The calm that followed the revelation was not the brittle kind that pretends to be peace — it was a deep, predatory stillness. Dilli's fury had not vanished; it had been refined into something colder and more useful: patience. He remembered, in a flash as clear as sunlight on water, the old proverb his great-grandfather used to murmur when storms came — "Aggression destroys the aggressor." That lesson folded into him like armor. Where others would lash out, he would wait; where they would bite, he would surgically cut.
When the three of them gathered in the dim, book-lined study of the family farmhouse, the evening had the smell of wet earth and jasmine. Subbaraju — the stooped, iron-eyed great-grandfather who carried the village's old codes like medals — listened without interrupting. Gadhiraju, Dilli's father, sat with his hands laced together, the map of their companies and recent events spread like a battlefield between them.
Betal's voice came through the room's single speaker: calm, precise, without the human flinch of outrage. It laid the evidence out again — the nodes, the payments, the meetings; it placed names on faces and charts on motives. But it did so as a surgeon would name organs, clinical and exact.
Dilli spoke last. His voice was low, every syllable measured.
"Rao, Krishnan, Ramudu, Jaggareddy, Banerjee — they're symptoms," he said. "The disease is larger. If we fight on their ground, we become predictable. We lose the family in the crossfire."
Subbaraju's hand trembled only once as he reached for Dilli's. "You show me the proof," he said slowly. "I raised men who fought with spears and who knew when to run. You must choose the way that keeps the family safe."
Gadhiraju swallowed. He had built ledgers and lived by contracts, had always believed that the company's growth would be their shelter. Now the ledger lay open and the ink smelled like treachery. "Whatever it takes," he said. "We move. We hide the flame where no one expects it."
They planned not in fury but in architecture. Lower operations inland — move essential R&D, critical servers and human cores away from prying eyes, scatter subsidiaries under innocuous names, plant legal shields and decoy projects. Shrink the map so that it could be guarded like a citadel rather than exposed like a plaza.
At the center of that plan was a single, audacious instruction: buy Hope Island.
Betal presented satellite images — a quiet crescent in the Bay of Bengal, a ribbon of mangrove, salt-sweet soil, and a history of being overlooked by commerce because it offered no easy ports. The island's name — Hope — was an irony too honest to ignore. It had no telecom towers, no industrial footprint, and just enough distance from the mainland to make covert relocation tractable.
"We make it our node," Dilli said. "A sovereign quiet. Servers in hardened vaults, research labs under the soil, microgrids for power, water reclamation. A place where we answer only to ourselves."
Subbaraju barked a short laugh — half disbelief, half approval. "You ask to buy an island?" he said. "When we used to buy a bullock, we bargained until the seller cried."
Dilli's smile was thin. "This time, no bargainers will stop us. Hope Island is small. We must move fast and buy it at any cost. If the money trails have eyes in the capital and in foreign boards, money will be a language they can't follow — untraceable transfers, trusts, shell purchases — all legally buried. We will make the purchase through a chain of entities that points nowhere and everywhere."
Gadhiraju looked at his son, then at his grand father. "It is a risk," he said, but the glint in his eyes was the same one that had started their first small ventures. "But the other path costs blood. We don't spend lives on contracts."
They spent that night drawing lines on maps: where to move the kernel team, which experiments to destroy and which to fragment into innocuous pieces, how to fake the public narrative of scaling down while they consolidated power in the island's hidden core. Betal calculated logistics to the decimal: optimal shipping windows, low-visibility transport corridors, carbon-neutral energy solutions to avoid attention, legal structures that would make the island's true purpose inscrutable to auditors.
At dawn, while gulls cried over the river and the village yawned awake, Dilli signed away a series of transfers through a set of companies — some real, some carefully fictional. Gadhiraju made calls to old friends who owed favors; Subbaraju invoked ancestral trust in men who still respected the old codes. Betal ran simulations for every contingency: floods, drone sweeps, corporate audits, legal subpoenas. For each, it offered alternatives that kept the family and the company intact.
There was one moment — brief and private — when Dilli stood on the farmhouse steps and breathed the same air his mother used to braid into their hair. He felt the weight of the Predator Suit's hum in his bones even when he had shed it for sleep. He placed his palm on the wood of the cottage door and whispered a vow to the night: No violence that can be avoided. No exposure that is unnecessary. Protect what is ours and let the rest fall by their own rot.
They would buy Hope Island as early as possible, at any cost. Not for conquest, not as an escape, but as a laboratory and shield: a place to reinvent CosPulse on their terms, to grow without predators peering in from the high seats of power. The purchase would be the first move in a longer chess game — one that traded immediate blood for durable sovereignty.
Subbaraju tapped the map with a gnarled finger. "We are soldiers," he said quietly. "But not all battles are fought on the field. Some are won by patience and planning. You, boy, have the patience of the river."
Dilli bowed his head. In the quiet that followed, the plan took shape like a seed in the dark. Hope Island — their new heart — waited across the waves, small and mute and waiting. They would go there together, and from its soil they would rebuild an empire that could not be bought, bullied, or buried.