“Nhh…”

“Heeech…”

“Sigh…”

Came the sound as Kush came out of his sleep, his lungs got pressed by the weights almost draining the life out of him and then he started to emit mana from his body and got the ability to breathe back.

“Cough… Cough… Cough…”

He coughed into the sand as he rolled to his left on his elbow. It took him a few seconds to take in everything around him. Right in front of him he saw the tail end of a full body cloak similar to his; only black in color. When he followed the cloak upto its hoody which was about 6 ft above the ground he realized it was a person wearing a cloak. He couldn’t make out the face of the person in the darkness of the hoody covering it, so he was perplexed for second, but the next moment he saw two yellow spots in the darkness of the hoody and it hit him… a fear so primal that beings would stay away, a fear which you feel from the base of your spine, a fear that stops you from leaving your bed, a fear so profound that you would rather die than fight the wielder of the power.

He had felt this sort of fear before, not from any monster he was hunting nor was it from Brutus, but from a friend, who put him in his place when he was soaring high with confidence and showed him ‘The Reality’ (nice right?? the way I put it in). The one person his father was impressed by.

“Parth Bhaiyya (Bhaiyya elder brother in Hindi)” he uttered almost immediately.

The person too reacted to the call, by first retracting his Karmic power, releasing the hold he had on Kush then moving the cloak’s hoody off of his head. His eyes had gone back to that of a normal human’s back eyes. He still didn’t have a beard on, cleanly shaven, 6 ft in height, muscular but lithe, in his right hand he still held the same black 5 ft 10-inch bow and had the familiar quiver. His face had not aged a bit and his smile was as bright and confident as ever. The only thing that surprised Kush was the eyes, he never retracted the Karmic power eyes before.

“You could do that?” Asked Kush with a puzzled expression.

Parth was confused for a moment, then Kush continued his questions “Your eyes I mean”

Parth was taken aback by the sudden inquiry but replied nonetheless “Yeah it took a lot of practice, but now I can. It was turning me into some kind of easily recognizable target of some sort”

Even though most people could not recognize Parth’s Karmic power, but word had spread among the knowledgeable people. Forcing Parth to hide his powers and temporarily leave Kashi.

“Anyway!! This is the first question you want to ask in our first meeting after a long time??”

“AH!! Sorry bhaiyya. How have you been? Did you continue being Tatya after I left? How’s the situation back in Kashi? Anything in new…”

“Slow down! Slow down man… you just went zero to 300 arrows per minute in a second” he said with a big smile. Because Parth was afraid of Kush’s parents he couldn’t talk to guy any time after the fight, especially after seeing how his mother sent her own husband flying.

“Let’s talk as we move along, we have a lot of catching up to do. Where were you heading to anyway?”

“It’s an oasis. I am heading out there to search…”

“Do you mean Sutlej?”

“Yep” replied Kush

“Hey great!! I was heading there too. I took up a commission from the Tyrese to look for why the oasis dried up there”

“Great!! Let’s talk while we move” Kush said

“Before that, what are those tied around your body?”

“Oh these… long story… I will tell you as we move along”

The two tried to catch up about the past years as much as they could, being frequently interrupted by hordes of desert wolves, a few of monster worms and a few swarms of desert maggots which almost killed their roaring camel but Parth and Kush managed to handle. Parth had to do most of the heavy lifting but he didn’t seem to break a sweat. Kush was still heavily injured. The injury from the worm and added to that the fight with the scorpions had burnt off all of his power. He was healing rapidly, but he could sense it; his Mula Chakra was almost dry. The damage was extensive. Since his rest he had not stopped cause he wanted to find out about the woman’s son and rush back to Udaipur to have a chat with Tara before she got married. His body was burnt to his bones on many locations. It didn’t seem like he was human any longer, from his face down to toes. But he soldiered through the pain.

“Man… why don’t you just sit on the camel and lose the weights… just looking at you is painful”

“He he bhaiyya…” wheezing with every word being spoken “it is a bit difficult, but this is part of my training and my instructions give me very limited reasons to remove these weights and I don’t want to accidentally kill your camel”

His ribcage was visible on various locations and labored breathing would have creeped out even the worst steeled nerved companions, but Parth tried not to stare.

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“Had I known you would refuse the elixirs; I would have fed them to you while you were asleep”

“He he… thanks bhaiyya for understanding my situation”

“What situation?? Seems more like he’s trying to kill you”

“He he… he made sure, I am not that easy to kill”

“Hahahahahha… I could see that… well to each his own!”

“So bhaiyya enough about me, what’s this mercenary business you were talking about?”

“WHAT?? You don’t know what a mercenary is?”

“I know what a mercenary is, I want to know what this mission stuff is?”

“Sigh… it’s like you live under a rock!! There are requests from all over the world which the locals can’t handle like kidnapping, robbery, dacoits and some times bigger too. They get sent over to the mercenary mission windows, which are like shops all over the world carrying missions. A mercenary chooses a mission and shows proof of completion to get the money. Its good enough to be a living most of the times.” Parth said with a shrug.

“Seems pretty convenient… why didn’t they send someone down to Bhasmachal??”

“I did see a mission request over there, but no normal mercenary wanted to stick their necks to fight a monster of that scale and the ones who could… let’s just say either the pay wasn’t good enough or there were some political interferences”

Kush had a stern expression for a moment. He couldn’t understand what sort of gain would prompt another person to prevent millions of people from dying. He shook his head and let go of the anger building up in him, mostly cause a lot of the muscles is his jaw and neck were vaporized, but let go of them all the same.

He had healed a lot when was asleep for 6 hours after the scorpion fight, but still looked like a zombie reaching the end of the line.

“So you fought the scorpions while wearing those braces and emitting mana all the time?”

Kush nodded and Parth just gave a nod and small smile. “Heh… kid’s grown up a lot” he thought.

By now they had almost reached the oasis. The oasis was about a couple kilometer in diameter and should have been visible by now. There should been dense foliage of palm trees and tons of monsters feeding and resting here. It should have been like a garden in the middle of the desert, but it looked nothing like they thought. There were a few ponds which were a few meters in diameter and half a meter deep. There was no way to compare this to the old descriptions and images the two had of the place.

There were a couple of coyotes, who looked starved, they were normal animals not mana beasts who ran at the sight of the roaring camel. The camel moved to the puddle like pond and started lapping, storing what it could for the journey back.

“This cant be right…” said Kush trying to paint a picture of an oasis which was supposed to be as large as a town itself to this…

“Till now I thought the locals were exaggerating, trying to cover up their inability to find the old woman’s son… but this is ridiculous!! What could dry up an entire oasis this big and still go unnoticed??”

“Well… the reason for remaining unnoticed can be attributed to the fact that, anyone who took up this commission might have died before reaching here and the Tyrese seem to have underestimated the difficulty of the mission based on the reward promised against it. Don’t forget even you were unable to reach here without my help and hiring a person as strong as me costs a pretty penny. Hiring someone like me will involve… well let’s just say someone like the Tyrese family will have to get involved”

Kush was flabbergasted, not by the scale of economics being played around in the Parth’s statement but the open degradation of value of human life, being put on the same scale as svarna. He was aware that not everyone shared his view of human life and he was also aware that idealism was not something that could be enforced on the world, atleast not until he became strong enough to so do so. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind and asked “Then Bhaiyya, if the Tyrese weren’t paying enough why did you come here to investigate?”

“Partly because I was interested in knowing how much of it was true, partly because I don’t really have any work right now and mostly because I wanted to fuck up the reason responsible to destroying the lives of 4 towns”

Kush was a bit happy to see another person caring about the people of the town. His cheek muscles were almost all gone so even when he gave a smile it was like a twitch.

After looking around little more, they came across what looked like a building almost covered in sand, difficult to discern among the large dunes around it when seen from a distance. When coming in closer to the building, Kush seemed to start to recognize the familiar structures of and around the buildings, the courtyard, the boundary walls. On reaching the gated community he knew he had reached the site of incident, he had reached the allotments which were almost completed.

“Another incident in these so called charity of the emperor huh…” Kush said lightly.

“What do you mean?” asked Parth nonchalantly while looking around while participating the in conversation.

“The more than a decade long disaster in Bhasmachal had its origins from one these allotments over there” said Kush while trying to look for something. He was limping using Tanka like a stick. Relief for him was the fact that the cemented footing of the allotment courtyard gave him an even footing. After a long time, he could feel the weight of his old friend Tanka, the weight which filled the minds of his foes with dread!!

“How so?” inquired Parth showing a little bit of interest but still just strutting around slowly, trying to match his pace with the giant zombie-esque younger brother of his.

Kush’s jaws were starting to hurt now, talking without practically any muscles in it. But he still continued “The queen told me that the monster was first sighted coming out of green gooey pool a couple meter in diameter and few meters deep built below the allotment of their capital city”

Parth had a surprised expression “Dude you have it good. I have done so much work and no noble even knew there was a guy like me out there and here you know the princess of Marwaris and the queen of Bhasmachal”

Kush once again tried smirking remembering his night with the queen Sylvie but brushed it off. Kush observed the layout of the allotment, making mental notes. For a few hours they surveyed the area when Kush noticed the peculiarity about layout of the allotment. The shape was not circular, square, rectangle or any regular shape; but that of an eight. A weird shape he thought, when he tried remembering the allotment from Bhasmachal he thought they both seemed similar!!

At the intersection of the two halves of the allotment was where they found the pool last time, so they walked in that direction. Parth started walking a bit faster as he moved ahead of Kush.

Kush turned around while walking trying to survey the region around the intersection.

Parth continued saying “Sigh… I don’t think we will find the person you are looking for. For all we kn…”

Parth stopped mid-sentence. Kush turned back to look for Parth but couldn’t see anybody.

“Bhaiyya!!” He shouted for Parth.

Just then… about a kilometer from where Kush was standing sand started moving. It wouldn’t have been strange sight in the desert if it were downwind or downhill but. But the shifting seemed synchronized as if… something was moving the sand or was it someone…