✦ ⭑ I. The Problem with Armies
Armies, Narasimha had decided long ago, were dangerously stupid things.
Not soldiers.
Not individual men.
The mass of it.
Line them up in bright colours, beat drums, shout slogans, and they became:
visible from miles away,
predictable in their movement,
satisfying to poets,
extremely satisfying to enemy cannons.
"The British love that," he said one evening in the Map Room, tapping a red line representing a Company column. "They like neat lines. Squares. Files. Rows. Easy to count, easy to fire at."
Ayyappa snorted.
"Many kings like that," he said. "Even here. Makes them feel grand. 'Look, my army can block the sun.'"
"Or catch it with their faces," Sri muttered.
They were not alone.
Raghava sat in a corner, sorting Trinetra reports.
Devudu leaned against the wall, arms crossed.
Venkanna occupied his low wooden seat, staff resting across his lap, watching.
Narasimha turned to the blank section of the map where no neat lines were drawn.
"I don't want an army in the old sense," he said. "Not yet. Not loudly. Not while we still pretend to be loyal zamindars."
He looked at Ayyappa.
"I want 300 to 500 men," he said slowly, tasting the number. "Hidden in plain sight. Farmers to the world. Porters. Caravan hands. Guards. But in truth…"
A faint smile tugged at his mouth.
"…fangs in the dark."
Ayyappa raised a brow.
"You want tigers," he said.
"The kingdom already has a lion," Sri observed dryly. "Too many lions, it gets crowded. Tigers are fine."
Raghava interjected, practical as always.
"An ordinary soldier is easy to train," he said. "You give him a spear, you teach him to march, you shout. This… will be harder."
Narasimha nodded.
"That's why we build slowly," he said. "This is not a recruitment drive. This is… distillation."
He looked at Venkanna.
"In the old stories," he asked, "how did great kings pick their secret guards?"
"By seeing who refused small corruptions," Venkanna replied. "By watching who stood last on the wall. By asking who remained kind when no one was watching."
"Then we will do the same," Narasimha said. "I don't want bravos. I want men who can move like shadows—but who remember why they move."
He looked at Ayyappa again.
"You will shape them," he said simply.
Ayyappa's face did not change.
But his eyes lit.
"So," he said slowly, "you finally give me students I don't have to hold back with temple decorum."
Sri groaned.
"Here it comes," she muttered. "We're about to lose three hundred half-sane men and gain three hundred lunatics with discipline."
❖ II. Choosing the First Teeth
You cannot just put up a notice:
"Wanted: Men for secret tiger corps. Must like long walks, no glory, and possibly death."
So Trinetra worked quietly.
From:
caravan routes,
Sangha ships,
village militias,
temple guards,
tribal bands,
reports trickled in of men who:
did not panic when outnumbered,
shared food even when hungry,
kept their mouths shut at the right times,
did not abuse small power when given a stick and a title.
One such report came from a port town:
"Dockworker named Ravi – strong, quiet, breaks up fights without lasting grudges. Refused bribe from foreign trader to misdirect cargo. Could be… more."
Another from a tribal clan:
"Girl asks if only men can fight. You said 'no'—and then changed topic too quickly. Some of our young women shoot straighter than our boys. Think on it."
Narasimha did think on it.
For now, he kept this first core male-only—not out of belief in male superiority, but out of painful practicalities:
the underground spaces were still too crude,
the social shock of mixed-gender elite covert units would ignite more internal fires than he could handle in this phase.
But he quietly instructed Venkanna:
"Wherever we find women with courage and calm, give them other roles—for now. Messengers. Healers who know more than herbs. Later… we will see."
Selections began under innocent names:
"extended guard training,"
"special caravan security,"
"escort unit formation."
Men who agreed were told:
"You will work harder than others. You will get no extra praise. You will often be hungry and tired. You will see things you cannot speak of. If you do not like this, leave now."
Some laughed and stayed.
Some hesitated—and were mentally marked for other, less intense duties.
Some walked away.
Those who remained were not told they were becoming "Tiger Corps."
Not yet.
They were gathered in batches of twenty to thirty, brought to Uyyalawada or to certain hill sites.
They expected:
new weapons,
fancy uniforms,
shouted slogans.
Instead, Ayyappa made them run.
Up hills.
Down dry riverbeds.
Through scrub.
At dawn.
At noon.
At dusk.
Day after day.
"You are not seeing enemies," he told them. "You are meeting your worst enemy: your own weakness."
One man muttered, "I thought we were coming to learn to fight the British, not the sun."
Ayyappa smiled like a man shown a ripe mango he was about to cut.
"Good," he said. "Start with this. If you cannot endure heat, rain, hunger, and boredom, how will you endure when a Company patrol walks past your hiding place and you can't scratch your nose?"
By the end of the first month, some had quit.
No shame.
They were assigned back to normal duties, no punishment.
"This must be voluntary," Narasimha insisted. "An unwilling shadow is a liability."
Those who stayed:
lost some softness,
gained calluses,
began to understand that glory would not be their reward.
✢ III. Training in the Guts of the Earth
The first dedicated training ground was not on a wide open maidan.
It was underground.
In one of the larger hillside hollows—neatly reinforced and ventilated—lanterns hung from hooks, casting dim pools of light.
The space smelled of dust, sweat, and the faint tang of oiled steel.
Here, Ayyappa and Devudu began the real lessons.
Stealth
"Most of you think stealth means walking on your toes," Ayyappa said, arms folded.
He tossed a stone.
It clattered loudly off a far wall.
"Noise is not just sound," he went on. "It is presence. To be unseen, you must also be unremarkable when seen."
He set exercises:
move from one end of a village to another at dusk without anyone remembering your face the next day,
steal a bell from a temple courtyard without silencing it—simply by timing its natural ringing with your step,
follow a cart for an hour without raising the driver's suspicion.
Failures were not beaten.
They were made to repeat.
Again.
And again.
Until even the loudest of them could pass by a sleeping dog without waking it.
Unconventional Warfare
Narasimha did not want men who only knew how to stand in a line and stab.
He wanted men who could:
drop a bridge quietly,
misdirect a convoy,
turn terrain into weapon.
So Ayyappa taught them:
how to rig simple traps with rope and stones,
how to quietly loosen certain bolts on cart wheels so they broke later, in inconvenient places,
how to set up a night camp that looked big but was in fact half-empty—a decoy.
"The British will bring discipline and guns," he said. "We will bring inconvenience and misfortune. We will be the reason their plans never quite work as written."
Survival
In nearby scrub and forest, the men were broken into small groups and dropped with minimal supplies.
"Three days," Ayyappa told them. "You must:
find water,
eat without stealing from villagers,
avoid leaving an obvious trail,
return to this point."
They learned:
which roots were safe,
how to find water by watching animals,
how to sleep in trees when ground was unsafe.
One man, skinny but stubborn, came back after three days looking like he'd wrestled an angry bush.
What did you eat?" Devudu asked.
"Leaves," he said.
"Which leaves?" Devudu pressed.
He blinked.
"Green ones."
After a round of nervous laughter, the healers were called to treat his stomach.
For the next batch, survival lessons started with:
"Rule one: Do not eat random green."
Silent Combat
Perhaps the hardest part.
Most men knew how to shout and swing.
Quietly disabling another human being required:
control,
intimacy with violence,
and a stronger sense of restraint.
"When we fight the British openly," Ayyappa said, holding a wooden practice dagger, "everyone will know. That day, you can roar. Before that day, you move like ghosts. No wasted strikes. No unnecessary kills."
They practiced:
holds to choke someone unconscious without breaking the neck,
how to hit nerves to drop a man without screaming,
how to use cloth, rope, and even a water pot as weapons.
Narasimha himself joined some sessions.
He trained as hard as any of them.
Harder, sometimes.
Once, during a paired drill, a recruit caught him off guard and sent him tumbling.
The silence that followed felt like a drop of water into hot ghee.
The man turned pale.
"Dora, I—I didn't—" he stammered.
Narasimha grinned from the ground, hand to his ribs.
"If I can be felled," he said, "then I must train more. If you had held back because of my title, you would have wasted my time. Good strike."
After that, the men understood:
This was not a court formality exercise.
Their leader wanted to be as sharp as they were.
❖ IV. Naming the Tigers
The name came not from Narasimha.
It came from a village child.
One evening, after a training session in a wooded valley, a group of the men walked back to the village in simple clothes, their weapons hidden.
They blended easily into the bustle.
A group of children, playing near the well, watched them with wide eyes.
"Who are they?" one little boy whispered to his sister. "They walk like they know where every stone is."
"Guard men," she replied confidently.
"No," another child argued. "Guard men wear shinier clothes and shout more. These are like… like tigers. Quiet, but you feel them."
Her grandmother, listening, chuckled.
"You have sharp eyes," she said. "When your father was young, men like this were called puli padai—tiger troops. The kind kings sent where drums could not go."
The phrase reached Ayyappa's ears.
He brought it to Narasimha that night, a rare smile tugging at his lips.
"The people already have a name for your ghosts," he said. "Tiger Corps."
Narasimha blinked.
Then laughed.
"The irony," he said. "The lion builds a secret fang, and it gets named after tigers."
"In our land," Venkanna said mildly, "lions and tigers share forests in stories more easily than men share borders. Let them be tigers. You are still their Simha Dora."
So, among themselves, quietly, the name took root:
Puli Sena. Tiger Corps.
Not shouted.
Not carved into banners.
Just whispered sometimes at the end of a brutal drill, when men lay under the stars, too tired to sleep.
"We survived," one would mutter.
"Of course," another would reply. "We're tigers, aren't we?"
✢ V. Rules of the Corps
Any elite force without rules becomes a band of well-armed bandits.
Narasimha, Ayyappa, and Venkanna sat together one long night to define what the Tiger Corps would not be allowed to do.
On one palm-leaf, Narasimha wrote, in clear practical Telugu:
Tiger Corps Code
You are weapon of dharma, not of your own anger.
You do not harm women, children, or unarmed old men. Even if enemy hides behind them. Find another way.
You do not steal in the name of mission. If you must take, you pay it back or record it to be repaid.
You do not torture. Information gained through cruelty is often lies.
You obey command in field—but if ordered to break dharma, you may refuse and appeal to Simha Dora or Guru Venkanna.
You remember that your enemy is not 'all white men' or 'all Muslims' or 'all any-thing'. Your enemy is injustice.
You speak of your deeds only in necessary reports. Not in toddy shops. Not to impress girls. Not to puff your chest.
You are first to enter danger. Last to eat when food is short. If you wish comfort, leave now.
He placed the stylus down.
"What do you think?" he asked.
"Too strict?" Ayyappa grunted. "Good."
Venkanna read slowly.
His eyes lingered at rule 5.
"This," he said, tapping it, "will make you unpopular with future commanders. They like unquestioned obedience."
"I don't want unquestioned obedience," Narasimha said. "I want men who can think. The British trains sepoys to shoot when told, even if target is innocent. I want the opposite. If any future leader—and that includes my own descendants—tries to twist this corps into butchers, I want the code itself to resist."
Later, when the chosen few Tiger Corps recruits gathered in an underground hall, he stood before them and read the rules aloud.
"This is not churned butter for your ears," he said. "This is grit. Swallow it or spit it out now."
One man raised a hand timidly.
"Dora," he asked, "what if… in a moment, I freeze? Code says one thing, commander says another. I… don't know."
Narasimha's gaze softened.
"Then," he said, "you remember this: it is better to hesitate and save a child than to act quickly and kill one. If, in doubt, you choose mercy first, I will take that sin on my head. Not you."
That, more than the rules, bound them.
They were not just tools.
They were trusted.
❖ VI. Marvel Watches Men Become Weapons
In Kamar-Taj, the senior Master who had been watching the Rayalaseema anomaly observed the Tiger Corps training with increased interest.
"These," he told an apprentice, "are mortals teaching themselves what we drill into certain acolytes: awareness, stealth, restraint."
The apprentice watched the vision—men moving through forest shadows, practicing strikes, sharing meagre food.
"They fight… like us?" he asked.
"Not quite," the Master said. "They do not bend space. They bend probability. They tilt fate, one ambush at a time. And they chain themselves to a moral code. Useful."
Elsewhere, an Eternal analyst noted:
"New sub-group within U.N.R. forces: approx. 300–500 elite irregulars. Training emphasizes guerrilla warfare, strict ethical code, decentralized operability. Will significantly enhance resistance's capacity to inflict asymmetric costs on colonial forces while minimizing civilian harm."
Centuries later, when SHIELD would profile historic irregular units, some obscure analyst would find scattered references to:
an unusually disciplined band of southern fighters,
surprisingly low reports of atrocities near their operations,
an "old code" still quoted in some Indian special units.
They would file it away as an intriguing anomaly.
Never knowing that the first Tiger Corps had once breathed in tunnels carved by hand, under a lion's house.
✢ VII. The Lion Among Tigers
Narasimha did not just create the Tiger Corps and abandon them to Ayyappa.
He trained with them regularly.
Some nights, he slipped underground without much announcement.
He joined drills.
He ran the same courses.
He took the same blows.
One night, after a grueling silent-combat exercise that left everyone gasping in the dim light, he sat on the stone floor with the others, back against the cool wall.
Sweat dripped.
Breath came hard.
Someone, forgetting protocol in his exhaustion, muttered:
"Dora, why are you here? You could be upstairs, eating sweets."
Narasimha laughed, breathless.
"Upstairs, they have wedding preparations, uncle's demands, tax petitions, and five different aunties arguing about flower garlands," he said. "Down here, I have only Ayyappa shouting at me. This is paradise."
A ripple of tired laughter.
He ran a hand through his hair.
"When I sit in the court," he said softly, more to himself than to them, "I carry the weight of paper. When I sit here, I remember the weight of steel. I need both, or I will become lopsided."
A man across from him raised a hand, hesitant.
"Dora," he asked, "are you… afraid?"
"Of what?" Narasimha said.
"Of… when the day comes," the man said. "Of when you say, 'Now. No more patience.' Of… war."
The underground hall grew quiet.
Narasimha stared at the lantern flame for a moment.
Then he nodded.
"Yes," he said simply. "I am afraid. Only fools are not afraid of war. I know what it does. To bodies. To minds. To children who don't understand why their house burned."
He looked around at them.
"That is why," he said, "I am doing all of this. So that when war comes, we are not flailing. So that we can end it faster, cut precisely, bleed less."
He smiled wryly.
"And so that when I cry in the future about paperwork, none of you can say I did not also sweat in tunnels with you."
One of the men grinned.
"We will still say it, Dora," he said. "It is our right. We are Tiger Corps. We complain."
"Mutiny," Narasimha said weakly. "Already."
❖ VIII. Heaven's Commentary
Back in Vaikuntha, the six watchers looked down at the men arrayed underground, listening to their lion.
Lakshmi shook her head fondly.
"Look at him," she said. "Covered in dust, joking with soldiers, building elite units while also worrying about flower garlands for his wedding."
Parvati smiled.
"He is learning that kingship is not just about shining on a throne," she said. "It is about sweating in the dark for people who will never know your name."
Saraswati plucked a soft note on her veena.
"And he crafts a code," she said. "He anchors violence in words like dharma. Good. Power without direction is chaos."
Maheshwara's eyes were thoughtful.
"He is building his kṣatra—warrior essence," he murmured. "Without losing his karuṇā—compassion. A rare balance."
Vishnu added, half-amused, half-proud:
"Also, he has unintentionally laid some groundwork for future 'special forces' and 'black ops teams'—except his remember that not every problem is a nail for their hammer. When Marvel-era governments play with such tools, they would do well to remember this boy's rules…"
Brahma wrote:
U.N.R. – Tiger Corps phase initiated. 300–500 elite irregulars. Training: stealth, survival, unconventional tactics, silent combat. Ethical code defined to prevent drift into indiscriminate violence. Integration with hidden infrastructure ensures highly resilient resistance cell architecture.
✵ IX. Closing of "The Fangs in the Dark"
By the end of Chapter 29, the lion's preparations had grown a new layer of muscle:
The first Tiger Corps—300 to 500 handpicked warriors trained:
to move unseen,
strike unexpectedly,
survive harsh conditions,
and fight without fanfare.
Training grounds were carved:
in underground chambers,
in forest clearings,
in the narrow spaces between "ordinary life" and "incoming storm."
A code was written:
forbidding certain cruelties,
anchoring their violence in dharma,
allowing them to refuse immoral orders,
making them tools with conscience, not merely blades.
The people unknowingly named them:
"Tiger Corps."
seeing in their quiet movement something more dangerous and controlled than ordinary guards.
On the surface, Uyyalawada still looked like:
a prosperous estate,
a chieftain's house growing,
trade flowing,
a wedding approaching.
Under that surface:
tunnels breathed,
weapons waited,
medicine lay ready,
and three to five hundred men learned to become fangs in the dark.
One day, when the British would finally push too far,
when they would reach for too much,
when Narasimha would at last say:
"Enough. Now we roar."
these tigers would not need to be gathered.
They would already be in place,
already trained,
already bound by code.
For now, they trained in flickering lamplight, teasing their king, cursing Ayyappa's drills, and swallowing their fear.
The Deathless Lion was almost done sharpening his claws.
His teeth?
They were already awake.
✦ End of Chapter 29 – "The Fangs in the Dark" ✦