The silence of the room was heavy, thick with the metallic scent of adrenaline and the faint, lingering ozone of the struggle. Arjun's breathing was ragged, a rhythmic hitch in his chest that echoed the frantic beating of his heart. He had carried his mother to her bed with a trembling urgency that defied his own physical exhaustion. Her body felt terrifyingly light in his arms, a fragile porcelain doll that he had nearly allowed to shatter. His fingers, still slick with sweat and grime, fumbled as he dialed the family doctor—his last thread of hope in a world that felt like it was dissolving into chaos.
"Hello? Doctor, please... it's an emergency. My mother, she's unconscious, there was an accident..."
"Arjun? Listen to me," the doctor's voice cut in, strained and distant, competing with the background hum of a busy ward. "I'm on a mandatory night shift at the city hospital. There's a multi-car pileup; I'm scrubbed in for surgery. I'm miles away, and I can't leave until the sun is up. Call the paramedics, or find someone else, immediately."
Arjun's heart plummeted into his stomach. The rejection felt like a physical blow. "I... I understand. I'm sorry for calling so late, Doctor. I'll figure it out. Good luck with the surgery."
He hung up, the silence of the house pressing in on him like a physical weight. 3:00 AM. In this graveyard hour, the world was indifferent to his panic. The streetlights outside flickered, casting long, skeletal shadows across the floor. He knelt by his mother's side, his eyes scanning her pale face for any sign of a deep wound or a hidden fracture. His hands hovered over her, shaking, afraid that even a gentle touch might aggravate an injury he couldn't see. He felt powerless—a warrior who could heal his own flesh but couldn't wake the woman who gave him life.
Suddenly, his phone vibrated, the haptic buzz feeling like an electric shock. The screen illuminated the dark room, casting a harsh blue glow on his face. Three chilling letters stared back at him: W.S.O. SOCIETY
Arjun snapped. The dam of his patience finally broke. He answered the call, his voice a low, dangerous growl that vibrated with a lethal edge before the person on the other end could even draw breath.
"I told you! I made it clear to everyone!" he hissed into the receiver. "I wanted seven days. Seven days of peace to be a son, to sit with my mother, to breathe without looking over my shoulder! And you come for me on the very first night? To drag me out like a piece of property? Is this the 'protection' you promised? Is this how you treat your assets?"
"Arjun, calm down. It's Lizzy. Breathe." The voice was cold yet beneath the surface, there was an unmistakable note of urgency. "The ones who came for you tonight... they weren't ours. Our perimeter was breached by an external shadow cell. They belong to a hidden organization based in the USA—an organization that thrives on the fringes of international law. They don't want cooperation or alliances, Arjun. They want power. And when the whispers of your 'exceptional' physiology reached their ears, they decided they wanted you as their primary specimen."
"Research?" Arjun's laugh was hollow, a jagged sound bordering on manic. He looked at his hands, seeing the ghosts of the needles that had haunted him for months. "For four months, I was nothing but a map you carved their curiosities into. Every inch of my skin has been sliced open, documented, and stitched back together. And when they realized I heal faster than your scalpels could move, it stopped being science. It became a game of death. They ripped out my organs, one by one, just to watch the biological miracle of them regrowing. I am finished with being a wonder. I am tired of being a miracle."
His voice cracked, the white-hot anger giving way to a raw, bleeding despair that he could no longer hide. "I could take the pain. I could take the isolation. But today... today they touched my mother. They invaded the one sanctuary I had left. If this is the life I bring to her, if my very existence is a death sentence for the people I love, then take it all. Take my heart, take my brain, put me on a table and don't let me wake up. It would be a mercy compared to this."
There was a long, heavy pause on the line. The only sound was the distant hum of servers on Lizzy's end. "Arjun... we are more aware than you think of what you've endured," Lizzy said, his tone softening into something almost resembling empathy. "This breach was our failure. We are taking full responsibility for the cleanup. We've already dispatched two builders and a senior medical officer. She will treat your mother and the builders will erase the physical evidence of the struggle until not a single splinter remains. By dawn, the world will look exactly as it did yesterday. Go. Clean the blood off yourself. We are sending an identical set of clothes to replace what was ruined. To her, tonight must remain nothing more than a fever dream."
Arjun stood under the spray of the shower, his eyes closed as the water turned a grim, dark crimson upon hitting the tiles. The blood was stubborn, drying in the creases of his knuckles and the lines of his palms like a permanent stain of the violence he had committed. He scrubbed until his skin was raw, desperate to wash away the memory of the men who had broken into his home.
Once clean, he stepped out and stood before the fogged-up mirror, wiping a clear patch to look at his shoulder. Where a jagged, deep wound from a blade should have been, there was only smooth, unscarred, tan skin. It was a terrifying sight. His curse was his greatest shield, but it also made him something other than human.
Wrapping a towel around his waist, he stepped out into the hallway, only to freeze mid-step.
Tanaya.
She was standing in the center of his room, silhouetted by the moonlight, holding a fresh set of clothes. Her expression was unreadable, her eyes scanning him with a professional coldness that didn't quite hide the flicker of something else. Arjun's face flushed a deep, burning scarlet. Without a word, he spun on his heel and bolted back into the sanctuary of the bathroom, slamming the door shut. Tanaya smiled for a bit and she simply placed the clothes neatly on his bed and moved silently toward his mother's room, her footsteps making no sound on the carpet.
When Arjun finally emerged, dressed in the crisp, identical shirt and trousers, he rushed to his mother's bedside. "Is she... is there any permanent damage?"
"She's stable," Tanaya said, her eyes fixed on a glowing holographic tablet that projected her vitals. "No internal bleeding, no concussion. The blunt force of the kick to her midsection caused a vasovagal syncope—a sudden drop in heart rate that led to fainting. It's the body's way of protecting itself from shock. I've administered a localized painkiller and a specialized neuro-booster. She'll wake up feeling refreshed, as if she's had the best sleep of her life, not a trauma."
Arjun exhaled a breath he felt he'd been holding since the front door was kicked in. He walked to the living room and stopped dead in his tracks. Two men in grey coveralls were working with silent, high-tech machinery. A handheld device was humming over the shattered drywall, causing the particles to fuse back together with quick-dry polymers. Another man was buffing the scorched floor, removing every trace of the flashbangs. They moved like ghost builders, rebuilding his shattered world in a matter of minutes. It was efficient, cold, and utterly surreal.
"Arjun. Shirt off. Now."
He turned. Tanaya was standing behind him, her medical gadgets laid out on the coffee table.
"What? Why?" Arjun stammered, his cheeks heating up again as he looked at the floor.
"Don't be modest, Arjun. I've seen your chest under much worse conditions, usually covered in sensors and surgical ink," she said dryly, her voice echoing the clinical tone of the W.S.O. labs. "I need to check the resonance of your heart and the neural pathways of your brain. That battle was high-intensity. I need to see if the 'core'—the source of your regeneration—was impacted by the stress. Sit."
Arjun reluctantly pulled his shirt over his head, feeling the cool night air on his skin, and lay back on the sofa. Tanaya leaned over him, moving the sensors with practiced ease. He watched her—her focus was absolute, her brow furrowed as she read the data streaming across her tablet. As she worked, he noticed a small, lingering laceration on his chest that hadn't quite finished closing. Under the rhythmic hum of her devices, the wound began to knit together, the cells multiplying at an impossible rate, pulling the skin shut until the mark vanished entirely.
By 4:30 AM, the house was a masterpiece of deception. The garden was perfectly manicured, the broken fence was whole, the walls were solid, and the scent of blood had been replaced by a faint, lemon-scented cleaning agent. Tanaya packed her kit, and the two builders vanished into a matte-black car, leaving Arjun alone in the heavy silence of a peace built on lies.
8:00 AM.
"Arjun! ARJUN!"
The scream shattered the morning stillness. His mother burst into his room, her hair disheveled and her eyes wide with a lingering, primal terror. Arjun sat up instantly, rubbing his eyes and forcing a sleepy, confused smile onto his face. He had to be the best actor in the world today; his mother's sanity depended on it.
"Mom? What's wrong? Why are you shouting? It's too early for this," he said, yawning convincingly.
She threw her arms around him, her body shaking with tremors that broke his heart. "I had a dream... a horrible, dark dream, beta. Men... they came into the house. They were monsters. They were hurting you, trying to take you away from me... I tried to stop them, I tried to scream, but I couldn't move... it felt so real, Arjun. So real."
Arjun hugged her back tightly, resting his chin on her shoulder, his heart aching at the weight of the lie he was forced to tell. "Mom, look at me. Look around. It was just a nightmare. The house is quiet. The sun is out. I'm right here, perfectly fine. Not a scratch on me."
He pulled back, gently taking her hands in his and looking her in the eyes. "Actually, Mom... I've been thinking. I've been away for so long, and you've been cooped up in this house for years. Let's go on a trip. Somewhere far away, where the air is fresh. Just you and me. Let's pack our bags and leave this evening. No delays."
I can't stay here, he thought, his mind racing through escape routes and hidden locales. The W.S.O. SOCIETY, the Americans... this house is a beacon for them. I'll lead them away. I'll vanish into the crowds. They think they're watching me on their hidden cameras, but they don't know I'm planning to go off the grid for good.
His mother's face slowly brightened, the shadow of the nightmare receding. "A trip? Oh, that would be lovely. It's been so long. But... we should take Aradhya too! That poor girl is always alone while her parents are away on business. It would be good for her to get out of the city."
Arjun smiled, feeling a brief moment of genuine warmth. "Sure, Mom. Call her. If she can be ready by sunset, she's coming with us."
Somewhere in the Shadows...
In a room deep underground, bathed in the flickering, hypnotic blue light of eight massive monitors, a man sat in a high-backed leather chair. His silhouette was sharp against the glow. Two screens showed live, high-definition feeds of Arjun's house from angles no civilian camera could reach. Another showed a 'Slave'—a genetically modified soldier—pacing in a high-security cell. Others displayed the global logistics of an empire.
The man held a sleek, encrypted phone to his ear. "So... the extraction failed, and the house was fully repaired in less than ninety minutes? They have a localized reconstruction unit. Interesting. Very interesting."
He leaned forward, the light catching the cold, calculating glint in his eyes as he pressed a gold-plated button on his desk microphone.
"Attention," he whispered, his voice vibrating with the kind of authority that commanded armies. "There is a massive, unknown organization operating in the shadows alongside this boy. They have technology that rivals our own. I want every scrap of data. I want names, biological signatures, and their primary funding sources. I am calling an emergency meeting of the Board. Now. We are no longer just hunting a boy; we are at an unknown war."