The weekend passed in a state of suspended animation. Two days of routine, of stretching and practice, of eating and sleeping, all performed under a new, invisible tension. Parth felt like a string on his own bow, pulled taut and waiting for a release that never came. He'd shot the first arrow, a quiet little act of rebellion in the dark. Now, he waited for the echo.
It came on Monday morning.
As he walked towards the academy entrance, a stark white van with the Hastina Corp logo emblazoned on its side pulled away from the curb. His eyes immediately shot up to the lamp post. The sight sent a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the cool morning air.
The CHAKRAVYUH camera he had disabled was fixed, its lens once again aimed at the entrance, its blue light glowing with a serene, malevolent patience. But that wasn't all. Next to it, a second, identical camera had been installed. Both were now encased in a thick, transparent polymer shell, making them look like armoured insects. It was a cold, efficient, and utterly dismissive response. It said, Your little games are noted. And they are irrelevant. The enemy hadn't just repaired the damage; they had reinforced their position and doubled their vigilance.
He stood there for a long moment, the chatter of his teammates fading into a dull roar. He wasn't a prince on a divine chariot facing a rival king. He was a boy with a bow standing against an omnipresent, faceless system. The battlefield was shifting faster than he could comprehend.
"Something wrong?" Coach Singh asked, coming to stand beside him. His gaze followed Parth's to the new hardware. "Ah. Efficient, aren't they?"
"They're thorough," Parth corrected, his voice quiet. He finally understood. He couldn't blind the beast one eye at a time. He needed to find a way to get inside, to understand its anatomy, to find a weakness he couldn't see from the outside.
That afternoon, he skipped his final practice session. He gave the coach a vague excuse about needing to run an errand in the city, and the coach simply nodded, his eyes full of a worry he didn't voice. Parth took a city bus, getting off a few stops early and walking the rest of the way to a dingy internet cafe tucked away in a crowded market. The place smelled of stale air and dust. He paid cash for an hour of computer time, choosing a terminal in the darkest corner.
He knew his own phone and the academy's Wi-Fi were no longer safe places for the kind of search he had to do. The thought itself felt paranoid, theatrical, but the two glowing eyes at the academy entrance told him it was necessary.
He didn't know where to begin. His world was one of fletching, windage, and anchor points. This world was one of firewalls, data mining, and digital ghosts. He started with the basics, searching for critical articles on Hastina Corp and Suyodh Mehra. He found dozens of glossy corporate profiles and fawning interviews. He found articles praising CHAKRAVYUH as the next leap in urban security. It was a digital fortress of positive press.
Frustration began to mount. He was an archer without a target.
He changed tactics. He started using keywords like "Hastina Corp controversy," "Suyodh Mehra ethics investigation," "CHAKRAVYUH privacy concerns." Most links led to sanitized press releases or articles that had been taken down. The system wasn't just watching; it was actively scrubbing its own history.
Then, buried deep on the fifth page of a search, he found a reference in an obscure tech forum. A post from two years ago lamented the decline of fearless tech journalism, citing the case of a writer named Maya Joshi.
The name sparked something in him. He focused his search. He found fragments—a dead link to a blog called 'The Digital Skeptic,' a few angry quotes attributed to her in other articles. It was clear she had been a fierce critic of Suyodh Mehra's ruthless business practices long before he became a global icon. And then, she had simply vanished from the professional world. Her digital footprint had been all but erased.
He was about to give up when he found it: a cached version of her last blog post. It was a scathing, brilliantly argued piece that detailed how Hastina Corp, in its early days, had allegedly crushed a smaller rival using illicitly obtained data. It was a story of corporate warfare, a modern echo of the injustice he felt in his bones.
At the bottom of the cached page was a single comment, left over a year ago.
"She knew too much. They didn't just silence her; they tried to erase her. Some of us still remember. Find the 'Iron Lotus' cafe in Pune. Ask for a black lotus tea."
Parth stared at the words on the screen. It was cryptic, clandestine. It felt like a trap, but it was also the only thread he had. A name, a place, and a password. It wasn't the grand army he had imagined, but it was a start. The battlefield had a new coordinate. His next journey wouldn't be to the edge of a sacred river, but to a cafe in another city, in search of the first soldier for his impossible war.