> "What's your name?"
> "Aarav," he said. Simple. Declarative.
> "Come on, Aarav… I'm starving. Let's go eat."
To anyone else, it would seem ordinary. Friendship in a quiet night, a meal shared after a brutal fight.
Aarav thought differently.
> "Do not confuse this for empathy. He is not a friend. He is a resource. Untrained, reckless, volatile — and thus extremely valuable. Every fight he chooses, every enemy he makes, is data. Every weakness exposed is a chance to mold him. Strength without direction is useless, but strength guided can crush everything in its path. I will teach him when to strike… and when to hold back. Every lesson, every failure, every victory — under observation. Every pawn has its role. Every storm can be controlled. And this boy… he will be my instrument."
The streetlights cast long shadows. The city hummed indifferently around them. Vihaan laughed again, weakly, tasting both exhaustion and relief. Aarav allowed himself the smallest, coldest smirk.
> "The first piece has been touched. The game begins. And I intend to win it before anyone even knows it started."
They walked into the night together. One bleeding, one calculating. One a storm, one a strategist. But the lines were already drawn, the roles defined. And in this quiet, the rules of power began to shift — unseen, inevitable, unstoppable.
They sat under a flickering neon sign above a roadside stall that sold fried rice the way some people sell nostalgia — messy, hot, and impossible to refuse. Steam rose in lazy coils; the oil hissed; the vendor tossed rice with practiced violence. Vihaan attacked his plate like a man trying to reclaim something stolen: quick bites, angry swallows, laughter that came out rough and ragged.
Aarav watched him — not with warmth, but with interest the way a tactician studies terrain. Vihaan's hands moved with the same impatience he used in fights. He joked. He mocked the absurdity of being single-handedly humiliated and then filmed, and each punchline landed like a small, defiant explosion.
They traded stories, crude jokes, and half-true boasts. The beatings, the pride, the viral video — everything folded into the soundtrack of their meal. Vihaan described the ambush in blunt, breathless sentences; Aarav listened, storing each detail like currency. Between mouthfuls, Vihaan would laugh, clench his jaw, then laugh again — laughter that tasted of blood and stubbornness.
When the night closed around them, a strange thing had happened. It was not friendship in the soft sense; it was something colder, more useful. Vihaan had found someone who didn't stare with pity or loud condemnation. Aarav had found a volatile force that could be sharpened.
> "You laugh too loud," Aarav remarked once, dry, almost bored.
Vihaan grinned. "Better than crying."
They parted under an indifferent moon, each carrying his private weight. Vihaan with bruises and bravado; Aarav with calculations and a smile he did not let show.
---
Dawn crawled in like a thief. By morning the campus was already spinning with gossip. In the mess halls and on the steps, The Forsaken's members traded barbed jokes — the usual bravado of men who felt their authority restored by cameras and ridicule.
"He's probably in the hospital. Broke hands, broken pride."
"Let the footage teach others. Anyone who interferes gets the same."
Their laughter was loud enough to be the soundtrack for the rumor. They had turned the beating into a lesson, a warning unrolled like a banner.
The video had spread. It had become a brief, gleaming proof that the Forsaken still controlled order. Someone had added a caption: "Interfere in our business and this will be you."
Aarav heard the talk and did not waste expression. He cataloged it, as always. The campus was stabilizing — players reasserting positions. Predictable. Useful.
And then Vihaan walked into the corridor, humming a tune he did not know the words to, a ridiculous grin on his face. He called out "Good morning!" to professors, to girls passing by — to everything that knew how to be soft. He was absurdly alive, a man whose pride had been bruised but not bent.
The Forsaken froze. Their laughter died. The leader's words, the plans, the confidence — each felt suddenly exposed, ridiculous in the face of Vihaan's simple, unguarded defiance.
> How? a dozen questions might have formed in their minds, but none of them reached words. Yesterday they had filmed his ruin; today he walked like a man who owned the morning.
Their confusion turned to rage because confusion is always the seed of violence. Phones were pulled. Calls whispered into ears. Backup was remembered. The theatre of intimidation is preserved by spectacle; spectacle had been disrupted.
Aarav, standing near the stairwell like a sculptor above a slab of marble, allowed himself a brief, dry amusement. Vihaan's return to normalcy — this ridiculous, loud, unbothered normal — was itself a kind of defiance, and useful in the currency of attention.
One of the Forsaken's men rushed toward a friend on the phone, whispering, "He's fine? He's up and walking?" The leader's face tightened. Pride bruised twice as deep is twice as dangerous.
Vihaan sauntered up to the very table where one of the boys he had hit sat nursing a smirk. The boy's grin faltered. Around them, the corridor felt like a held breath.
> "Morning," Vihaan said, voice loud enough to be heard like a bell. He nudged the wary boy's shoulder where bruises still marked the surface. "You should eat properly. You looked pale yesterday."
A cheap attempt at mockery was swallowed before it could form. The boy's face burned with a shame that was not physical but public and humiliating, and he had no script for what to do with it. The Forsaken's members exchanged furtive glances; cameras wavered between record and hide.
Aarav watched all of it as one might watch a small fire flare and then settle. He catalogued reactions — who flinched, who stared, who smiled with teeth pulled tight. Each micro-reaction was a ledger entry.
> Vihaan performs unpredictability like armor, Aarav noted inwardly. Refusal to be the victim is itself disorienting. Useful.
Aarav's laugh this morning was small, but it was there — not the open mirth of friendship, but the thin smirk of one who recognized usefulness. Vihaan was a walking anomaly: beaten and laughing, humiliated and arrogant, injured and unbowed.
> "They thought they'd ended you," Aarav murmured, half to himself.
Vihaan just grinned. "They tried." His eyes flicked to Aarav. "You think I should've died?" he half-joked, but the answer was in the way his hands flexed.
Aarav's mind was already working on contingencies. If The Forsaken escalated, then who else would gain from the chaos? Who would strike when they hesitated? Who could be bribed into silence? He imagined corridors after midnight, whispers between lockers, small trades that would raise or lower a price of a favor. A campus ran on codes and the currency of fear; Vihaan's defiance had introduced a new variable that could be exploited.
He kept his mouth shut because words before plans are a luxury the practical cannot afford. Instead he offered Vihaan a look — a measuring look that asked, without asking, whether Vihaan could be bent toward a purpose.
Vihaan answered with a laugh that was half prayer, half battle cry. "Let them try," he said. "I laugh because it annoys them."
Aarav cataloged the laugh. It was a tool. It was a crack where pressure could be applied — either to break or refine.
---
The day unfolded like a reel, each scene an opportunity. The Forsaken's humiliation campaign had failed to produce the desired fear; instead, it had produced attention. People love spectacle, and those who perform boldly attract both followers and enemies. Aarav wrote the equation without haste: attention = leverage if the observer can convert it. Vihaan had attention. Vihaan had broken the rule. Vihaan had the raw material; it just needed structure.
He imagined the possibilities as if arranging chess pieces: a word whispered here, a favor exchanged there, a recorded apology that would look like contrition if released at the right moment. He thought of alliances that could be formed by protecting Vihaan until a moment when he would owe a debt — and pay it in influence. Action was not warmth; it was calculation.
For the first time since the semester began, Aarav allowed himself to think of campaigns, of slow pressure applied like heat to metal until it bends to the desired shape. Vihaan would be the hammer — blunt, effective — but Aarav's hands would be the ones that guided it, the ones that decided which nails to strike.
As evening approached again, the campus hummed less like a battleground and more like a theater awaiting its next act. People had opinions — loud, mutable — and videos looped like mantras. Vihaan moved among them with a swagger borne of insolence and pain. Aarav walked beside him, a shadow that calculated, smiling privately at the geometry of influence.
Their bond was not made of mutual softness; it was forged in the language of usefulness. Two men, different temperaments, aligned for a moment in the slow arithmetic of power.
> One fights. One plans. Both are necessary.
Aarav tasted the idea like a bitter spice: it was promising and dangerous in equal measure. He would need patience. He would need to choose battles that increased returns and minimized costs. And above all, he would need to keep his distance between decision and emotion.
Vihaan finished his laughter and said something silly about the video — about how the Forsaken looked like fools trying to play gods. He flexed his bruised hands and pretended the pain was a coincidence. Aarav watched him, already turning the moment into potential: the smile would be the bait; the reaction it provoked would be the net.
The campus, unaware, folded into night. The virality of one beating had become an asset, not just a wound. Somewhere inside that transformation lay the first seeds of War — quiet, patient, and merciless — and Aarav, with his ledger of minutiae, began to draw the map.