The sun was gentle that morning, casting golden light over the quiet fields beyond Vaikunth Dham. Dew still clung to the grass like tiny diamonds catching the early light. The smoke from Aryan's early training fire curled lazily toward the sky in peaceful, meandering spirals.
Bhaskar wiped the sweat from his brow—the honest sweat of physical exertion, the kind that comes from real training—a wooden sword slung over his shoulder as he prepared to leave the training site. His movements carried the relaxed confidence of someone heading home, someone with no premonition of what awaited him.
"I'll be back by sunset," he told Aryan, flashing a characteristic smirk. "Don't break the village while I'm gone. And try not to accidentally obliterate something important with your ridiculous speed."
Aryan chuckled, already settling into his next meditation session. "No promises. But I'll try to keep casualties minimal."
Bhaskar adjusted the strap on his shoulder and set off down the dirt road leading to his village—Kaliganj, nestled in the lush borderlands of the southern kingdom. It was a modest place: thatched rooftops, stone wells, carved wooden idols standing guard at every doorstep like patient sentinels. The village wasn't rich in gold or fame, but it was impossibly rich in warmth—the kind of warmth that comes from generations of families living together, working together, building together.
As he passed the temple bell tower, he greeted Old Ramdas, the bell keeper, who was feeding pigeons with the patient hands of someone who had decades of gentleness perfected.
Further down the path, he waved at Jyoti and Ramesh, an elderly couple who sold incense sticks and sweets from a small wooden stall, their faces creased with friendly smiles.
Children chased chickens barefoot through the streets, their laughter echoing off stone walls, weaving between carts and baskets with the joyful chaos only childhood allows.
The village lived like a breath held in harmony—steady, unshaken, as if the world beyond its borders couldn't touch the peace that had been cultivated here over centuries.
Bhaskar reached his small home at the edge of the village, near the banyan grove with its ancient, twisted trunk and sprawling branches that provided shade for half the settlement.
His mother, Kamala, was grinding grain in the courtyard—the rhythmic sound of the mortar and pestle a constant heartbeat of domestic life. His little sister, Mira, no more than nine years old, was sitting nearby drawing mandalas on the floor with rice paste—intricate patterns formed from the simple ingredient, her small fingers working with intense concentration.
"Bhaiya!" she shouted, jumping up with the explosive energy only a child possessed and hugging him with the strength of someone who'd missed him desperately despite his only being gone since dawn.
He laughed, lifting her easily—she was still light enough that raising her required minimal effort. "What mischief have you been up to now, you little troublemaker?"
"Nothing!" she said, her eyes wide with the exact opposite of truth, her face betraying every scheme she'd attempted while he was gone.
Their mother smiled softly, continuing her grinding motions with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this ten thousand times. "Eat first, then tell us what new tricks you taught Aryan today. That strange boy from the slums."
He stepped inside, and the scent of boiling dal and warm chapati wrapped around him like a welcome embrace—the smell of home, of family, of safety.
But above this peaceful scene… the sky was beginning to change.
The golden hour faded.
Clouds rolled over Kaliganj like whispers—not the normal clouds of monsoon season, but something unnatural, something deliberate. They moved with purpose. They moved with intent. The early light dimmed behind a sudden mistthat seemed to swallow the world rather than obscure it.
The air grew still. Too still. The kind of silence that made crows stop calling—birds that normally argued with each other, that screamed warnings, that filled the air with noise suddenly went quiet. The kind of silence that made oxen pause mid-step, their animal instincts detecting something fundamentally wrong with the world. Even the village dogs whimpered and slunk beneath carts and porches, seeking shelter from something they couldn't see but could absolutely sense.
Old Ramdas, still at the bell tower, narrowed his eyes at the road.
Someone was walking down it.
A single figure. Small. Unhurried. Moving with the deliberate pace of someone who had nowhere to be and infinite time to get there.
Wrapped in long black robes that seemed impossibly heavy for a child his size—layers of fabric that fell to the ground and seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. His face was completely hidden beneath a smooth obsidian mask, reflective and blank—no eyes, no mouth, no feature whatsoever, just silence and emptiness.
The figure stopped at the temple gate, and as he did, the fog thickened unnaturally behind him, as if it was swallowing the world he came from, erasing his origin point from reality itself.
Ramdas squinted, his old eyes straining to see through the mist. "Are you… lost, child?" His voice was gentle, the voice of someone accustomed to helping lost travelers, showing them the way.
The figure tilted his head slowly—a motion that seemed wrong, seemed to turn at angles human necks shouldn't achieve. Then he asked, in perfectly calm Sanskrit, a language most of the village still spoke but few young people learned anymore:
"Who is your strongest warrior?"
His voice was wrong.
It didn't echo right. The sound didn't travel through the air like normal speech. It was like hearing someone whisper into your mind from inside your own skull—intimate and invasive and deeply, fundamentally unnatural.
Ramdas blinked, confused. "What?"
By now, villagers were gathering—Jyoti and Ramesh leaving their stall unattended, a few farmers pausing their work, even children peeking from behind baskets and laundry lines, their curiosity overcoming their caution.
The figure spoke again. Cold. Soft. Carrying the weight of absolute certainty.
"Bring me your best. Or I will break your weakest."
Ramesh laughed nervously—the kind of laugh people make when they're unsure if something is a joke or a threat. "Look at him! Wearing a mask like some kind of bandit! Must be one of them forest kids playing pranks. Probably lost his way at a festival."
Another villager chuckled, his voice carrying false confidence. "Might be festival madness! You want a fighter, little one? Why don't you spar with Ramdas' goat? That should give you a fair match!"
A few kids giggled—the sound of innocence that would echo in the next few hours as screams.
The figure stood absolutely still.
Then, ever so slowly, he raised his right hand.
He pointed a single finger at the ground.
The air twisted.
BOOM!
A shockwave rippled from beneath his finger—not from the ground, but from the very fabric of reality itself—and blasted a deep crater in the cobbled road. The crater was nearly three feet wide and two feet deep, as if an invisible meteor had struck the earth. Dust and stone fragments flew through the air like shrapnel.
The laughing stopped.
Screams followed.
People stepped back, their casual mockery evaporating instantly, replaced by primal fear.
And then the figure moved.
He didn't run. He didn't need to. The word "moved" isn't quite right—he simply appeared in front of Ramesh in a single blink—faster than eyes could follow, faster than the mind could process.
CRACK!
Ramesh's chest folded inward as if crushed by an invisible hammer. His body flew ten feet backward through the air like a ragdoll and hit a stone wall with a wet, sickening sound. Blood sprayed across the stone in an arterial pattern.
Silence hung for a heartbeat.
Everyone was processing what they'd just witnessed. Their brains were struggling to accept the new reality.
Then chaos broke loose.
"Monster!" someone screamed.
"Protect the children!" another voice shrieked.
"Call the guards—call—someone—!"
But no one escaped.
The Purge Begins
With each step, the boy sent walls tumbling. Not through any physical contact, but through releases of pure chakra that detonated like controlled explosions wherever he directed them.
Bodies split. Villagers caught in the direct path of his strikes literally came apart, their bodies unable to withstand the force directed at them.
Flames erupted from his feet—chakra-fueled and wild and absolutely destructive, setting homes ablaze as he walked past them without even seeming to notice or care.
Straw roofs turned to torches.
Oil pots exploded into fireballs that sent burning liquid across courtyards and through homes.
The quiet village of Kaliganj turned into hell in under five minutes.
One by one, they fell—villagers who had nothing to fight with but wooden hoes and kitchen knives, farmers and shopkeepers and bell-keepers who had never trained for real combat.
The boy didn't even draw a weapon.
He simply touched, pointed, or snapped his fingers. And people shattered like glass—their bodies unable to withstand even the gentlest application of his power.
His chakra didn't blaze like others' did. It flowed around him like ink in water—dark, fluid, suffocating, as if darkness itself was his ally and weapon. And his eyes… hidden behind that featureless mask… never once blinked, moving with mechanical precision, processing the chaos with the detached observation of someone watching insects scatter.
It was mechanical. Cold. Like death had taken the form of a nine-year-old.
The sky above the village was no longer blue.
It was painted in flames.
Ash fell like black snow, coating rooftops, cracking stone, floating over the once-peaceful farms of southern Vaikunth Dham. Children cried from alleyways—some in pain, some from being separated from parents, some simply from fear of the incomprehensible horror unfolding around them.
Homes collapsed into embers, centuries of family history burning in minutes.
Chickens ran blindly, their feathers smoking, their instincts screaming to flee but finding nowhere safe to go.
And amid this fiery storm stood a single figure—calm, dark, motionless, moving through destruction like it was a garden walk.
The boy was nine.
His robes were the color of mourning, stitched in ancient Yamalok patterns no one in the village recognized—patterns that belonged to a distant land, to a culture of shadow and silence and death.
A black obsidian mask covered the upper half of his face, hiding everything but his mouth—a faint, almost bored smile curved upon it, as if this entire massacre was beneath his notice, as if he was simply going through a task that had to be completed.
He had asked a simple question.
"Who is your strongest warrior?"
And when no one gave a serious answer—when laughter replaced respect—he had begun the purge.
He didn't scream.
He didn't threaten.
He simply moved.
Faster than eyes could track.
Villagers dropped—backs snapped, skulls crushed, limbs torn from sockets with surgical precision, each wound exactly calibrated to kill or disable.
Houses exploded behind him as he tossed chakra bombs like pebbles into courtyards, like a child playing with toys he'd already grown bored with.
Fire rained on granaries, destroying months of stored grain, destroying survival.
People who begged were silenced first—their pleas cut short by strikes meant to end suffering quickly, though whether that was mercy or cruelty was impossible to determine.
He was not here to be seen.
He was here to erase.
Bhaskar's Final Stand
From a narrow path into the village, Bhaskar was sprinting.
His breath was shallow, his chest burning, his legs pumping through thick air filled with smoke. His heart pounded—not from fear, but from fury, from the primal rage of someone watching their world burn.
The closer he got to the center of the chaos, the worse it became.
Bodies. Scattered in the mud like discarded dolls.
Screams. Some fading, some already silenced forever.
Smoke-choked wind that made every breath feel like inhaling fire.
And then… he saw her.
His sister.
Mira.
She stood frozen in front of their home, arms raised in fright as the dark figure approached her. His mask gleamed orange in the firelight—a reflection of the flames consuming her world.
Bhaskar didn't think.
Instinct override consciousness.
He leapt.
"STAY AWAY FROM HER!"
The boy turned slightly. His glowing eyes barely registered Bhaskar's punch before he caught it with one hand—casual, effortless, as if stopping a charging warrior was no different than swatting a mosquito.
"You must be strong, huh," the boy said casually, his voice still carrying that invasive, skull-whisper quality. "Chakra 1. Stage 7. Average talent. Slightly above average control. Weak heart."
He released the punch, letting Bhaskar stagger backward, off-balance.
"I'll enjoy this."
Bhaskar gritted his teeth. Chakra exploded from his skin, enveloping his body in a cocoon of blue lightning—the First Chakra fully activated, every technique he'd learned channeled into desperate power. He didn't hold back. Not now. Not ever.
His fists blurred into a relentless barrage.
Kicks came from every angle—rotating, spinning, designed to come from unexpected directions.
His movements were perfect—textbook technique refined through years of training.
But none of them landed.
The boy leaned, ducked, twisted—barely trying, barely applying effort. He moved like smoke on water, like his body operated on a plane of reality slightly different from everyone else's, allowing him to simply not be where strikes were aimed.
And each time he evaded, he sighed. As if this fight… bored him.
"Are you even trying?" he asked, yawning mid-dodge, his tone dripping with disdain.
Bhaskar shouted in rage and struck with a double palm blow—a technique usually powerful enough to splinter stone, to break through defensive formations, to shatter lesser opponents.
The boy raised a finger and blocked both hands with a flick, the motion carrying such casual power that Bhaskar felt like he'd struck a wall made of diamond.
"Predictable."
And then he vanished.
Bhaskar blinked, his eyes searching desperately. "Where—?"
Then he heard it.
A gasp.
Behind him.
He turned.
The boy stood there, holding Mira by the throat, her feet kicking helplessly in the air, her face already beginning to darken from lack of oxygen.
"No—NO! Let her go!"
As Bhaskar's bloodied feet thundered across the burning ground—his legs carrying him as fast as they could move, his eyes locked on Mira's fragile form struggling in the grip of that monster—something cracked inside him.
Not just the moment.
But memory itself.
The porch steps. Sun-warmed stone beneath his palm.
The soft sunlight filtering through the leaves of the banyan grove, casting dancing shadows.
Mira's tiny voice as she sat there drawing swirls on the stone with her toe, creating patterns in dust that would be blown away by evening wind.
"Bhaiya," she had said that day, tilting her head up with that gap-toothed grin, the grin of someone who'd recently lost her first baby tooth, "if I train hard… can I be like you someday?"
He had chuckled, wiping flour from her nose with a gentleness that only an older sibling could muster. "No, Mira. You won't be like me. You'll be better."
She had hugged his arm, swinging it like a doll, testing the strength of her brother's muscles. "But if I become strong… will I still need you to protect me?"
Bhaskar had looked at her seriously then, his palm gently resting on her head, his fingers threading through her hair. "Even if you become the strongest girl in the world… I'll always protect you. That's my job. From monsters, lightning, war—everything."
"Even from nightmares?" she had whispered, her voice suddenly small and vulnerable.
"Especially from nightmares," he had smiled, kneeling down to meet her at eye level. "If darkness ever comes… I'll be your light. Always."
"Promise?"
"I promise," he'd said, sealing it with a pinky swear—that sacred gesture that meant forever, that meant eternity, that meant a brother's oath to protect his sister from all harm.
As Bhaskar got his glimpse of Mira's face—that same face, that same expression of fear and trust, trusting him to save her—
The boy looked at Mira.
Then at Bhaskar.
"So this little pest… is why you fought so hard?"
And then—
Snap.
The sound was so small. So insignificant.
Bhaskar's scream split the air. A sound so primal, so full of anguish, that it seemed to tear the fabric of the world itself. "MIRAAA!!!"
Her body fell limply from the boy's hand, limp as discarded cloth, limp as something that no longer needed to move because moving was no longer something it would ever do again.
Bhaskar caught her in his arms. Her eyes were open, but blank—the light that had been there moments ago already beginning its journey to wherever light goes when it leaves the living. Her warmth was already fading, transferring to the air like a ghost departing a house.
He shook her. Desperately. Frantically. "No. No. Wake up. Mira. Please—wake up…"
But she didn't.
She never would.
Tears poured down his face—tears of despair, tears of failure, tears of a brother who had broken his most sacred promise. He turned, his chakra pulsing out in wild arcs, no longer controlled or directed but simply radiating from him like a star collapsing inward. "I'LL KILL YOU!"
He charged, this time with everything—no restraint, no fear, only the blind rage of someone who had nothing left to lose because everything had already been taken.
But the boy didn't move.
He raised one hand lazily and caught Bhaskar by the face, his palm covering the entire upper half of Bhaskar's head.
"You're loud."
Then he lifted him like a rag doll and smashed him into the ground. Once. The impact created a crater. Twice. Blood sprayed. Three times. Bones cracked with audible snaps.
Bhaskar didn't scream anymore.
He just coughed—wet, gurgling coughs that sprayed blood across his chin.
And whispered, his voice barely audible over the sound of burning homes: "You… monster…"
The boy stepped on his chest, applying just enough pressure to make every remaining breath a battle against compression.
"You're not wrong."
Then with a slow, deliberate motion—the motion of someone with infinite time, infinite patience, someone for whom this moment held no urgency whatsoever—
He raised his foot towards his head.
"Time to practice the sound of silence."
From afar, through the haze of distance and time and the normal routine of an afternoon, Aryan saw the smoke curling into the evening sky—thick, dark, and rising like the fingers of some giant invisible hand reaching up from the earth.
At first, he tilted his head, his mind trying to categorize what he was seeing within normal parameters.
"Huh," he mumbled, slowing his sprint slightly. "Are they… burning something? Festival, maybe? They didn't even invite me."
SYSTEM: "Festival? Unless they're celebrating 'Total Annihilation Day,' I doubt it. That smoke doesn't have the profile of celebration. That has the profile of catastrophe."
"No, no—look at it! Could be a bonfire. They said something about preparing food for the market. Just got carried away, probably."
SYSTEM: "Yes, how dare they forget to invite the village weirdo with explosive sneezes and poor social skills to their… funeral pyre. What discourtesy."
Aryan narrowed his eyes. The fire wasn't flickering cheerfully like normal flames do. It was billowing—thick and hot and aggressive, consuming without mercy. Too much smoke. No music. No voices. No sound of celebration that should accompany any genuine festival.
And then came the scent.
Burning wood. The acrid smell of timber consumed by flame.
Burning cloth. The unique odor of fabric disintegrating.
And… something else.
A horrible, greasy edge that made his stomach twist, that activated some primal part of his brain that recognized it even though he'd never smelled it before.
Burning flesh.
"...That's not a festival," he whispered, his voice small in the suddenly enormous world.
SYSTEM: "Ah, it lives! Took the prodigy thirty seconds to smell cooked disaster. Bravo. I'm genuinely impressed. Now move before I have to write another sad entry in my digital journal."
Without another word, Aryan slammed his foot into the dirt, digging in for traction.
His Acceleration activated—the skill he'd learned just days ago.
10 seconds. His legs filled with Chakra, muscles firing in perfect synchronization.
Then—BOOM.
He shot forward like an arrow loosed from the gods themselves, moving with speed that should have been impossible for a six-year-old, moving with power that defied the normal limitations of physics and biology.
Trees blurred as he passed them.
Wind slapped his face, almost hard enough to hurt.
Branches cracked in his wake as he bounded across roots and stones, each stride covering impossible distances, each motion perfectly calculated.
The skill kicked in harder. Faster. Sharper.
The +40% speed boost from Acceleration wrapped around him like a jet stream, like he was riding a current of air that only he could perceive.
After 10 seconds: +40% speed boost activated.
His legs moved faster. The world moved slower.
After he continued running—after crossing the 100-second boundary—his speed increased again.
After 100 seconds: +40% additional boost stacking—total of +80% speed and reflexes.
He was moving nearly twice as fast as human bodies normally could move. The world around him was becoming detailed in ways it shouldn't be. Individual leaves on trees. Individual rocks on the path. The precise angle of each breeze.
But the faster he went, the worse it looked.
Ash rained from the sky, falling like black snow made of death and destruction.
The air was painted orange-red from fires that burned so hot they'd turned the sky itself into a cauldron.
And then, over the final ridge, he saw it.
The village.
Or what was left of it.
Homes once made of stone and wood were reduced to black skeletons—frames that still stood but held nothing, preserved ruined monuments to what had existed before.
Roofs collapsed, caving inward like broken spines.
The training ground where Bhaskar once practiced with such precision was now no more than a pit of smoking rubble, unrecognizable as having ever been anything but destruction.
People lay scattered in the mud—limbs twisted unnaturally, some still twitching, some already beyond any movement at all.
Fires danced on their clothes like cruel spirits refusing to leave, refusing to let their victims rest even in death.
Aryan skidded to a stop, his feet dragging through the ash and dirt, all his speed and power suddenly insufficient against the scale of horror he was witnessing.
His breath caught in his throat.
SYSTEM: "…This wasn't a raid. This wasn't a robbery or a territorial dispute. This was a purge. This was deliberate erasure."
Aryan's eyes widened. He whispered hoarsely, his voice barely functioning: "No… Bhaskar… Mira…"
He ran again, his Acceleration already active, adding more layers of speed boost to his desperation. He bounded through devastation, dodging fallen beams, leaping over broken carts, moving past charred bodies and ruined homes, ignoring the sting in his lungs and the tears threatening his eyes.
Then he saw it.
Bhaskar's house.
Or what remained of it.
One side had collapsed completely. Fire gnawed at the support beams like ravenous insects, consuming wood that had stood for generations. The balcony was broken. The windows shattered—nothing but empty frames looking out on destruction.
But the front yard—
The front yard was worse.
And that's when he froze.
There, standing tall in the middle of the yard, surrounded by cracked stone and corpses…
Was a boy.
Dressed in black.
Masked.
And beneath his boot—
Bhaskar.
Sprawled on the ground, twitching faintly, his hands bloodied, his face swollen beyond recognition from impact trauma. A few feet away, Mira's small body lay still, her eyes wide open, glassy, like a doll discarded in the mud, like she'd simply been placed down and forgotten.
Aryan's world went silent.
Even the fire seemed to hush, seeming to pause in its consumption.
He took a step forward—barely a sound, barely a movement.
But the boy turned his head, slowly, as if he already knew. As if he'd been waiting. As if Aryan's arrival had been anticipated.
And with a tilt of cruel indifference, he pressed his foot down—
CRACK.
Bhaskar's skull gave way under the pressure, the sound sickeningly clear across the distance.
The masked boy looked over at Aryan.Beneath the mask, something like a grin.
"…Now who are you, dumbo?"