Chapter 2: Beginning of the Mission
Vikram stepped into the sharp, pine-scented air, boots crunching on loose gravel. Before him, the valleys of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir unfurled in the dawn's gold — rugged slopes, terraced fields, distant peaks still striped with late snow. Frost clung to the grass. Every breath burned, half cold, half adrenaline.
His objective hadn't changed: gather intelligence on Pakistani military positions and terrorist camps in POK. But now, with the system humming quietly inside his mind, even the impossible felt close enough to touch.
He lived under the name Rashid Malik, a mechanic from Karachi — a shadow with a story, walking the muddy lanes of a border village called Mufti Bazaar, two kilometers from a key Pakistani military base. The villagers took him for a harmless drifter, chasing odd jobs, blending in with the seasonal migration of laborers. Exactly as he wanted.
He moved down the narrow, uneven path and nodded to hawkers behind battered carts, their hands stained with spice and old oil. Kashmiri and Punjabi tangled together around him, a music of barter and banter. Women haggled over onions dusted with earth. Metal pots clattered somewhere behind the braying of a mule. Frying bread and cumin mixed with coal smoke until it stung his eyes. He stopped at a chai stall and wrapped his fingers around a chipped cup, savoring the scald and the cardamom on his tongue. For a moment he was just another face in the crowd.
A battered jeep coughed exhaust into the market square. Four soldiers in green spilled out, laughing too loud, slouching with the boredom of men who had nowhere better to be. Vikram watched through lowered lashes, pulse even, every sense reaching outward.
The system chimed, low and unhurried, like something settling into place rather than announcing itself:
> [Spying Skill Increased to Level 1]
Something shifted at the back of his skull — not a window opening so much as a wall coming down. The market's noise stopped being noise. He could pick a soldier's muttered complaint out from under the sizzle of the stall, hear the impatience in a hawker's sigh, the nervous catch in another man's accent. The world had more edges than it had a minute ago.
One soldier — the youngest of the four — broke off, stretching. "I'm heading to the washroom. You lot get the smokes," he called, already turning away, and the market's din swallowed the rest.
Vikram dropped a few coins for his chai and let the crowd take him. Each step measured. Each movement folding into the flow of laborers and beggars until he was no one at all.
> [Stealth Skill Increased to Level 1]
Moving became effortless, like stepping into water that already knew the shape of his body. His footsteps didn't vanish so much as stop mattering.
In the alley behind a shuttered shop, he caught up to the boy. Because that was what he was, up close — hometown stubble, boots still creaking with newness, eyes sharp with a fear he thought he was hiding well. Vikram had maybe three seconds to decide, and he didn't take them. His hands moved on their own, the way four years of training had promised they would. One motion. The body dropped into the mud and refuse without much sound at all.
Vikram stood over it, breathing.
He had killed before. Men with guns raised, men who would have killed him first, men whose faces he'd already stopped remembering by the time the debrief was done. This was different, and he made himself notice exactly how different, rather than letting the thought slide past unexamined. This boy hadn't had a weapon in his hand. This wasn't Vikram's face doing the killing, or even his war, technically — he was thirty years early for it. And the ease of it frightened him more than the act itself. No hesitation. No mercy considered and set aside. Just motion, and then a body in the mud.
*That's the part to watch,* he thought. *Not that I can do this. That I didn't feel it happen.*
He filed the thought away — there wasn't time to sit with it now — and knelt beside the body.
> [Host can sell this body to the System for Gamer Points (G.P.)]
The offer sat there in his mind, patient and indifferent, waiting on his answer like it had all the time in the world and he had none.
He pressed his palm to the boy's temple first. Memories surged up out of the dead flesh — disjointed, half-formed: a mother's anxious smile, a password muttered under someone's breath, the awkward shiver of a first night in uniform, a favorite hiding spot behind a grain shed, a superstition about stepping over graves. A whole small life, compressed and handed to him like a file.
He called up Face Change. His skin tightened, bones shifting by degrees too small to hurt. In the shop window's dark glass, the boy's face looked back at him — pimple scar and all, down to the wary set of the mouth.
Only then did he answer the system.
"Sell," he said, and hated a little how easy the word came.
The body broke apart into silver motes and was gone. No blood in the mud. No boy. Nothing at all where a person had been a moment ago.
> [Gained 10 Gamer Points]
Ten points, small and hard-earned, logged themselves somewhere behind his eyes. A new kind of ledger. He didn't look at the empty space in the alley again.
He walked back toward the square wearing someone else's gait — a slight limp, a softer smile, habits that surfaced without him reaching for them.
"Oi, Abdul! Still alive?" one of the soldiers grinned, tossing him a battered pack of cigarettes. "We saved you some."
"Needed a minute to find the place," Vikram said, and the accent slotted into the group's rough banter like it had always belonged there.
They laughed and climbed back into the jeep. As it jolted toward the military camp, Vikram watched the terraced fields slide past the window — a spy riding in stolen skin, new ability humming under his nerves, every word from the men around him a small test he couldn't afford to fail.
He was invisible now, surrounded by men who would kill him without a second thought if they knew his real name.
He told himself that was the only thing that should feel strange this morning.
_____
THANKS FOR READING.....