Finally at last someone worthy of taking seriously.
I sat on the stone berth in my cave with all my subordinates for a strategy meeting, my mind still feeling the sting of thrill from our last encounter.
As I was thinking, an idea spurred through my mind.
I immediately spoke over my walkie talkie, “Jhansi, Guardian here.
I want an immediate meeting with Mamu Khan of Awadh.
I have a plan which this Willhoughby won’t be able to think of, even in his dreams.” The walkie talkie cracked on the other side.
Soon I was put on line with Mamu Khan, vassal of Begum who was ruling Awadh in her absence.
After he heard the whole scenario, he was taken aback, both in shock as well as amusement.
“I never thought the British had such a lethal personality with them.
Though I am forced to think, seeing that he was able to outsmart you, the genius of the alliance, why would they hide such a person till now?”.
I replied with smile on my face and my heart thumping from the sheer excitement of what had transpired.
” Why did they wait?
Because they were arrogant.
They thought cannons and commerce were enough to hold Bharat.
They only called for ‘The Brain’ when the ‘The Sword’ started to chip.
He didn’t outsmart me, Mammu Khan, he reminded me that even an absolute being can be tripped by a wire if he’s looking at the stars.
He used the past to blind the future.
It was a beautiful move.
But like all beautiful moves, it only works once.
Now, I know his frequency.” I mentioned that I had an excellent plan in my mind which could get rid of the “British Brain” and choke the eastern waterways both at the same time.
Two kills with one stone.
“He used the sound of drums to find me.
Now, we are going to use the sound of an empire to bury him.
We won’t hide from him this time, Mammu Khan.
We’re going to give him exactly what he’s looking for a massive, loud, marching target.
But when he reaches for it, his hand will close on nothing but air and shadow.
I need your help in putting my massive plan in action.
Therefore I request you to come to the Barabar caves in Bihar.
Please bring a small battalion with you.” He instantly agreed.
In the cave after weeks of hard work, grinding and engineering, I had successfully reconstructed a few large speakers.
They amplified sound ten folds.
As I finished up, I heard large number of synchronous footsteps closing in on the cave.
I slid the big entrance stone aside a little, to check who it was.
Mammu Khan stood at the entrance with three battalions of reinforcements.
I warmly welcomed them inside.
As we all sat for the strategy meeting.
I explained my encounter with Willoughby and his flawless strategy.
They were amazed, then suddenly Mammu Khan spoke up, “then what do we do now?”.
I silently and enthusiastically pointed towards the speakers , which I had spent time building.
(I usually carried my twenty first century tools with me.
One never know what thing will become useful next).
I explained to Mamu Khan that these were my creation and they could emit sound at a high intensity.
I handed them a few mic and told them to record their synchronous and loud stomping to copy the sound of advancing regiments.
As soon as night fell, the hardened sound of stomping and marching filled the cave.
After they had recorded the sound into the speakers.
I enthusiastically told them to watch how Willoughby would go down.
Early morning, I had my soldiers place the speakers in the forests surrounding the area where Edward was stationed.
Early morning the beats of loud boots marching towards the camp startled everyone.
As the sounds grew louder, the panic grew thicker.
Sepoys ran frantically here and there shouting they were under attack, their alarm bell boy went crazy, ringing the bell, as his last moments were near.
Soon Wiilloughby came out his camp and tried to calm down everyone.
Horrified from the trumpets and beating drums, he immediately ordered the regiments to be in the ready position.
While Willoughby was busy in finding my location, as the sun was setting down, I secretly ordered Mammu Khan to take a fleet of boats and silently move towards Munger port.
“Take all the ammunition you want, Khan sahab.
Now the success of this mission weighs on your shoulders.”, I spoke through the walkie talkie.
Mammu Khan replied in absolute obedience, “As you wish Huzoor, I promise not to disappoint you.” With that he left to set sail with a fleet of ships in the holy waters of Ganges.
Soon heavy winds started whipping the surroundings and within no time, a medium intensity storm brewed near Munger port.
Mammu Khan briefed me about the storm, I calmed him and said, “Don’t be anxious Mammu sahab, even the nature is in our favour, you just go and capture the port.
Believe me!!!
my men are as silent as owls, the British won’t even know what hit them.
I have faith in you.” Mammu Khan fully charged by my words thanked me and sailed towards the port.
Here Willoughby was busy contemplating the situation, numerous scenarios ran through his head.
“According to what I have seen, the Guardian is not foolish to himself charge at a army camp.
What could he have possibly thought of.
There is possibly more here than meets the eyes.
What could you be possibly thinking of, my mate.” As he was busy contemplating my plan, a British general, ran past him.
He saw Willoughby standing still and thinking.
He stopped in his tracks and headed towards him.
He roared, “What are you standing here for, you nincompoop?!!!
Don’t you see we are in a state of emergency here!!!!!
Now get those cheeks of yours away off the ground and start searching for the enemy forces.” Saying this he hurried off.
Willoughby, finally pulled from his transient thoughts and almost teasing in the officer’s direction, said, “As if I ever will, you dufus!!!”.
He decided to do his own digging.
As the soldiers were moving looking for the rebel forces, he silently pulled himself aside with his a few loyalist.
He decided to look separately from the general, because according to him the general didn’t understand the Guardian at all.
As they were searching, Willoughby’s gaze fell on something strange.
In Munger, numerous boats reached the shore in the dark of night, Mammu Khan, signaled his men to stop rowing and let the boat float freely, reaching the port as silently as a feather.
Soon, unknown to the British the port was surrounded by boats of Mammu Khan.
As the soldiers turned away from the port, the men swiftly moved and hid in the nearby forest areas.
A soldier silently took out a bottle, and silently mixed the contents in the nearby river water.
After sometime, the river started glowing red.
As soon as a sepoy glanced at the river, he screamed, “The River!!!!
The R-river has turned red.
This a bad omen.
We have incurred upon ourselves, “Wrath of God”.
We will be devoured.
Everyone flee, run away!!
Run as fast as you can.” Soon all the sepoys left their posts and ran away.
Not so long after, Mammu’s men closed in on the port of Munger.
His men silently moved to cover the surroundings of the port area, while Mammu Khan, with his elite unit, crept in the warehouses and silos.
After they had entered unnoticed, few of them tossed some smoke grenades all inside the warehouses.
While the British officers and sepoys were blinded, Mammu Khan’s men moved with their special goggles on, efficiently eliminating every single British officer with muffled shots.
The shots were so silent that the sepoys barely took notice.
By the time the smoke cleared, all the British officers lay dead on the ground. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
A special team covered the staircase to the commander in chief’s office, while the British custom officer lay inside looking at all the paperwork, unknown about the danger approaching him.
Back in Barabar Hills, it was a mud path trotted with numerous boots like some regiment pass down his path.
He bent down and checks the footprints with his fingers.
“This is definitely a path, may be it is a route taken by the Guardian.
May be this could lead to his hideout.”, he thought and started moving forward, with a small battalion of trusted soldiers.
He hand tightened around the grip of his gun, as he advanced deeper into the cave.
He noticed that sound of marching troops grew louder as he crept closer.
Drops of sweat rolled down his face, his nerves throbbing, his heart pounding with excitement of his thought of capturing me, the mind of the alliance.
His hands shook with sheer excitement of capturing me.
The mud grew slicker, the air thickening with the scent of damp earth and something alien the sharp, metallic tang of ozone.
Willoughby pressed his back against the cold, unyielding granite of the Barabar Hills, his fingers tracing the exquisite, mirror polished curve of the entrance.
“Lomas Rishi,” he whispered, a jagged breath escaping his lungs.
He could not help but admire the geometry.
The archway, carved with such ancient precision, was the only vessel worthy of containing a mind like the Guardian’s.
It was a choice of aesthetic and strategic genius a fortress of stone that sang with every footfall.
The rhythmic thrum of the “marching army” inside reached a crescendo, a thunderous vibration that rattled the very marrow of his bones.
To Willoughby, it was the most beautiful music he had ever heard; it was the sound of a cornered God.
His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Every step deeper into the dark was a hit of pure adrenaline, a drug that made the torchlight dance before his eyes.
He felt a savage, almost ecstatic thrill.
He wasn’t just capturing a rebel, he was conquering the future.
The darkness seemed to pulse with the heat of a thousand battle ready men, and he imagined he could see the faint, blue bioluminescence of the Guardian’s armor reflecting off the obsidian walls.
He signaled his men to halt.
In the heavy, expectant silence of the inner chamber, he let his head fall back against the stone, his eyes glazing over with the sheer intensity of his triumph.
“Soon,” Edward thought, his mind a fever dream of white hot ambition.
“I will not simply hang you, Guardian.
No, the gallows are for common thieves.
You!!!!
you are a library I intend to burn for its secrets.
I will peel back that silver mask of yours, not with a blade, but with a thousand questions.
I will watch the light die in your eyes as I dismantle your ‘New India’ piece by piece.
You gave them lightning; I will give them the dark.
I will keep your head in a jar of spirits on my desk in London, a silent monument to the day the British Empire outthought the future.
Today, the legend ends.
Today, the ghost bleeds.”
He gripped his saber, the leather creaking under his palm.
A predatory smile twisted his face, his nerves singing with the cold joy of the hunt.
He took one final, decisive step into the glow of the central vault, his voice a low, tremulous rasp.
“I have found you, you magnificent devil.
Come…
let us see if your machines can pray.”,
Willoughby lunged forward, the torchlight spilling into the central vault like a golden wave.
He expected a line of silver clad soldiers; he expected the Guardian standing in the center of the room, a defiant titan bathed in blue light.
Instead, the light hit the polished granite and shattered.
The “marching troops” didn’t stop.
They stood in perfect rows, their armor gleaming with an unnatural, flickering brilliance.
But as Willoughby swung his saber at the nearest figure, the blade passed through the man’s chest with a sickening lack of resistance.
The image rippled like water, digitized static sparking where the steel met the light.
The roar of the army suddenly cut to a whisper, then a rhythmic, electronic hum.
The figures vanished one by one, leaving behind only small, humming discs on the floor; my signal repeaters.
Willoughby’s boots skidded on the mirror finish floor.
The air in his lungs felt like lead.
The silence that followed was not just quiet, it was deafening.
It was the sound of a vacuum.
He stood frozen, his hand still gripped around his saber, his eyes darting frantically to the corners of the empty cave.
The land did not just slide beneath him; it dissolved.
He felt a terrifying sense of transit, as if he were falling through the very earth he had tried to conquer.
The “marching army” was a loop of light and sound.
The “ozone” was just a chemical trick.
He had chased a ghost across the hills, fueled by the ego of a man who thought he had finally cornered “The Last Obstacle”.
A sudden, violent tremor shook his frame.
He hurled his saber against the wall, the metal clanging uselessly against the stone.
“NO!” he roared, the sound echoing a thousand times in the acoustic chamber.
“IT CANNOT BE!
HE WAS HERE!
I FELT HIM!”
He fell to his knees, his fingers clawing at the dust where I, the Guardian, should have been.
The thrill that had sustained him for miles turned into a cold, hollow poison.
He felt a grief so sharp it was physical; sadness not for his men, but for the loss of the intellectual battle he thought he was winning.
He had been played like a cheap flute.
Minutes passed.
The torches of his men flickered low.
Finally, Willoughby’s breathing slowed.
The madness in his eyes receded, replaced by a crystalline, terrifying clarity.
He crawled toward one of the humming discs and picked it up.
He looked at the intricate circuitry, the smooth twenty first century finish that felt like a pebble from another world.
He stood up, brushing the dirt from his uniform with trembling hands.
He didn’t look at his confused soldiers.
He looked at the empty archway of the Lomas Rishi.
“Magnificent,” he whispered, his voice cracking with a strange, distorted respect.
“Truly Magnificent!!!!
He didn’t just hide.
He used my own obsession as a tether.
He knew I would follow the loudest noise because I am a man who looks for patterns.
He gave me exactly the pattern I wanted to see.”
He touched the note pinned to a small tripod in the center, the one with the single word
“RECALCULATE.”
“You didn’t just outmaneuver me, Guardian,” Willoughby murmured, a ghost of a smile touching his lips despite the ruin of his mission.
“You rewrote the rules of the engagement while I was still reading the prologue.
A masterstroke.
To win a battle without a single soldier being present, that is not just war.
He turned to his sergeant, his face a mask of cold, professional resolve.
“Burn the equipment.
We return to the river.
We have been fighting a shadow, and while we were chasing the dark, the sun has already set on the Ganges.”
In Munger, as the commander lay engrossed in his paperwork, the door of his cabin suddenly broke in.
The commander startled by sudden intrusion was taken aback.
“Who are-“, before he could even complete his words, a sepoy took aim and fired.
The bullet passed straight through the center of his brain.
He lay dead on his seat his head bending backwards from the sheer force of the shot.
Soon as all the sepoys had been vacated or had run away.
Upon Mammu Khan’s signal as the forces pulled back, every silo or warehouse could be seem erupting in eternal flames behind them.
As soon as they left, a strong storm approached the area of Munger and soon every silo and every warehouse was either blown away or tattered.
“Even the God seems to be on our side.”, Mammu Khan said as a smile spread across his face.
While the East burned, the North West was won with a smile.
Begum Hazrat Mahal did not arrive in Peshawar with a sword drawn.
She arrived as a Queen.
In the grand Jirga of the Pashtun tribes, she sat among the white-bearded elders, her presence a calming, regal force.
“The British offer you treaties written in fading ink,” she said, her voice charming and soft.
“I offer you the brotherhood of the mountains.”
She didn’t demand loyalty; she seduced it.
She offered them Guardian-tech medicine to heal their wounded and promised tax free trade routes for the Bihar grains she knew I would soon be sending North.
Finally, she tapped her wrist, and every British signal flare in the valley went dark.
“I offer you the power to be invisible,” she whispered.
“Let no British messenger pass the Khyber.
When the Firangi looks North, let him see only a wall of brothers.”
The elders stood, one by one, touching their hearts.
The “Lioness” had sealed the frontier without firing a single shot.
She keyed her radio, her voice light and triumphant.
“Guardian, the Pashtun have invited me for tea.
The front door is locked.
I believe I’ll stay for the saffron; the hospitality here is far better than in Awadh.”
I sat back in the Barabar cave, watching the red icons of British control flicker and die on my map.
The “Brain” had been out thought.
The “Sword” had been shattered.
Back in Jhansi,
Guardian
“Lotus, Lioness, do you read me?
The ‘Great Thirst’ has officially begun.
I’m looking at a map that used to be covered in British red.
Now?
It’s looking a lot like a vacuum.”
Rani Lakshmi Bai (Her voice clear, carrying the steady rhythm of someone walking the ramparts)
“I hear you, Guardian.
The silence from the East is the loudest sound I’ve heard all year.
My scouts at the border say the British messengers are turning back in confusion.
They can’t find the river, and they certainly can’t find you.
Tell me, did ‘The Brain’ leave a parting gift?”
Guardian (Tapping the Iron Box)
“Better than a gift; he left his homework.
I intercepted Willoughby’s master strategy.
It’s all here: the silt-depths of the Hooghly, the secret telegraph schedules to London, even a list of their local informants.
I’ve already scanned it.
Mammu Khan is currently using the hydrology data to turn the Rajmahal choke into a permanent plug.”
Begum Hazrat Mahal (A soft, triumphant laugh echoes from the North)
“And here I thought I was the only one having a productive week.
The Pashtun elders send their regards, Guardian.
They were impressed by your ability to make British signal flares vanish into thin air.
The Khyber is locked.
The British in the Punjab are now shouting into a void, and the only answer they receive is the wind.”
Guardian
“That’s the beauty of it, Begum.
We aren’t just fighting them; we’re ‘recalculating’ them.
Mammu Khan did a hell of a job at Munger.
Between the ‘Red River’ omen and the smoke grenades, the British Custom officers didn’t even have time to reach for their pens, let alone their pistols.
The Ganges is now an Alliance highway.”
Rani Lakshmi Bai
“It is a masterstroke.
But be careful, Guardian.
A man like Willoughby doesn’t stay humbled for long.
He commended your ‘art’ because he finally recognizes you as a rival.
He will spend his nights in Calcutta trying to solve the puzzle you’ve become.”
Guardian
“Let him try.
By the time he figures out the frequency, we’ll have changed the song.
But honestly?
I’m done with the mud and the ozone for a while.
Begum, I hope you’re saving some of that Pashtun saffron for me.
And Lakshmi, I’m holding you to that walk in the garden.
My HUD says the jasmine is at peak bloom.”
Begum Hazrat Mahal
“The saffron is waiting, brother.
And so is the New India.
We have the peaks, the rivers, and the plains.
The trap is shut.”
Rani Lakshmi Bai
“The garden is ready, Guardian.
No armor.
No tactical reports.
Just the sunset.
Come home.”
Guardian
“Copy that, Lotus.
Guardian out.”