Sanvi pressed her palm against her sternum, her fingers white-knuckled as she tried to manually slow the frantic gallop of her heart. She kept her chin tucked, eyes glued to the scuffed linoleum of the interrogation room. The air in here was recycled, smelling of ozone and old sweat.
"I don't know," she whispered. Every word felt like a shard of dry ice rattling in her throat. "It... it was a monkey-like figure. It came out of the shadows, a blur of fur and teeth, and then the world just went quiet."
The Lead Agent didn't move. She sat in the corner where the light didn't reach, the only glow coming from the digital pulse of her tactical watch. With a slow, predatory grace, she reached into her nylon jacket—the material rasping like a cobra shifting its coils—and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes.
"Right," the Agent murmured, sliding a single cigarette out with her teeth. "A monkey. A ghost. A myth." She struck a match, the sulfurous flare illuminating the jagged scars on her knuckles. "We'll find him, Sanvi. We'll bring him down, and we'll see what's under the fur."
A jagged chill, cold as a storm in winter, raced up Sanvi's spine. The smoke filled the air, thick and grey, turning the small room into a sensory tomb. The tension grew until it was a physical weight pressing on Sanvi's lungs, finally punctured by the rhythmic, heavy thud-thud-thud of combat boots in the hallway. Two men, their faces hidden behind the obsidian, polarized visors of the NSEA, stepped inside. They didn't look like men; they looked like machines built for containment.
"Go with them," the Agent commanded, her eyes already looking through Sanvi toward the next objective.
Sanvi let her body go limp, a defense mechanism against the terror, and allowed the guards to haul her out. The moment the door hissed shut, the Agent's expression shifted from calculated boredom to a lethal, focused hunger. She ground the half-lit cigarette into the concrete floor with her heel, twisting it until the ember was a smear of black ash.
"The girl is lying through her teeth," the Agent snapped to the operatives swarming the hallway. "She's protecting him. She's a high-value asset, but he... he is the source. Put every team on High-Alert. I want that beast breathing. I want his breath in a vial to make him a weapon."
Behind her, a subordinate hurried forward, eyes hovering over a tablet. He held out a sleek black folder, the title stamped in fresh, red-dipped ink that looked like it was still bleeding: [FILE ID: UNKNOWN DEALER - NSEA TARGET 01].
Across the sprawling grid of Pune, Arush was performing a ghost act. He moved through his school chores, solving equations for a future he no longer believed in, wearing a smile that felt like a plastic mask glued to a rotting face. But the "Static" was humming under his skin, made a frequency that made the lightbulbs in the classroom flicker whenever he walked past.
During lunch, he sat on the last bench—the "exile" row—his neck bent low. He was tapping his fork against his tiffin box—clack, clack, clack—a metallic, obsessive heartbeat that vibrated through the metal table.
"Hey," a student nearby whispered, huddled with a group. "Did you guys hear the news? The NSEA is moving into the North sector. They're hunting a beast. They're calling it an Artificial Terrorist."
The tapping stopped. The silence that followed was vacuum-sealed. Arush's voice emerged from a throat that felt like it was filled with dry sand. "What do you mean? What the hell is an 'Artificial Terrorist'?"
The group turned, eyes wide with the cheap excitement of people who think tragedy is a movie. "It's a Dealer-level awakening, Arush. But instead of joining the government, they start attacking the society and people.' They choose become monstere over the State. The NSEA says if you have that much power and you aren't under a leash, you're an enemy of humanity. An outlaw. A monster."
Arush went quiet. The air around him suddenly felt heavy, like the atmosphere before a lightning strike. Beneath his palm, the old wood of the school bench groaned. A jagged crack split the surface, wood fibers snapping like bone under the pressure of his subconscious grip. He bolted for the washroom, splashing freezing water on his face until his skin turned blue. I saved them, he told his reflection. I pulled them from the abyss. But the "Mind" screamed back with the voice of the State: You are uncontrolled. You are a weapon. You are a terrorist.
As night fell, the city was draped in a veil of blue and red sirens. High Alert. Arush sat in the far corner of a dimly lit, late-night cafe, sweat beading on his forehead. He was scrolling frantically, searching for "AATD," for "Dealer Tier Rights," for anything—but the internet was a sanitized void. The State had deleted the truth.
"Man, dang it!" he hissed, his fingers trembling as the "Dealer" frequency in his blood made the coffee in his cup ripple in concentric circles. "Why is the world like this? Why do they get to decide who I am?"
He checked his watch: 9:58 PM. The red digits felt like an executioner's clock. "Shit! I'm late!" He drained the bitter dregs of his coffee and sprinted out. On the cafe's wall-mounted TV, a news flash broke the static: "Indian NSEA has just authorized the deployment of Top-Tier Dealers. Names released: Vaidere and a girl, age 18, Sanvi."
Arush let out a small, broken smile. Sanvi was alive. She was "Official." She was safe from the shadows because she had accepted the leash. He turned the corner into a black alleyway, a shortcut home where the streetlights had been smashed by stones.
Scream.
The sound was raw, a soul-tearing shriek. In the deep shadows, seven men were dragging a woman toward a rusted van. Her soul, visible to Arush's Crimson eyes, was flickering a desperate, dying Yellow. The men's souls were toxic, Rotten Green clouds of malice and hunger.
"Ayy, hero!" one of the men barked, stepping forward with a serrated blade. "Get lost or you're a corpse."
Arush's knuckles turned white. His eyes flared a deep, bloody crimson. He looked at the woman—her eyes pleading for a savior—and then he thought of the "Artificial Terrorist" label. If I fight, I am a criminal. If I fight, I am hunted.
The van door slammed. The tires screeched on the gravel. He watched the taillights fade into the darkness.
Arush stood in the mud, his breathing heavy and jagged. His soul offered logic: Survival requires silence. His morality offered a curse: You are already dead inside.
He rang his doorbell at home, his parents' voices sounding like distant, angry thunder as they yelled about his curfew and his "irresponsibility." He didn't answer. He walked into his room, locked the door, and let the darkness swallow him until he drifted into a drug-induced sleep.
The next day, the "Silence" began.
In the final lecture, the teacher stood at the front, her voice cracking. "A minute of silence, please. For the girl found this morning in the industrial sector. Kidnapped. Harassed. Discarded like trash."
The classroom stood in lazy, bored silence. Students checked their nails; some whispered. But for Arush, the silence was Stinking. It smelled like the copper of blood and the rot of his own cowardice. His stomach cramped into a hard knot of acid. He felt the mud from the alleyway caked on his soul. He gripped his desk until his fingernails tore into the wood, blood dripping from his palms.
What if I had burnt them? What if I had torn them apart?
That night, the sleeping pills couldn't stop the "Recoil."
In the dream, Arush was back in the alley. The watch said 10:01 PM. He didn't wait. He sprinted, the air whistling past his ears. He found the van. But when he tore the door open, there was no fight. Only the woman, her body broken, her dress a tattered rag.
He fell to his knees, sobbing into the dirt. Then, a cold, soft hand touched the back of his neck. He looked up, crawling backward in the mud. It was her. Her eyes were hollow pits of shadow.
"Why didn't you save me?" she asked, her voice a dry rattle. "Was I too ugly to live, Arush? I loved someone. I had a life. But you chose your privacy over my blood."
Arush screamed, a sound that wasn't human. A tail of Crimson Fire erupted from his spine, melting the asphalt beneath him. The dream shattered.
He woke up standing in the middle of a deserted road.
In front of him, the van was no longer a vehicle. It was a mangled scrap of iron, folded into the brick wall of a warehouse like a piece of crushed paper. The road was a Bloodbath.
Arush looked down at his right hand. He was holding a human Spinal Cord, the vertebrae still warm, dripping thick, viscous blood onto his shoes. To his left, another man lay in the gutter, his chest cavity caved in as if hit by a wrecking ball. The smell was overwhelming—metallic copper, burnt rubber, and the stench of released bowels.
He shrieked, throwing the spinal cord away into the darkness. He looked up at the street cameras—the little red lights were still blinking. Panic, raw and electric, surged. He remembered: Military grade cameras glitch, but these were cheap civilian ones. They had seen it all. They had seen the Beast.
He didn't think. He ignited. Running in his fire-form, his bare feet charred the asphalt as he tore through the air. He scaled his apartment wall in three lunges, slipped through his window, and dived into the bathroom.
He scrubbed his hands until the skin was raw and bleeding, watching the water turn a deep, sickening pink in the sink. "Why me?" he sobbed into the basin. "Why me?"
At the crash site, an NSEA armored convoy screeched to a halt, tires soaking in the cooling blood. A man in a high-collar leather jacket stepped out, two obsidian blades strapped to his back. Behind him, fifty soldiers in gas masks and "War-Stopper" tactical gear formed a 360-degree perimeter.
"I am Vaidere," the man said, his voice a low hum of electricity. He flashed an AATD badge. "Leader of the Anti-Artificial Terrorist Department."
He walked through the carnage, his boots splashing in the red pools. He stopped at the first body. The man's face had been gripped by a single hand and squeezed until the skull collapsed inward—the bone fragments were fused together by intense heat.
"Forensics," Vaidere called out, his eyes beginning to crackle with Blue Lightning. "Look at the localized melting on the steel. This isn't just power. This is high-frequency friction."
He moved to the van, looking at the man whose spine had been harvested like a crop. Vaidere's jaw tightened. He raised his heavy boot and stomped on the dead kidnapper's remaining ribs, the snap of bone echoing in the silent street.
"You bastards," Vaidere growled, the ozone smell in the air thickening until the soldiers' hair stood on end. "If I had found you first, I would have kept you alive for a month, peeling your souls back layer by layer. This wasn't a murder. This was an exorcism."
He turned to his lead technician. "The cameras?"
"Sir... the civilian loop recorded it. But the figure... it's just a blur of crimson light. We can't get a face."
Vaidere looked up at the moon, his eyes twin bolts of blue fire. "He's out there. And he's angry. Find him before he burns this entire city to settle his conscience."
High above, on the mango tree outside Arush's window, a White Hawk sat watching the boy wash the blood away.
"Things will hurt until your skin gets thick, Sun," the hawk whispered, its voice lost in the wind. "Save some tears for later. When the AATD finds you, or you will find them"
-ARUSH SALUNKE