Year 1564
Flashback, Few months ago
Deep within the grand, white marble walls of the royal palace in the Khurda Kingdom's capital, King Mahendra Deva sat alone in his private study, reading the gritty, classified details of his son's latest exploits. The official military dispatch outlined an extraordinary, almost miraculous victory. Prince Vikramaditya Deva—whom the King fondly addressed by his private name, vikramaditya—had not only completely annihilated Count Amir Durani's northern territorial army, which drastically outnumbered the prince's forces, but had also thoroughly crushed a clandestine Bengal Sultanate raiding army that had infiltrated the borders under the cover of the count's treason to capture or assassinate the boy.
Though his son was a mere nine years old, a cold shiver of profound amazement and slight terror traced the King's spine as he processed the sheer scale of the boy's tactical genius. From engineering revolutionary multi-shot weapons to making cold, ruthless, and cunning decisions to surgically eliminate internal and external enemies, the child defied all mortal paradigms. Sometimes, the King exchanged bewildered glances with Queen Meghashree, wondering what kind of transcendent, legendary soul they had given birth to.
As a father, Mahendra's chest swelled with immense pride; his immediate instinct was to loudly proclaim his son's magnificent achievements from the highest battlements of the kingdom, as any proud father would do. Yet, statecraft demanded iron restraint. His son was still too young. If the predatory empires bordering Khurda got wind of the true brilliance and terrifying capabilities of the young prince, they would undoubtedly pool their limitless resources to target and eliminate him before he became too massive a threat to handle. Taking a calculated administrative decision, the King chose to bury the true narrative beneath a layer of half-truths mixed with strategic lies. He issued a grand proclamation across the kingdom, stating that Count Amir Durani, in collusion with the hostile Bengal Sultanate, had attempted to ambush the young prince; however, the King, claiming to have discovered the treason beforehand through the crown's own intelligence, had supposedly laid a massive trap with the regular Royal Army, slaying the treacherous count in retribution.
A few days later, within the formidable stone keeps of the county of Deoyakhand, Count Shamsher Choudhry stood by his arched windows, listening intently to the official reports of Count Durani's sudden demise in the north. A massive, sinister smile slowly spread across his face. Among the three primary opponents he needed to completely eliminate to seize the crown of the Khurda Kingdom—namely the King, Count Durani, and Count Veervadhra—one major obstacle had just destroyed by another without Choudhry even lifting a single finger.
This was incredibly fortuitous news. Choudhry marveled at his own cunning foresight to delay any premature, direct military action against the crown. Instead, he had masterfully instigated the foolish, fanatical slamic noble, Count Amir Durani, into launching an aggressive strike against the royal family. Choudhry had subtly planted the manipulative idea in Durani's mind that King Mahendra was inherently weak and faltering, pointing to how the King had seemingly buckled under the collective pressure of the nobility and restrained from officially declaring the young prince as the absolute crown prince during the tense court sessions. Content with the escalating chaos, Choudhry decided to maintain his patient strategy of watching, waiting, and weaving further internal schemes. To secure his flanks against the northern threat, he immediately drafted and dispatched a secret correspondence to his powerful external ally, the Mughal Empire. He detailed the recent aggressive military activities of the Bengal Sultanate within the Khurda borders, urging the Mughals to amass forces and heavily increase military pressure on Bengal's flanks, thereby diverting the Sultan's ravenous attention away from the Khurda Kingdom entirely.
Simultaneously, within the heavily fortified castle of Count Veervadhra Sen in the southern county of Gajapatipur, the news of Durani's execution at the hands of the Royal Army arrived via swift courier. Veervadhra processed the information with an unreadable, stoic expression. He harbored no personal opinion on the matter; instead, he executed the same cold protocol he always performed whenever critical domestic intelligence surfaced within the realm. Moving to his desk, he systematically transcribed the detailed movements of the Khurda court and forwarded the encrypted dispatch directly to his handlers: the Prime Minister of the Vijayanagar Empire.
A week later, within the opulent, tense court of the Bengal Sultanate, Sultan Shiraj-ud-Daulah slammed his fist onto his gilded throne in a fit of white-hot fury. The reports of their utter failure to capture the northern territories of the Khurda Kingdom—which directly bordered his own southern domains—left him seething with rage. Breathing heavily, the Sultan was on the absolute verge of ordering a mass mobilization of his grand army to launch an all-out, overt invasion to seize the northern province by sheer military force.
However, before the royal decree could be stamped, a breathless scout burst into the court with catastrophic intelligence: the massive armies of the Mughal Empire were once again amassing in terrifying numbers directly along the Bengal borders. The sudden, ominous movement of the Mughal war machine forced the Sultan to instantly grind his expansionist ambitions to a halt. Recognizing the Mughals as a far more grievous, existential threat to his throne, he reluctantly ordered his commanders to leave the Khurda Kingdom alone for the foreseeable future, rapidly shifting his entire military focus to fortify the threatened Mughal frontiers.
Deeply impressed and profoundly shaken by the flawless tactical performance of his son's private force during the northern crisis, King Mahendra Deva came to a monumental military realization. He recognized that the traditional, disorganized feudal levies were entirely obsolete against the dawn of modernized warfare. Acting with absolute executive authority, the King authorized the immediate integration of an additional 11,000 men from the regular Royal Army to be systematically trained in advanced line formations and tactical disciplines. These troops were ordered to train alongside the 4,000 veteran soldiers already undergoing grueling drills under the direct supervision of the Rudradev Khurda Company headquarters.
The King sent a detailed correspondence to his son vikramaditya, outlining his grand intentions for state militarization. The young prince, acting with the unyielding professionalism of a veteran industrialist, responded not with words of humble gratitude, but with an incredibly bold and shameless counter-proposal. Instead of accepting standard payouts of gold mudras from the royal treasury, the prince explicitly demanded the absolute ownership and administrative rights over a specific, remote location in Talcher, situated within the crown-administered territory of Angul. The prince's letter mentioned strange, highly technical plans regarding the continuous mining of a dark, combustible mineral he called "coal," which he claimed was critically necessary to fuel his rapidly expanding iron foundries in Badrak. Furthermore, vikramaditya casually requested royal permission to expand his private army to a staggering permanent size of 15,000 men.
Sitting in his office, King Mahendra could do nothing but burst into hearty laughter at his son's sheer audacity and relentless ambition. Though the King was fundamentally a traditional statesman and a warrior, possessing little comprehension of complex metallurgical innovations, thermodynamic sciences, or what an obscure black rock could possibly be used for, he trusted his son's transcendent intellect implicitly. Shaking his head with a proud smile, the monarch signed the royal decree, eagerly awaiting to see what paradigm-shifting marvel his miraculous son would pull out of his hat next.
Present Day
Sitting behind his heavy oak desk within the highly secure, fortified corporate compound in Bhadrak, nine-year-old Prince Vikramaditya Deva broke the gold-wax seal of the latest royal scroll. A cold, brilliant smile cut across his young face as he scanned the text. His father had granted him absolute, uncompromised rights to the coal-laden sectors of Talcher, along with the official royal mandate permitting the immediate expansion of his private army by another 15,000 men.
To push this monumental decree past the suspicious ministers and treacherous regional nobles of the royal court without triggering a civil war, the King had deployed a masterfully deceptive excuse. The official court record stated that because Count Durani's rogue forces had almost successfully assassinated the crown prince due to the severely small size of his personal escort, the crown was generously allowing the young prince to expand his personal security force for his own defense.
Vikramaditya let out a sharp, ringing laugh as he rolled up the parchment. He could perfectly picture the arrogant, short-sighted nobles smiling broadly in the capital at this very moment, foolishly whispering among themselves that the young prince was nothing more than an incompetent, terrified little boy who was running scared after his first taste of real blood on the borderlands. Let them wallow in their absolute, blissful ignorance; their arrogance was the perfect smoke-screen behind which the foundations of an unstoppable empire were being forged.
Moments later, the heavy doors of his central office swung open. The battle-hardened Colonel Virendra and his intensely loyal personal attendant, Bhimrao, stepped inward, dropping to one knee to deliver their crisp military salutes.
Vikramaditya signaled them to rise and smoothly slid the royal charter across the desk. "The path is clear," the prince commanded, his voice carrying the deep, chilling authority of a futuristic sovereign. "The royal court has granted us the right to raise an additional 15,000 troops. Colonel Virendra, from this day onward, you are officially promoted to the rank of Major General of the Rudradev Khurda Company's armed forces. Our private army will soon swell to a permanent, hyper-disciplined force of 20,000 active combatants. I want the recruitment drives to begin across the peasants-born settlements immediately. Separate the raw recruits, implement our relentless foot drills, and ensure they are thoroughly trained in our advanced line infantry volleys and hollow-square tactics without a single day of delay."
Virendra's eyes flashed with fierce excitement as he took the document. "By your command, Your Highness! The steel shall be broken into shape."
Turning his piercing gaze toward Bhimrao, Vikramaditya tapped a highly detailed topographical map of the kingdom, Khurda, drawing upon the vast historical and geographical knowledge he had meticulously retained from his past life as a scholar. "Bhimrao, organize our logistics infrastructure at double-time speed. You are to dispatch an elite vanguard of workers, seasoned miners, and our most highly trusted, vetted company supervisors directly to the coordinate zones I have marked in Talcher. This dark mineral, coal, is the lifeblood of the industrial age; it will provide the extreme, sustained energy required to run our secret blast furnaces and iron foundries continuously, completely bypassing centuries of slow technological evolution."
The prince handed Bhimrao a dense ledger containing a precise chemical and physical description of the coal veins, along with the exact subterranean depths where the richest deposits slept within the Angul territory.
"We are no longer bound by the limitations of wood and charcoal, Bhimrao," Vikramaditya concluded, his dark eyes reflecting the unyielding dawn of a new era. "Establish secure supply lines and start transporting the coal back to Badrak immediately. The fires of our industrial revolution are finally ready to burn."