 1950 AD.
The city was submerged in the atmosphere of the fifth decade of the century, as if time itself had chosen to pause and rest here.
The neon lights of shopfronts cast a soft gleam upon the chrome of old cars gliding slowly past, while the distant chime of a tram bell slipped between the rustle of silk skirts and the murmur of hushed conversations.
In a room thick with cigarette smoke and the bitter scent of coffee, a woman sat.
She did not sit in the usual manner.
Her wooden chair was turned backward, facing the backrest, so that her body leaned forward with both arms neatly resting atop it.
Her chin settled upon her crossed wrists, a posture that was not merely sitting, but a stance of waiting, or perhaps of contemplation, wrapped in a silence heavy with questions.
With slow and deliberate movement, the woman shifted her gaze from the distance, focusing her entire being upon the man bound before her.
Her grayish eyes hardened into something like cold-forged steel, reflecting the dim light that swept across the room.
Her hand, which had been tapping restlessly against the wood, now lifted a heavy, timeworn object of metal.
An eighteenth-century pistol, its grip carved with intricate engravings and its barrel darkened by age and repeated use.
The atmosphere in the room seemed to freeze; the air ceased to flow, and only the pounding of a heartbeat echoed between walls that bore silent witness.
The pistol advanced with a movement almost ritualistic—not hurried, but inevitable.
Its cold muzzle found the surface of the man's forehead, pressing firmly enough to leave a circular imprint.
The woman did not blink; her breathing remained calm, steady—nothing like someone threatening a life.
Her position upon the reversed chair gave her an unsettling air of authority.
Physically lower, yet all the room's energy converged upon her, upon the decision suspended at the tip of her finger curled around the trigger.
His plea shattered in a deep tremor, tearing through the blanket of silence that wrapped the room.
"Mercy," he murmured, the word escaping like trapped air forced free.
His eyes, widened by pure fear, never left the woman's face.
"I beg you… I promise. I will not cause another disturbance this year."
Each word felt heavy, breathless, as though extracted from the depths of his terrified soul.
Then, in a softer voice, laden with crushing confession, he added, "I will return immediately. Back to the year 2005, where I truly belong."
His words hung in air already saturated with the scent of old gunpowder and cold sweat.
The confession of time travel—"the year 2005"—was no metaphor.
Those words changed everything.
The dim chandelier light seemed to flicker briefly, reflecting confusion and bitterness in the woman's eyes.
The eighteenth-century pistol in her hand did not waver, still pressed coldly against his skin, yet the stiffness in her shoulders revealed a fierce internal conflict.
His confession had opened an entirely new dimension to this confrontation.
This was no longer merely a personal dispute, but a collision between eras, a fault in the corridor of time that had to be corrected by unimaginable means.
The woman's face, once like a mask of cold marble, slowly showed cracks.
Her thin lips trembled almost imperceptibly—not from mercy, but from the weight of a truth that had suddenly become real.
The man before her was no ordinary enemy.
He was an intruder from the future, an anomaly disturbing the fragile fabric of the 1950s reality.
His promise to "return" sounded like a spell, a solution—yet also an admission of damage already done.
The decision fell without pause, without mercy, manifested in a soul-shaking blast.
The first shot erupted, loud and dry, filling the room and forever severing the melody of jazz.
The first bullet struck squarely between his brows, ending his plea, his promise, and every fragment of his future in one violent instant.
His head jerked backward, yet his bound body held him in tragic suspension.
Before the echo of the first shot had fully faded—before the body had entirely comprehended its own death—two successive blasts followed.
Those bullets shattered his right eye, breaking the window of his soul into a bleeding crater.
Almost simultaneously, or perhaps within a fraction of an immeasurable second, the final two shots screamed through the air.
His left eye met the same fate, shattered to pieces, leaving behind a hollow, ghastly void.
Five shots.
One to end it, four to ensure there would be no light, no sight, no evidence left of the world of 2005 he had once seen.
The sharp, aged scent of gunpowder quickly flooded the air, mingling with the metallic aroma of spreading blood.
The truth now hung heavier than the lingering smoke.
Nirmala Adisurya.
Her very name was a clue, a code not born of this era.
She sat amid the ruins of her own drama, surrounded by the aesthetics of the fifties that were not her world, watching a man—also a wanderer through time—now reduced to a silent corpse.
Both of them were smugglers within the fabric of history, fragments of the future trapped inside a misplaced nostalgia.
The man had wished to return, but Nirmala chose to carve his departure in iron and blood.
Her act was not merely murder.
It was erasure—a cleansing of one anomaly by another, a horrifying decision that to preserve the integrity of one timeline, another must be severed with final violence.
The five gunshot wounds to his head, which should have marked the end of the story, proved instead to be the opening of something far more dreadful.
The man's once-limp and silent body began to tremble.
Not the tremor of dying, but the vibration of energy radiating from within, forcing his body to move against natural law.
With an unnatural jerk, his slack, perforated head slowly began to rise.
The bones in his neck cracked and ground together, mending their fractures as though driven by an unseen force.
The blood that had streamed down his face seemed to recede, drawn back into wounds now pulsing with a dim violet-blue glow.
Nirmala Surdaya, who had just turned to leave, froze in place.
One of her pupils dilated, witnessing impossibility take form before her.
Her standard procedure, a cleansing protocol performed hundreds of times before, appeared futile against this phenomenon.
Then, a sound emerged.
At first, it was a hiss, like air forced through punctured lungs.
The hiss shifted into a giggle, then exploded into laughter.
Not laughter of triumph nor ordinary madness, but something deep, resonant, and unmistakably inhuman.
The man lifted his head fully, staring at the ceiling with his still-destroyed eye sockets, and laughed.
His laughter shook the walls, sent concrete dust cascading downward, and shattered what little silence remained.
He laughed without pause for a full ten minutes—a span that felt eternal to Nirmala, frozen as she watched.
With each passing second of that laughter, the man's body underwent transformation.
To be continued…