The mountain path was a treacherous thread of ice and stone. For two days, Kalki descended, the thin air a familiar companion. He moved with an unnerving economy of motion, a discipline drilled into him by Parashurama. His boots crunched on old snow, the sound sharp in the vast alpine silence.
He was leaving the roof of the world. With every thousand feet he dropped, the air grew thicker, heavier with the scents and sorrows of the age.
On the third day, he reached the treeline, then the foothills. He saw the first signs of the world outside Shambhala: a rusted fencepost, a discarded plastic bottle, a prayer flag faded to gray, shredded by a wind that carried no blessings. These small pieces of decay were more jarring than any monster he could have imagined. They were signs of a world that had forgotten its own sacredness.
He came upon a road. Two ribbons of cracked, weed-choked asphalt winding down toward the smoggy plains. He had been walking for three days and had not seen another soul.
Then he heard the engine.
It was a low, angry growl, growing louder. A plume of dust appeared on the road ahead, rising from behind a switchback. Kalki stepped off the road, melting into the shadow of a rock outcropping. He was not hiding out of fear, but out of caution. He was a variable in a world whose rules he was still learning.
An armored transport rumbled past. It was painted a flat, non-reflective black, with the emblem of the Null Order—a stylized empty circle—stamped on its side. Inside, behind reinforced mesh, were people. A dozen or more, crammed together, their faces pale and blank. They weren't prisoners of war; their eyes held the hollowed-out look of those who had simply given up. The harvested fruit of despair.
A second vehicle followed, smaller and faster. It was a sleek, black patrol skimmer that hovered a few inches above the asphalt, its engine a high-pitched whine. Two men in matte-black armor sat in the open cockpit. Order-keepers.
They were laughing.
As they passed Kalki's position, the one in the passenger seat casually raised a sleek rifle and fired a pulse of blue energy into a roadside shrine. The small stone niche, which held a clay statue of Ganesh, exploded into dust.
"Another illegal idol," the man said, his voice amplified by his helmet, dripping with bored contempt. "Cleanliness is Order."
The skimmer sped on, following the transport down the mountain.
Kalki stepped out from behind the rock. He stared at the pulverized stone, the lingering scent of ozone hanging in the air. The act was so casual, so petty. This was not the strategic suppression of faith he had heard about in the council. This was something uglier. This was cruelty for sport.
He looked at his hands, then at the wooden sword in his belt. Parashurama's words echoed in his mind: Your task is not to kill the man, but to cut the lie away.
What was the lie here? The lie was that this act of desecration had no consequence. That faith could be erased by force. That hope was contraband. That the Order was invincible.
Kalki started down the road, no longer walking, but moving in a steady, ground-eating jog. He moved faster than any human could, yet his breathing remained even, his footsteps almost silent on the crumbling pavement. Devadatta, his fabled steed, was not yet with him; for now, his own body, perfected and pure, was his only mount.
He rounded the next switchback just in time. The convoy had stopped. A massive landslide, a relic of a past monsoon, blocked the road. The armored transport idled, its engine a low thrum. The two Order-keepers had disembarked from their skimmer and were inspecting the wall of rock and earth, their rifles held loosely.
"Gonna take the sweepers an hour to get here," one of them complained, kicking at a loose rock. "Another delay."
"More time to collect fines from the locals," the other replied with a shrug. "Look, a new customer."
They had seen Kalki. He stood in the middle of the road, fifty yards away, a lone traveler with a wooden sword. To them, he was nothing. A peasant. A target of opportunity.
The first Order-keeper raised his rifle. "Halt! Identity and travel permit. You are in a restricted zone."
Kalki did not stop. He continued walking toward them, his pace steady, his eyes fixed on theirs.
"Final warning!" the keeper barked, his voice nervous now. The boy wasn't reacting the way people were supposed to react. He wasn't cowering. "Violate compliance and we will use pacification measures."
Kalki kept coming. He was now twenty yards away.
The keeper fired. A bolt of blue energy, identical to the one that had destroyed the shrine, shot from the rifle. It was designed to stun, to inflict paralyzing neuromuscular shock. It crossed the distance in an instant.
It never hit him.
The bolt stopped an inch from Kalki's chest, frozen in mid-air. It simply hung there, sizzling and crackling, held in place by a force that had no name. A law he had just imposed on the moment.
The two Order-keepers stared, their mouths agape behind their helmets. This was not possible. This was not in their manuals.
Kalki raised his right hand, palm open. The captured energy bolt, like a trained hawk, flew to his palm. He closed his fist, and the bolt extinguished with a soft hiss, leaving only the smell of burnt air.
"That," Kalki said, his voice calm but resonating with the power of the mountain at his back, "was an act of Adharma. It was an imbalance. This is the consequence."
He took one more step and drew the wooden sword.
The second Order-keeper, his training finally kicking in, screamed and opened fire, a volley of rapid-fire pulses.
Kalki moved. He wasn't just fast; he flowed around the energy bolts like water flowing around stones in a stream. He seemed to be in multiple places at once, a blur of gray cloth. Before the keeper could even register it, Kalki was on him.
The wooden sword did not strike his armor. It tapped his rifle. Tap.
The advanced weapon, a fusion of complex circuitry and particle emitters, fell apart. Not shattered, but neatly disassembled. Its power cell, stock, and barrel clattered to the asphalt in a perfect, neat pile, as if an invisible master craftsman had taken it apart in a nanosecond.
Kalki did the same to the other keeper's rifle before the man could even raise it. Tap. Another pile of useless parts.
He now stood between them. They were armed only with their sidearms and their disbelief.
He had not harmed them. He had disarmed the lie of their power.
One of them, his voice high with panic, drew a vibro-knife from his belt and lunged. Kalki did not meet the attack. He sidestepped, and his hand, open and calm, came to rest flat against the man's chestplate.
He pushed.
It was not a shove. There was no brute force. But a wave of pure, concentrated kinetic energy, an expression of Dharma itself, erupted from his palm. The Order-keeper flew backward thirty feet, tumbling through the air before crashing into the rockslide, his armor dented and smoking. He was unconscious, but alive.
The last keeper dropped his useless sidearm and fell to his knees, his hands raised in surrender. "Mercy," he whimpered.
Kalki stood over him, the wooden sword held loosely at his side. He looked at the cowering man, and for the first time, he saw not a monster, but a man trapped in a monster's armor. A man who had traded his soul for a steady wage and the illusion of strength.
"My first vow," Kalki said, as if reciting a lesson, "is to never alter the will of another. Your will to live is your own. I will honor it."
He looked past the man, toward the armored transport. The prisoners were pressed against the mesh, their eyes wide with a feeling they had forgotten: hope. A tiny, fragile, dangerous thing.
Kalki walked to the back of the transport. The door was sealed with a magnetic lock, a thick slab of steel. He did not touch the lock. He did not touch the door. He placed his hand on the chassis of the truck beside the door.
He felt the cold, dead metal, an object of oppression. And then, he reminded it of its true nature.
A deep resonant hum filled the air, seeming to come from the truck itself. A sound like the first note of creation. A perfect OM.
The steel door did not break. It unlocked. With a soft click, it swung open.
Freedom.