Indra did not march with a grand army or the sound of trumpets. He knew that even if he was the strongest warrior in history, a million men could eventually drown him in blood. Instead, he decided to bleed the Weeling Province dry through shadows and fear.
He took only thirty members of the Warrior Society—the men General Veda had hand-picked to watch him. Indra didn't care about their loyalty; he only cared about their blades. They crossed the border at night, moving through the thick jungles and jagged rocks that the Gamma Empire thought were impassable.
The first strike happened at the Supply Depot of Karka, a vital hub that fed the front-line Gamma legions.
Indra did not give a long speech. He simply pointed his black spear toward the gates. Under the cover of a monsoon rain, the thirty warriors slipped past the sentries. When the alarm finally barked out, it was too late. Indra was already in the center of the camp. His spear moved like a flickering tongue of fire. Every thrust left a man dead before he could draw his sword. He didn't waste movement. He moved from tent to tent, cutting the support ropes and trapping the sleeping soldiers inside before his men set them ablaze. By dawn, the depot was ash, and Indra's group had vanished back into the trees.
For the next month, the Weeling Province lived in a state of growing panic. Indra's "Warrior Society" became ghosts.
One night, they would strike a patrol of fifty men, leaving them all pinned to trees by their own spears. Two nights later, they would poison the wells of a garrison twenty miles away. Indra led every raid from the front. He used his superior reach to kill commanders from outside their guard range. His men watched him in awe and terror; they had been sent to betray him, but they found themselves following him because survival seemed impossible without him.
Indra's strategy was simple: Destroy the mind, and the body will fall. He targeted the couriers. No message could reach the capital of Weeling without being intercepted. The province was blinded. Then, he targeted the wealth. They raided the gold shipments meant to pay the mercenary companies. Without pay, the Gamma soldiers began to desert.
The "one-man army" was proving his theory. By refusing to meet the million-man army in an open field, he made their numbers useless. A million men cannot fight a shadow. A million men cannot eat if the granaries are burned.
The most famous of these guerilla strikes was at the Bridge of Sunder. A full battalion of a thousand Gamma soldiers was crossing to reinforce the border. Indra stood alone at the end of the bridge in the moonlight. The Gamma commander laughed, ordering a charge.
Indra didn't flinch. As the first wave reached him, his spear became a blur. He used the narrowness of the bridge to his advantage, making it so only three men could face him at a time. He piled the bodies so high they formed a wall, blocking the path. His thirty warriors then rained arrows from the cliffs above. The thousand-man battalion broke and fled, screaming that a "Revenant" was guarding the bridge.
The Governor of Weeling Province sent a desperate letter to Emperor Hikumbus. It read: "We are not being invaded by an army. We are being hunted by a god."
Indra sat in a dark cave that night, cleaning the blood off his black spear. His face was as blank as ever, but his reputation was now a weapon of its own.