After the fiasco, everything went more or less the way Adyanth had expected—except for a few surprises.
For weeks, reporters, opposition party representatives, and a buffet of government officials buzzed around the orphanage like flies over freshly uncovered rot. Cameras clicked, dramatic statements were made, promises fluttered like confetti.
Then one day, as abruptly as they'd arrived, they all vanished.
No farewell speeches. No final articles. Not even a courtesy smear piece.
They just left—dragged away by whatever new scandal their opportunistic little hearts decided was juicier.
What they left behind was… unexpected.
The government, shockingly true to form, didn't bother appointing a new director for the orphanage. Instead, the facility was handed off to a handful of volunteers.
Volunteers. As in: people who worked without a paycheck because they genuinely gave a crap.
When Adyanth first heard the news, he almost laughed—quiet, dry, and very nearly out loud.
"Oh yeah, perfect. We went from professional neglect to holy-scented altruism. Next up, angels descending to mop the toilets."
But as it turned out… these people were serious.
They actually showed up every day. They cleaned the place. They played with the kids. Some of them even took notes when the younger ones talked.
Worse still—the food improved.
No, not just improved. Evolved.
Portions got bigger. Flavors emerged. The porridge actually had spice in it now. Spice.
To a normal person, this would've been cause for celebration. A minor miracle.
To Adyanth? It was torture in ceramic bowls.
"Fantastic," he muttered over breakfast one morning. "Now I get to taste how dead inside I am."
The buttery chapati mocked him. The masala-filled dal scoffed at his indifference. Every bite was rich, warm, comforting—and utterly meaningless.
Give him the old watery porridge. At least that didn't pretend to offer joy.
---
And then came the doctors.
Yes, doctors. Plural. With clipboards, gloves, and that strange look adults get when they realize the children in front of them are not metaphorical patients—they are statistical failures.
A team started visiting every two weeks.
Surgeries were arranged. Bone fractures realigned. The once-abandoned medical files of the kids were dusted off, updated, and—gasp—used.
Even the kids who had been left limping after the orphanage riots began to recover.
When it came to Adyanth, though?
His dislocated shoulder had already popped itself back in place a week after the incident.
When he told the doctors he felt fine, they looked at him like he'd claimed to regenerate organs.
After an X-ray confirmed that the injury had mysteriously resolved itself with zero intervention, the lead physician just scribbled something on his file, muttered "Well, one less thing to worry about," and moved on.
Efficiency, thy name is disbelief.
---
As for the three clowns?
They'd gotten their surgeries too—patched up neat and quiet.
And the moment they could walk without looking like emergency puzzles?
They vanished.
Didn't tell anyone. Didn't leave a note. Just bolted.
Adyanth hadn't expected that.
He honestly thought they'd stay and enjoy the new, improved, trauma-lite orphanage experience. He imagined them growing comfortable, fat on three meals a day, maybe even laughing over dumb games.
But nope. Gone.
What he didn't know was—he'd scared them half to death.
They were terrified of him. Not the kid in bandages. Not the Adyanth who smiled and said "It's fine." No.
They feared the thing that broke their bones and called it friendship.
They believed—truly believed—that one day he might kill them, and they wouldn't even know how or when or why.
Could you really blame them?
He'd used them to orchestrate an entire implosion.
He'd weaponized their foolishness.
He broke their arms—smiling—telling them it was "for their own good."
They trusted him. Completely. Like fools at a magic show, they didn't realize was a demonstration in psychological warfare.
So when the chance came?
They ran.
---
A few weeks after the incident, life at the orphanage found something resembling peace.
For the first time in—well, possibly ever—no one was yelling. There were no dramatic betrayals, no screaming staff, no midnight fists flying across sleeping quarters.
It was quiet.
Too quiet, honestly.
No one bothered Adyanth anymore. The other kids had their own problems now—he'd made sure of that. Each one busy with personal demons, recovery schedules, or trying to figure out why the rice suddenly had flavor.
To most, this newfound stability was a gift.
To Adyanth?
It was… tolerable.
Except for the food.
Because somewhere in the twisted definition of post-crisis reform, the cafeteria had begun serving actual meals. Not just warm sludge with optional crunch. Real food. Rice cooked all the way through. Dal with salt in it. Chapatis that didn't double as leather belts.
He hated it.
"Great," he muttered into a bowl of ghee-drenched curry. "Now it's not only tasteless emotionally—it's also delicious. As if I needed help remembering I can't feel joy."
A tragedy in three courses.
---
But while his tastebuds suffered, the rest of his life settled into a rhythm he could actually tolerate.
Each morning, well before sunrise, Adyanth slipped out of bed and started training. Quiet. Mechanical. Focused.
At first, it was standard stuff—push-ups, crunches, the kind of exercises every half-hearted protagonist starts with before their glowing transformation arc.
But gradually, something shifted.
It was like... something inside him pushed.
Not ambition. Not guilt. Just a pulling urgency.
A wordless urge that whispered, You're not enough yet. Move.
So he obeyed.
More reps. More weight. Less rest.
When others still snored through dawn, he was already dripping sweat onto cracked concrete. A month in, he added evenings too. Training became his bookends—one to burn away the residue of dreams, the other to strip the act off his skin after a full day of pretending to care about people.
He didn't know what was driving it.
He just knew that with every strained breath, the exhaustion lifted. Not just the muscle fatigue—but the mental sludge from fake smiles, polite nods, and daily charades of warmth.
Acting like a normal person had a cost.
Training was how he paid it off.
---
Strangest of all was his body.
It responded like it had been waiting for the abuse.
Push harder? It got stronger.
Twist a joint the wrong way? It popped back like nothing happened.
One time, he bruised his ribs when a bench slipped during weighted dips. The pain vanished by morning.
"Well, at this rate," he told himself dryly, "I could probably walk off a concussion by Tuesday."
At one point he genuinely considered punching himself in the head—just to see if it would "reset something"—but decided against it.
"With my luck, I'd fix the broken wiring and turn into a functioning citizen. Can't risk it."
He started keeping quiet records in his notebook. Patterns. Healing speed. Endurance scaling. Muscle density.
It wasn't supernatural.
It was just… wrong.
But wrong in a way that felt useful.
And so, he pushed.
---
Meanwhile, the rest of the kids had their routines reshaped too. No more fieldwork. The volunteers had replaced agricultural labor with something far scarier: education.
Turns out, basic literacy was not optional anymore. The kids were now enrolled in structured classes—two hours a day, five days a week.
They were taught Vestalise, the common tongue spoken across the continent. Most of them barely knew how to write their own names in Varathi, their native language.
It wasn't their fault.
The war had turned the country's education system into a nostalgia item.
School was now a rumor shared over campfires.
Adyanth, for example?
His school career had lasted precisely six minutes.
He still remembered the day.
Five years old. Hair combed. Shirt two sizes too big. He walked through the school gate with a backpack, a box of crayons, and the wild confidence of someone who'd never seen a math problem.
He had taken exactly four steps into the building before—
WHOOOOOOOOP.
The air raid siren screamed like an angry banshee going through a divorce.
Teachers screamed. Students scattered. One kid tried to hide under a garbage bin and got stuck.
"Apparently I was so excited to learn that the gods panicked and sent planes."
That was it. No lessons. No lunch. Just a lot of noise and a very apologetic teacher who told his parents to "try again next year" with the energy of someone handing back a cursed artifact.
The next year didn't come.
Not for him. Not for most kids.
Some villagers, because people can't help but be predictably stupid, started whispering that the war escalated because of him.
"The war started right he was born. He stepped into school—bam, The sirens rang. He clearly cursed."
Adyanth didn't blame them.
He wouldn't trust a five-year-old with his luck either.
---
Still, his parents had tried.
They taught him at home—how to speak and write in Varathi, basic arithmetic, some farming techniques.
Not much.
But enough to spark his mind.
And that spark never died.
Adyanth had always been sharp. Uncannily sharp. His memory worked like a camera set to auto-capture. He could remember every face he met, every insult thrown, every favor owed.
It was one of his parents' great regrets: that they couldn't give him a platform worthy of his mind.
So he built his own.
---
The orphanage volunteers, for all their annoying positivity, had done one thing right—they opened a library. A small room with secondhand textbooks, worn story collections, and enough technical guides to keep him busy until the world stopped spinning.
He devoured them all.
Physics. Biology. History. Even economics—which he considered fiction with extra math.
Within a few months, he was fluent in Vestalise—reading, writing, even sarcasm. Sometimes he read instruction manuals just to make fun of their phrasing.
"Who writes these things? 'Insert axle into crossplate until secure'? I've heard less suggestive lines in prison dramas."
Between books and burpees, his days filled out.
He had time.
He had space.
No chaos. No enemies. No misfired expectations.
Just knowledge, sweat, and silence.
The kind of life a person could almost mistake for normal.
---