Location: General Mustafa Khan's Camp, Northern Bank of the Krishna River
Time: March 1639, Midnight
Following the absolute catastrophe of the mud trap, a suffocating, putrid aura of dread enveloped the Bijapuri encampment. The Black Cotton Soil had claimed over a thousand elite cavalrymen, but it was the psychological toll that was truly dismantling the army.
At the perimeter of the camp, a young Bijapuri sentry named Tariq huddled near a dying campfire, his hands trembling violently as he tried to scrape the thick, adhesive clay from his musket barrel. Beside him, an older veteran stared blankly into the flames, his left arm bound tightly in blood-soaked rags.
"They say the Prince of Vellore commands the earth itself," Tariq whispered, his voice cracking with the biting cold. "I saw it with my own eyes, brother. The mud reached up and swallowed General Qadir's horse whole. We are not fighting an army. We are fighting demons."
"Shut your mouth," the veteran hissed, glancing nervously over his shoulder at the grand silk pavilion of their commander. "If Mustafa Khan hears you speaking of demons, he will have your tongue cut out before dawn."
Inside that sprawling silk pavilion, General Mustafa Khan was seething with a manic, unhinged rage. He hurled a heavy silver goblet against the center tent pole, shattering the metal. "Let the men sleep!" he roared at his exhausted, mud-caked commanders. "Double the sentries on the riverbank. Tomorrow, when the morning sun bakes this accursed mud dry, we will unleash our twenty bronze cannons. I will reduce the Vellore lines to ash and dust. I will mount that boy-prince's head on my own lance!"
Mustafa Khan was confined entirely to the military doctrines of the 17th century. To him, war was fought in the daylight, with brute force, heavy armor, and loud war cries. He did not understand that in the realm of modern warfare, 'Sleep Deprivation' is an instrument of profound psychological torture. The human mind can endure incredible physical pain, starvation, and even the threat of death. But without sleep, the brain begins to manufacture its own terrifying reality. Paranoia replaces logic. Shadows become assassins.
I had no intention of letting them sleep tonight.
On the southern bank, concealed entirely by the pitch-black night and the howling wind, I stood before a specialized detachment of two hundred men. In the traditional, archaic social hierarchy of the empire, these men were considered the absolute lowest caste—sanitation workers, scavengers, untouchables forced to clean the filth of the upper classes. Society had forced them to live in the shadows, demanding that they remain unseen and unheard.
But in my Swarajya Army, a man's worth was calculated solely by his utility, not his birth. I had taken their lifelong conditioning—their ability to move invisibly, to exist without making a single sound—and forged them into my most elite stealth operatives. They were my shadows.
Their faces, torsos, and weapons were entirely camouflaged with wet black mud. They blended so perfectly into the darkness that standing just ten feet away, they looked like an optical illusion. Their leader, a heavily scarred man named Ranga, stepped forward.
"For centuries, the kings of this land made my people invisible, My Prince," Ranga's voice carried the heavy weight of generational suffering, mixed with a dangerous, burning loyalty. "They treated us worse than the stray dogs in their streets."
"Tonight, Ranga," I whispered, my voice cutting cleanly through the cold wind, carrying the authority of an emperor who had rewritten the rules of the world. "You will use that exact invisibility to bring a mighty empire to its knees. You are no longer outcasts. You are the vanguard of my wrath. Remember the protocol. Assassination is not your objective tonight. Your targets are their sanity and their artillery. Deploy the Agni-Garba, spike the guns, and extract without a trace. Go."
Utilizing the dense darkness and the shallow, muddy riverbed, the stealth unit slithered across the Doab like a colony of vipers. They did not walk; they crawled on their stomachs, using the natural dips of the muddy terrain to mask their approach. They effortlessly bypassed the exhausted Bijapuri sentries who were fighting a losing battle against sleep and the biting wind.
At one point, Tariq the sentry thought he heard a wet rustle. He thrust his torch forward into the dark, his heart hammering against his ribs. The orange light flickered over the mud, but he saw nothing. He sighed, rubbing his freezing hands together. He never realized that Ranga had just crawled mere inches from his boots, a serrated dagger clenched tightly between his teeth.
Exactly at midnight, the stealth operatives reached their designated coordinates. The camp was dead quiet, save for the crackling of fires and the groans of the wounded.
Then, the first detonation shattered the absolute silence. BOOM!
Then a second. Then a third. In rapid succession, fifty violent explosions ripped through the dead center of the Bijapuri encampment. These were the 'Agni-Garba' (The Womb of Fire)—primitive yet highly devastating clay grenades engineered to perfection. They were packed tight with gunpowder, sulfur, and severely crushed Ghost Peppers (Bhut Jolokia), the hottest chili pepper in the known world.
The concussive blasts were terrifying, waking the army in an instant, but the chemical payload was catastrophic. A thick, noxious cloud of yellow sulfur and aerated chili powder immediately engulfed the tents.
Bijapuri soldiers jolted awake, frantically clutching their throats as the toxic smoke seared their lungs. It felt as though they were inhaling boiling acid. Their eyes swelled shut, streaming with bloody tears, and their skin burned wherever the powder settled.
Pure, unadulterated panic swept through the camp like a contagion. Blinded, choking, and disoriented in the suffocating dark, the Bijapuri soldiers genuinely believed they were being overrun by a massive, invisible frontline assault. Driven by the primal terror of survival, they drew their broadswords and began slashing wildly into the thick smoke.
"Die, Vijayanagara dogs!" a Bijapuri lieutenant screamed, plunging his sword forward into a shadowy figure. The figure collapsed with a gurgling shriek. As the smoke briefly parted, the lieutenant realized with absolute horror that he had just impaled his own younger brother.
Friendly fire turned the camp into a bloody, chaotic madhouse. Men were butchering each other in the dark, fighting phantoms manufactured by their own terror.
General Mustafa Khan stumbled out of his pavilion, a wet silk cloth pressed desperately to his face. His eyes were bloodshot and streaming with tears. "Form ranks!" he roared blindly into the chaos, swinging his sword at shadows. "Fire the cannons! Blast the riverbanks! Return fire!"
But his final trump card had already been systematically dismantled.
During the absolute height of the smoke-induced panic, a dedicated squad of Bheel operatives had silently reached the twenty heavy bronze cannons positioned at the perimeter of the camp. Working with terrifying, calculated efficiency, they used heavy iron mallets—muffled with thick layers of leather to deaden the sound—to drive solid steel spikes directly into the 'touch-holes' of every single cannon.
The moment the spikes were hammered deep into the bronze, the operatives poured a fast-cooling mixture of melted lead and crushed glass over them, sealing the ignition holes permanently.
In modern artillery terms, it is an operation known as "Spiking the guns." Without a functioning touch-hole to ignite the main powder charge inside the barrel, a cannon is entirely useless. It would take a master blacksmith weeks with specialized, diamond-tipped drills to remove those spikes—time Mustafa Khan did not have.
Standing atop my command ridge, observing the absolute inferno of smoke, screams, and chaos tearing the enemy camp apart from within, my expression remained glacial. The firelight reflected in my brass telescope.
General Raghunath Rao stood beside me, his hands trembling slightly as he watched a massive army systematically destroy itself without a single Vijayanagara sword being drawn in combat.
"You do not fight like a man, Prince," Raghunath whispered, staring at my calm profile with a profound, terrifying awe. "You fight like a demon."
"I fight like a scientist, General," I replied smoothly, lowering my telescope and turning my back to the burning enemy camp. "Their minds are officially broken. Their artillery is dead. They have nothing left but their desperation. Tomorrow morning, we unleash the final volley."