Summoned by the Divine Realm Prologue: The Greatest Loser
Somewhere on a battlefield gone quiet with smoke, a man with long red hair lay broken inside his battered armor. Every breath sent fresh waves of agony through his ribs, and blood spilled from his lips in a slow, steady line, staining the dirt beneath him a darker shade of red.
The world felt distant, unreal, as if time itself had slowed down just to make sure he didn't miss this part. Screams still echoed somewhere across the field, but they reached him muffled, hollow, like sound traveling through water.
He forced his eyes open and immediately wished he hadn't. The sky was the wrong color. Or maybe his eyes were the problem.
Is everyone alright?
Am I dying?
Why does everything feel like it's underwater?
Then he saw it — a vast shadow taking shape in the empty sky above him. Immense. Tranquil. Impossibly familiar, the way a song you haven't heard in years still somehow knows the words.
It should have terrified him. Instead, it settled over him like warmth he hadn't felt since childhood.
A weak, disbelieving chuckle scraped its way out of his throat.
"Hah... arghhh... is that you? Lord Krishna?"
The shadow laughed — a sound that rolled across the battlefield like distant thunder that meant no harm. Gently, it lifted him from the ground, and a warm, amused voice settled into the space around him.
"So. You recognized me."
"Yeah." He managed a smile despite the blood still in his mouth. "Had a feeling."
"And how do you feel now?"
He closed his eyes, savoring the question like it was the first honest thing anyone had asked him in years. "Like always. Still hurts. But for the first time in my life, I'm at peace."
A silence stretched between them — not uncomfortable, just full.
"Do you regret your actions?" Krishna asked.
"At first." The man considered this with more care than the question deserved. "Not anymore."
"Hmm." Krishna sounded pleased, the way a teacher sounds pleased when a slow student finally gets it. "Then tell me everything. Your journey. What brought you here."
The man sighed, then immediately regretted it — sighing with three holes in your chest is not recommended. He coughed up another mouthful of blood for emphasis.
"You sure you want the long version, my Lord? I'm still bleeding, you know."
Krishna laughed, and with a snap of his fingers, the wounds simply weren't there anymore. The pain went with them. The man sat up, whole, and looked at his own hands like he didn't quite believe they belonged to him.
"Better?" Krishna asked, amused.
"hah I forgot for a second that who i was talking to, and I'll take it."
"Besides," Krishna added, "I'm curious."
The man grinned — the first real grin he'd worn in longer than he could remember — and turned to look directly out at you, the reader, with the casual confidence of someone who'd always known you were watching.
"You're probably wondering what's going on too, right? Don't worry, I get it. I'd be confused too." He shrugged. "Might as well tell it properly while I've got a captive audience. Pun intended — I was literally captive to several arrows ten minutes ago."
He settled back, closed his eyes, and let the memories surface.
"Alright. Brace yourselves." A pause, half dramatic, half genuine. "This is the story of the greatest loser to ever get a second chance."
"...Now where do I even start."
As Krishna waited, patient as a god has every right to be, the memories pulled him back — to another life, another world, another body that had died in the rain.
Rain fell in cold, relentless sheets, mixing with the blood pooling beneath my body. I lay on the street, the world tilting and blurring at the edges, every shallow breath dragging fire through my stomach.
I remembered this. The pain, the cold, the way sound stretched thin and far away — I'd felt all of it before, in dreams I'd never understood until now.
I'd been shot. Three bullets, straight through the gut.
Back then, I lived in another world — or maybe another version of this one. Even now, looking back, I'm still not sure which. What I do know is that I'd spent years working for a mafia organization, doing whatever they told me without asking why. Moving product I never looked too closely at. Cleaning up messes I tried not to think about afterward. I was good at not thinking about things. It was the only skill that mattered in that line of work.
Eventually, I'd had enough. I wanted out — not for redemption, not for some grand reason, just to live whatever was left of my life without someone else's blood on my hands.
So I went to Francis Carlos, the man who ran the eastern side of Mumbai like his own private kingdom, and I asked for permission to leave. No excuses. No long explanations. I'd already made peace with the idea that he might say no with a bullet.
Instead, he smiled.
"You may leave."
That was it. No conditions, no warnings, nothing.
I should have known right then that something was wrong. A man like Francis didn't let people walk away that easily — not without a reason, and never without a price. But I was too busy being relieved to ask what the price was.
I went home and packed fast, hands shaking with something that felt almost like hope. My flight left in a few hours. I was actually going to make it out.
Then the doorbell rang.
I froze for a second before walking to the door, and through the frosted glass I saw a shape I knew better than my own reflection.
Samar.
The closest thing I'd ever had to family, standing on my doorstep with his hands in his pockets and an easy smile on his face.
I opened the door. "Hey — I was just about to head out."
He raised an eyebrow. "You were gonna leave without telling me, bro?" He laughed, shook his head. "Heard from the others you're leaving the gang. Figured I'd come see you off properly."
Something small and cold settled in my chest. I only told the boss. How did everyone else already know?
I let it go. Because this was Samar. Because trusting him had never once been a mistake before.
It would be my last one.
He drove, and I assumed it was toward the airport, right up until the streets started narrowing into alleys I didn't recognize — crumbling shacks pressed shoulder to shoulder, gutters running black with rainwater, the kind of neighborhood people disappeared into and didn't come back from.
My pulse picked up. "Samar. This isn't the way to the airport—"
I didn't get to finish the sentence.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three shots, and then a pain so total it didn't even feel like pain anymore — just a white-hot absence where my stomach used to be. I tasted blood before I understood I was bleeding.
Samar dragged me out of the car and dropped me onto the wet pavement the way you'd drop something you were tired of carrying. I heard him step back, heard the small click of a phone connecting.
"Yeah, it's done." His voice was steady, almost bored. "Roshan's handled. Dumped him in the slums."
A second click — a photo, probably proof for whoever he answered to.
I looked up at him through a vision going dark at the edges. "Why...?" My voice barely made it out. "I thought we were family—"
He didn't answer right away. When he finally looked down at me, something flickered across his face that might have been guilt, if guilt was worth anything to a dying man.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Then he turned and walked away, and the rain swallowed the sound of his footsteps before he'd gone ten feet.
I lay there and let that settle. Betrayed by the one person I'd never doubted, dying in a gutter in a part of the city. No parents to mourn me. No family and loved one waiting anywhere. Just rain, and silence, and the slow understanding that nobody was coming.
A laugh broke out of me, weak and a little unhinged. "Lived like a dog." Another wet breath. "Worse than a dog, probably. At least dogs get to live their own life as per their choice."
I wasn't crying — I told myself that, even as the rain on my face stopped feeling like rain. I hadn't wanted much. I wasn't going to talk, wasn't going to the police, wasn't going to be a problem for anyone. I just wanted out. And it still hadn't been enough.
Let it end, then, I thought, and the thought came easier than I expected. Maybe the next one's quieter. Maybe I get someone worth trusting this time. Someone who actually stays. A family, if I'm allowed to ask for that much. A tired, fading half-smile. A daughter, maybe — sons are a headache haha.
It's funny what your mind reaches for at the end. Not the good years. Just the things you never got to have and the regretful life.
Lightning cracked somewhere above me, and for a second the world went white.
Then a voice — a woman's, frantic, threaded with something that sounded almost like hope — pushed its way into my thoughts from somewhere that wasn't anywhere.
"Help us... please... I will grant every wish you have... please... help us..."
The voice cut off like a thread snapping. Something took hold of whatever was left of me and pulled, hard, and the last thing I felt was the unmistakable sensation of leaving my body entirely.
Then there was nothing.
Consciousness came back like a slap.
My head throbbed in time with my pulse, and panic arrived before thought did, my chest heaving for air that, somehow, didn't taste like rain or blood anymore. The ground under me was wrong — too dry, too warm. Even the air smelled different, like nothing I'd ever breathed in Mumbai.
I sat up slowly, and the first coherent thought I managed was simple enough.
"Where the hell am I?"
That question — and everything that came after it — was where my real story actually began.
To Be Continued...