The moon was a thin silver blade above Surat when Jai and his seven shadows slipped out of the factory's hidden gate. No torches, no steel clinking—just black kurtas, oiled hair, and the soft whisper of bare feet on wet stone.
They reached the eastern riverbank in under twenty minutes. Alok Chaudhary's new riverside haveli rose like a fortress: three storeys of red sandstone, jali screens glowing faintly from within, watch-fires at every corner.
Jai raised a closed fist. The squad froze as one.
He opened his hand, fingers splayed, then made the silent signs they had perfected over years of night work:
Scatter.
Observe patrol patterns.
Identify lone targets.
Return in twenty minutes.
Not a word spoken.
They vanished—melting into bougainvillea, scaling walls, becoming part of the rain.
Jai crouched beneath a tamarind tree, Perception=210 drinking in every detail. Within moments he felt the difference.
These were not ordinary guards.
Two men on the eastern wall moved with the fluid balance of panthers—shoulders loose, eyes scanning in slow arcs. A third on the roof turned his head a fraction too early when a leaf rustled thirty paces away. Another guard paused mid-step, nostrils flaring as though tasting the air.
Jai's people were ghosts.
Yet these men sensed ghosts.
Nineteen minutes later the squad reassembled in the drainage ditch behind the haveli.
Maya's whisper was barely breath. "They're not hired muscle. They move like Rajput cheetah squads, but sharper. One looked straight at me through a jali screen—from forty paces in the dark."
Arjun signed quickly: Groups of three or four. Never alone. Always overlapping sightlines.
Rahil added, voice a thread: One on the roof terrace. Solitary. Watching the river approach.
Jai's mind raced. His shadows were the deadliest in Gujarat. If they were being felt, these men were prodigies—or something worse.
Direct assault was suicide tonight.
He signed: Change of plan. Take one alive. Learn who they are.
They searched for an opening, but the patrols were stitched tight. No lone walker, no careless sentry.
Only the man on the roof terrace—silhouetted against the sky, motionless, cross-legged, a long spear across his knees.
Jai made the decision in a heartbeat.
He signalled: Maya, Arjun, Rahil, Sanjay, Dhruv—fall back two hundred paces and hold.
Nishil—with me.
The others melted away.
Jai looked at Nishil. The grizzled trainer's eyes gleamed with understanding.
The wall was twenty-five feet of carved sandstone—lotus motifs, deep window ledges, decorative vines in relief. To any normal man, unclimbable without rope or ladder.
Jai and Nishil were not normal.
Jai went first.
Fingers found purchase in grooves no wider than a coin. Toes wedged into lotus petals. Power=112 and Agility=205 turned stone into a ladder. He flowed upward—silent, relentless, faster than a monkey, reaching the parapet in eight seconds.
The sentry sensed him at the last instant—head snapping around, spear rising.
Too late.
Jai's arm snaked around the man's throat from behind, forearm like an iron band. The guard was strong—Power easily 85, neck corded with muscle—but Nishil was already vaulting the parapet behind him. A precise strike to the vagus nerve and the sentry went limp before he could cry out.
Jai eased him down. Nishil produced silk cord from his sleeve—wrists bound, ankles tied, mouth gagged with his own turban.
Jai gave the low owl-hoot—two short, one long.
Far below, Maya's team flashed a mirrored signal: clear.
The descent was slower, heavier. Jai took the sentry's shoulders, Nishil his feet. They moved like a single creature—fingers and toes finding the same holds, lowering the unconscious man inch by inch, never letting him drop more than the length of a handspan.
Forty-seven seconds later they touched wet grass.
Without a word the squad reformed, the bound guard slung over Nishil's broad shoulder like a rolled carpet.
They vanished into the night.
An hour later, deep beneath Vora Heights, they reached the hidden cellar that had once used for Wings of Freedom Lair. Now it was the assassination unit's lair—stone walls lined with weapons, a single iron chair bolted to the floor, and a single oil lamp flickering like a judge's eye.
The prisoner was dumped into the chair. Cold water slapped across his face. He came awake gasping, eyes wide with the realisation that the nightmare was real.
Jai stepped into the lamplight, Shadow padding silently behind him.
The man's gaze flicked from the tiger to the boy—no, the young man—who commanded it.
Jai's voice was soft, almost kind.
"You are going to tell me who trained you, who pays you, and why Alok Chaudhary needs men who can smell shadows in the dark."
He leaned closer.
"And you will do it quickly. Because if you don't, the tiger gets impatient… and I stop being polite."
The lamp flame danced.
The first crack in the sentry's defiance had already begun to show.