POV: Rudra Sen
The room is silent except for the gentle hum of the monitor. I sit in the dark, light from the screens flickering across the walls like distant gunfire, echoing a war that hasn't yet begun. My hands rest calmly on the desk. No trembling. No doubt. The simulations have become smoother, sharper. She adapts faster now, absorbs pain like it's data, filters grief into something more useful.
She doesn't break. She sharpens.
They forget who I am. Or maybe they pretend. The retired officer, the ghost in the cabinet, the shadow behind signatures. But they all know the name. Rudra Sen. There was a time I could end insurgencies with a phone call, collapse entire cartels with a whisper. I turned defectors into patriots and turned silence into intelligence. The Northeast sweep, the Yemen breach, the triple agent extraction in Kandahar. All mine. All clean. All forgotten, publicly of course. But inside those who still matter, my name never left.
I don't know when the fascination began. Maybe after the Fatima incident. Maybe the moment I saw her walk away from what should've shattered her. Most humans drown when thrown into the abyss. She learned to breathe there. I had been an advisor to the defense and foreign ministry for years by then. Quiet work. Strategic placement. But nothing had intrigued me in a long time. Until her.
The files are hidden, of course. The program isn't official. Classified under layers even the system doesn't know exist. It began as a theory. What if you could build a weapon from inside the organism, something too human to be questioned, too damaged to resist control. Not a soldier. Not an agent. A force of reaction sculpted into purpose.
She doesn't even realize it. The reassignments. The emotional traps. The disasters that conveniently required her unique intervention. One after another. Measured carefully. Escalated strategically. Every scar we allowed became a lesson she taught herself to master. Every failure, a rewire of her instincts.
But no, I'm not building a blade. Blades break. Bodies fall. I'm shaping inevitability. Not physical, but psychological. The kind of weapon that cannot be defeated because it's never truly in combat. It watches, predicts, infiltrates and influences before the enemy even picks up a gun. That is Mrityu. And yes, the name was mine. The public may have whispered it as myth, but it was seeded. Intentionally. Strategically. The fear of her needed to move faster than her actions. Let the world flinch before she ever enters the room.
I am watching the recordings again. Her in the rain after the Uttarakhand mission. Not crying. Not screaming. Just sitting. Still. Breathing like a machine does when it's learning to be silent. That was the moment I knew she could become exactly what we needed. What this country needed. Unstoppable. Unquestionable. Unaware.
Some monsters roar. Others study the roar until they own it.
I do this for the nation. I do this because no one else sees the bigger picture. Empathy is a delay we can't afford anymore. Humanity is good. Emotional fragility is good. For people with small, ordinary lives. People who are meant to love and grieve and fail safely. But she was never meant for that. People like her are born once in a generation. Her path cannot be gentle. It cannot be kind.
She is not becoming the shadow because I chose her. She was born to be one.
She needs something real. A mission. A direction. I'm giving her one. That is not cruelty. That is clarity.
I sign off for the next test. A civilian setup. Low threat. High emotional confusion. Let's see what she becomes this time.
A knock sounds at the door.
I don't turn. Probably a report. Maybe an interruption.
POV: Giriraj Singh Pradhan
The screen glows softly in the half-lit chamber, the biometric match taking its time until a name appears that does not belong to this world, not entirely. Rudra Sen. For a moment everything inside me stills. I had always known someone was involved behind the veil, someone powerful, but this, this was not something I imagined. Not him. Not the ghost behind half the intelligence victories this nation quietly credits without ever naming.
I have felt his presence in the margins of every unexplained decision, in the silence that followed impossible resolutions. Rudra Sen was never replaced because no one could replace him. The one who resolved the Northeastern standstill without stepping into the terrain, who orchestrated diplomatic collapses with a single clause embedded inside a trade deal, who brought down insurgent supply routes using a falsified map and a whispered rumor. He wasn't a man you found. He was the man who already knew you were looking. And yet, when it comes to her, I have never faltered. Not then, not now, and history will not remember me as one who stepped back when she needed someone to step forward.
I dive deeper, eyes moving across encrypted data buried inside misleading filenames and mis-labelled entries. Even then, most of it resists access. Rudra's walls are not designed for trespassing. Still, enough appears. Enough to form an outline that should not exist. It is not surveillance. It is documentation. Longitudinal. Methodical. She is being studied like a behavior model, her reactions traced, her triggers noted, her evolution recorded in metrics and approximations.
It makes no sense until you assume what no sane person would dare assume. That everything about her emergence was not just observed but cultivated. Not interfered with directly, but guided, nudged, tested. She has been walking through corridors that were being constructed one step ahead of her pace. I walk out of the surveillance chamber and sit at the temple, stone cold beneath me, incense curling into stillness that does nothing to settle my mind. Around me the chants rise and fall, but all I hear are the echoes of her footsteps through every room she should not have survived, and the silence in which someone was always listening.
Two hours. That is how long it takes to build the pattern in my mind, to weigh the fragments against the weight of what I have seen with my own eyes. Each situation that appeared to demand her unique presence, each tragedy timed with her proximity, each escape that hardened her further. It was not fate. It was a strategy. Rudra is not building a soldier. He is refining a concept. Mrityu. Not the death that ends battles, but the fear of it that prevents them.
I bow to the deity not out of submission but to seal my clarity. Some truths are too heavy to be carried without that pause before the storm. I rise, walk steadily through the corridor, and do not stop until I reach her room. This is not a report. This is not a debriefing. This is me sitting across from the only person who deserves the truth without performance.
She sits across from me like she always does now, silently, precisely, with that strange stillness I've never seen in another human. It is not calm. It is not tense. It is simply present, watchful, detached, as if her body is rooted here while her mind drifts somewhere deeper than even she can name. There is no rest in that stillness. Only readiness.
I place the folder between us on the table, though I don't open it. Some truths are too sacred for paper. They deserve to be spoken, carried through voice, through presence. I meet her eyes and hold them. Then I begin.
"You are being used again."
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't blink. Which tells me enough. She already knows, or at least suspects it. That, too, is part of how deeply this has all gone. I continue, slowly, deliberately.
"Rudra began tracking you after Fatima. He didn't reach out. Didn't offer support. He created a log. Patterns. Psychological impact charts. He wasn't worried. He was impressed."
There's a shift in her posture, almost imperceptible. Not defensive. Not angry. Analytical. She is calculating, sorting the information even as she receives it, not with emotion but with the precise detachment of someone who has already lived it.
"Your breakdowns were not failures to him. They were data points. Every panic attack, every collapse, every outburst, he documented it. Not with concern. With interest. You weren't returning from anything. You were rerouted. Rewired. Rebuilt."
I let the silence stretch between us, not to provoke but to allow the truth to settle. She says nothing. She doesn't need to. Her stillness is answer enough. She has heard this before, somewhere inside her own bones.
"He didn't rebuild you. He reassembled the damage and called it progress."
Finally I open the folder, revealing just one page. A schematic, cold and clinical. Incident logs, escalation layers, projected behaviors. She scans it but I know she doesn't need it. Her mind has held these patterns all along. All she ever needed was confirmation.
"You've always asked the wrong question, Chhayika," I say quietly. "You keep trying to find the man who broke you. The man who sent that fake Fatima. You assumed it was Azhar. I let you. Because at the time, I wasn't sure either."
Her eyes don't move but I see the change. A flicker beneath the neutral surface. Not surprise, but recognition.
"It wasn't Azhar. He wouldn't have used such finesse. This wasn't an attack. It was a test. A psychological calibration. Someone was measuring your endurance. Not to destroy you, but to see what came after the destruction."
I pause, because memory hits like glass shattering in the mind. Tunis.
"After the bloodbath in Tunis, something changed. You thought it was Azhar retaliating. So did I, at first. The timing was perfect, the bodies too clean, the signature deliberately blurred. But then the details refused to add up. Azhar's people leave a mark. Chaos, not containment. Tunis was cold. Structured. It wasn't revenge. It was design. Someone wanted to see how far you could go before you broke. And what you would do if you didn't."
Her mouth opens slightly, then closes. She is thinking faster than I am speaking. Let her.
"I doubted everyone after that. Even Aariz. Especially Aariz. You were too close to him, and his silence was too well placed. I watched his movements, his hesitations. I studied how he looked at you, how often he stayed away when you needed grounding. I thought maybe he was planted, maybe he didn't even know. But that theory collapsed on its own. Aariz is many things, but he is not capable of this scale, and more importantly, he would never treat you like data."
I don't move. I don't raise my voice. I want her to hear this like the slow truth it is, not a revelation, but an unveiling of what she already knew.
"I let Rudra play his game. Because I knew he was not the real threat. I watched what he did. And I watched you survive it. That's when I saw it clearly. He was too invested in the result, not in the method. Which means the method wasn't his to begin with."
Her hand tightens on the edge of the table. The first visible reaction. It's not rage. It's restraint. The mind preparing for war before the body ever moves.
"I have proof now. I know who orchestrated the first test. I know who wanted to see what you could become when pain was the only language spoken to you."
She doesn't ask who. Smart. Because she knows I wouldn't bring her here if I wasn't about to burn the next mask myself. And because she knows that once I speak the name, nothing in this world will remain untouched. Not her. Not me. Not them.
I don't say anything for a while. Just sit there, letting her mind run ahead. She needs to reconstruct her own timeline. Not because she can't trust me, but because what's coming next will demand that she trust herself more than she ever has. My job is not to give her answers. My job is to confirm what her instincts already told her, what her nightmares whispered behind closed eyes when even she was too tired to question them.
Finally, I stand, but I don't walk away. I just look at her. Her face is unreadable. But her silence is sharp. Focused. Ready.
In my mind, not aloud, I think this:
You are no one's experiment, Chhayika. You are not a report to be filed or a weapon to be activated. You are mine. Mine to guard, mine to support, mine to anchor, mine to explore, mine to watch something that the world would never be able to name. You are my entire defense system and I know no one can touch me until you stand in their way. I promise the same to you. It ends when I say it ends. And for Rudra, that time is close. He saw a weapon. I see a war. And war doesn't ask permission.
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Author's Note
As promised, the extra update is here. Thank you for your patience, and for holding space for this story as it unfolds in its own rhythm. Your quiet cooperation never goes unnoticed.
If you enjoyed the story, a vote would mean a lot.
If something feels off, feel free to comment, I'm always trying to improve.
Compliments and honest criticism are equally welcomed here.
Love you all.💖
Until next time,
~ Kshyatri