The workshop tent was quieter than usual.
Not because Akshay wasn’t talking.
But because everyone was watching him not talk—for once.
He stood beside a long workbench draped in red silk. Beneath the silk, something hummed with low, barely audible energy.
Makardvach stood a few feet away, still bandaged but upright now. The golden bracer on his forearm pulsed softly—its Vanara glyphs shifting in time with his heartbeat.
“Ready?” Akshay asked, voice unusually solemn.
Makardvach nodded.
Akshay pulled the silk away.
And the suit stood revealed.
It wasn’t garish.
It wasn’t bulky.
It was precise.
A deep crimson bodysuit woven from impact-resistant nano-fiber mesh, sleek but lined with subtle Sanskrit filigree that flowed like circuitry. Reinforced golden plating curved over the chest, shaped like a stylized gada—not literal, but symbolic. Across the shoulders, lightweight carbon-silk panels bore Vanara etchings in shimmering bronze. His gloves and boots bore grips shaped to support leaping, wall-scaling, and weapon deflection. And flowing from the neck:
A scarf—bright red, trailing like Hanuman’s celestial banner.
Flexible. Unmistakable.
It looked like a warrior had stepped out of a scripture and into a future war.
Makardvach approached it slowly.
Megha stepped beside him. “He designed it based on Vanara battle garb from the Satya Yuga. But layered in modern utility. Flexible enough for windwork, grounded enough for melee. This… isn’t cosplay.”
Akshay tapped a tablet. “Bracer syncs with the chestplate. Gada holster here, locking magnets. HUD visor in the mask—infrared, comms, AR threat detection. Light armor, but don’t worry—if it hits, it hurts.”
Makardvach touched the fabric.
It was warm.
Alive.
“This was made for someone else,” he said quietly.
Akshay looked up. “No. It was made for who you’re becoming.”
Makardvach nodded once.
And stepped behind the screen.
Minutes later, he emerged—
Clad.
The suit didn’t make him look invincible.
It made him look inevitable.
Rishabh raised one brow. “Now you wear the vow on your skin.”
Makardvach turned his palm and summoned the gada.
It clicked into place on the magnetic back-mount with a soft thunk.
He rolled his shoulders.
“The scarf stays,” he said.
Akshay grinned. “Would’ve kicked you out if you said otherwise.”
Megha circled him once. “We just need one thing.”
She knelt.
Picked up a silver pendant in the shape of a monkey’s tail.
And clipped it to his belt.
“Now,” she whispered, “they’ll remember your name.”
Makardvach looked into the mirror.
Not vainly.
Soberly.
“Vanara Man,” he murmured.
Then turned to the team.
“Let’s earn it.”
The moon hadn’t risen yet.
The jungle around the base moved in nervous waves. Crickets stopped. Owls hushed. Even the wind that had so faithfully followed Makardvach since Anjanadri now hid in the canopy.
Rishabh knew before the others.
He sat cross-legged at the perimeter, eyes shut, breathing slow—when suddenly his spine stiffened. His fingers dipped into the ash circle he’d drawn earlier that day and pressed to his brow.
“Something comes,” he whispered.
In the workshop tent, Akshay glanced up from his toolkit.
Makardvach was testing the suit’s flexibility, his every movement precise, controlled.
Megha was running final scans on a bloodstained relic from Anjanadri, trying to trace the dark mantra Tarakasura had used.
Then the shadows twisted.
Literally.
They didn’t stretch—they coiled.
And from them stepped Raktanjali.
Not through a door.
Not through a gate.
But from the blood in the earth itself.
She didn’t walk—she dripped forward, her body wrapped in flowing black cloth inked with silver talismans. Her hands bare, skin the color of dried blood. Her nails were too long. Her smile too wide.
Her voice? It didn’t echo in the ears.
It echoed in the veins.
“Vanara Man,” she sang, “you wear your name like a crown. But I see the blood beneath.”
Makardvach spun, gada drawn.
The golden bracer pulsed once, flaring with protective light.
Raktanjali raised her palm.
And then—whispers.
From everywhere.
From inside.
Makardvach flinched.
His muscles twitched.
The light on his bracer faltered.
“Your power is new,” she crooned. “Your bloodline old. But in between? There’s so much… room.”
Megha shouted, “She’s casting a blood tether!”
Akshay reached for his emitter.
Too late.
Raktanjali pointed at Makardvach.
“Dāha bandhanaḥ.”
(Burning bind.)
Makardvach gasped.
His eyes turned white.
The gada dropped.
He dropped.
Megha ran to him.
Veins across his neck glowed red. His body twitched violently. The golden markings on his arms flared out of control—like the divine energy inside him no longer knew its master.
Raktanjali smiled, satisfied.
“You carry fire in your soul,” she said. “But now it burns inward.”
She turned to leave.
But Rishabh stepped into her path.
No staff.
No posture.
Just breath.
Still.
Balanced.
“Leave this place,” he said, “before the mountain breathes again.”
Raktanjali paused.
Her grin remained, but her gaze narrowed.
“You’ve taught him well, sage. But even mountains can bleed.”
She melted back into the shadows.
Gone.
Rishabh knelt beside Makardvach.
“He has hours,” he said.
Megha held his hand, voice trembling. “Until what?”
Rishabh’s jaw clenched.
“Until the fire inside him consumes him whole.”
The bracer was glowing white now.
Too bright.
The Vanara glyphs pulsed with irregular rhythm—like a divine heartbeat seizing in panic. Makardvach’s body arched in the center of the temple chamber, breath rattling like dry leaves in his throat. Steam hissed from his skin where blood and light collided.
Megha paced.
Frantic.
“This isn’t just corruption,” she said, flipping through parchment after parchment. “It’s inversion. She’s reversed the polarity of his divine essence. His soul is trying to burn itself out.”
Akshay hovered by the wall, helpless. “Can’t you reverse the reversal?”
Megha slammed a palm onto the scroll.
“Do I look like a god?!”
Silence.
Then Rishabh spoke, quietly, from where he knelt beside Makardvach.
“There is one way.”
Megha looked up. “What?”
Rishabh held up an old, tattered bundle of palm leaves bound with crimson twine.
The Hanumat Rahasya.
A secret scripture not found in temples.
Only passed by whispers.
“The Jīvita Mantra,” Rishabh said. “The Breath Invocation. Hanuman used it once—to restore Lakshman’s failing life after Sanjeevani. This is… its echo.”
Megha’s eyes narrowed. “That’s apocryphal. That mantra was said to destroy mortal lungs.”
“It does,” Rishabh said. “But he is no longer only mortal.”
He placed the bundle before her.
“This is not a cure,” he warned. “It is a fire-starter. It will purge the tether, but only if he accepts it.”
They looked at Makardvach.
His face now twisted in pain. Arms flaring gold and red, the light flickering like a candle in a dying storm.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Megha whispered.
She took the scroll.
Knelt beside him.
Whispered into his ear—
“Vanara Man… breathe with me.”
And she began the chant.
“Jīvitaṃ nādaṃ vāyuṃ stambhaya…
Hanumatāya śaktiḥ pravartaya.”
Makardvach twitched.
The bracer stopped flickering.
Then glowed steady gold.
The gada, lying forgotten near the corner, lifted half an inch off the floor.
“Ātma-jyotiḥ naśyatu tamasā…
Rakṣa rakṣa rakṣa… Hanumāna svāhā!”
Makardvach arched.
And screamed.
The golden glow flared into white heat—blinding, divine, primal.
Then—
Silence.
The air turned cool.
The bracer faded to soft gold.
Makardvach collapsed against Megha’s shoulder.
Breathing.
Alive.
And across the jungle, in a temple defiled with blood—
Raktanjali shrieked.
A crack had formed in her binding circle.
And it pulsed with the syllables of her own undoing.
When he opened his eyes, he couldn’t feel his body.
At first, he thought he was still dreaming—floating inside that sacred chant, wrapped in mantra and mist.
But then pain settled in.
Not the sharp kind.
The deep kind.
The kind that came from a fire that hadn’t killed him—but rewritten him.
He lay in the middle of the temple courtyard, under a sky full of white clouds and watching birds.
The gada rested beside him—not on the ground.
Hovering.
Turning slowly on its axis like it was caught in a current no one else could feel.
Rishabh knelt nearby, meditating.
Megha dozed lightly under the shade of a banyan.
Akshay was nowhere in sight—but speakers hummed with soft classical music from a far corner of the camp.
Makardvach sat up.
The gada followed.
He didn’t touch it.
He thought it.
And it came.
Hovered inches from his hand.
Then—
As if reading him—it glowed.
Not gold.
But white.
Faint crackles of divine energy licked its surface, and for a second, the air smelled of burning sandalwood and lightning.
Makardvach reached for it.
But the moment his fingers touched the haft—
It flared.
Energy blasted outward in a wave—knocking over empty crates, tilting the bell chimes on the far side of the temple, rustling every tree in a thirty-meter radius.
Rishabh opened his eyes.
Didn’t flinch.
Makardvach gritted his teeth and dropped the gada.
It slammed into the stone—and embedded itself half a foot deep into solid rock.
He stared at it.
Chest heaving.
Hands trembling.
“What the hell was that?”
Rishabh stood and walked slowly to him.
“The bond has deepened,” he said. “The curse didn’t just test your body. It forged your essence tighter with the weapon.”
Makardvach looked at the embedded gada. “It felt alive.”
“It is.”
Makardvach stood, wincing slightly.
“So how do I control it?”
“You don’t.”
Rishabh met his eyes.
“You align with it.”
He gestured to a circle carved into the courtyard floor.
Eight Vanara glyphs. One center stone.
“Every day from now on,” Rishabh said, “you’ll enter this circle. You’ll not swing the gada. You’ll not train. You’ll listen.”
Makardvach frowned. “To what?”
“To yourself.”
Rishabh turned to walk away.
“And to the parts of you still too afraid to be silent.”
Later that night, while Makardvach meditated inside the circle, the gada rested in front of him.
Still.
But humming softly.
Like a beast learning its master’s heartbeat.
And in the shadows far beyond the temple, Raktanjali stared into a pool of blood, her fingers twitching.
She had failed to bind him.
But she had left her mark.
“Let the fire teach him,” she whispered. “For it always eats last.”
The morning air was cool.
But Makardvach no longer felt weather the same way. His body, still technically mortal, now seemed to filter heat and cold through layers deeper than skin. The gada remained silent at his back, not heavy, not light—simply there, like breath.
In the courtyard, Akshay stood with arms crossed, squinting into the sun.
“So?” he said. “You ready to suit up for real?”
Makardvach nodded once.
Akshay stepped forward, tablet in hand. “Then it’s official. We calibrate the armor today.”
The team gathered near the van-turned-mobile-lab. Even Rishabh stood closer than usual, his presence more open, as if granting silent approval. Megha held her notebook in one hand, but wasn’t writing. She was just watching.
Waiting.
Makardvach stepped into the harness bay.
The armor unfolded around him—starting from the boots upward. Red flex-plates slid across his calves like liquid metal. The chestpiece clicked into place with a soft hum, the golden gada emblem blooming to life. The shoulder pads sealed over his arms. The Vanara-script bracer on his forearm glowed and synced with the suit’s inner systems.
Then came the scarf—woven from layered silk-fiber, its tail fluttering in the breeze like a war flag.
The final piece: the mask.
Makardvach took it in his hands.
Red.
Angular.
Vanara-inspired markings across the brow and jaw. Lenses that narrowed into golden slits. Not to hide his face.
To amplify it.
He slid it on.
And breathed.
The team stood in silence.
Not out of shock.
Out of recognition.
This was not a man in costume.
This was a shape destiny had waited for.
Megha stepped forward. “We’ll still call you Makardvach in private.”
“Sure,” Akshay muttered, grinning. “But publicly?”
He pointed to the nearby broadcast screen. It showed news footage from the market fight. The title now read:
“THE VANARA MAN STANDS AGAINST DEMONS.”
Makardvach turned to them, voice steady.
“I didn’t ask for the name.”
“You didn’t have to,” Rishabh replied. “Names like this don’t belong to one man. They belong to what he fights for.”
Makardvach walked to the edge of the hilltop, where the jungle opened to reveal the sprawl of Varanasi below—ancient and electric, burning with life.
And then—
He leapt.
A clean, impossible leap.
Thirty feet.
Forty.
He landed near the footpath, boots cracking stone, scarf trailing behind him like red flame.
Tourists screamed. Locals stared.
But no one ran.
Not this time.
One child stepped forward.
Pointed.
“Vanara Man!” she shouted.
Makardvach didn’t speak.
He simply turned.
And kept walking.
Into the city.
Into the legend.