Notice : Guys before reading this chapter do read the entire storyline from the start as i revamp it including change the name of the protagonist to Vikramaditya.Thanks
============================================
The damp, suffocating heat of the Bengal summer did nothing to slow the brutal momentum of the civil war. Inside the fractured Sultanate, the lines between loyalty and betrayal had dissolved into absolute chaos. Duke Mir Jafar's rebel faction had dug themselves into the fertile, labyrinthine floodplains of the east, while Sultan Shiraj-ud-Daulah's Royalist forces pushed relentlessly outward from the capital of Gaur. Yet, the true conductor of this symphony of blood remained concealed in the deep shadows.
From a hidden command post buried within the choked, vine-strewn ruins of an ancient temple, Vasuki, a senior field operative of the Tritiya Netra, monitored the closing trap. Around him, a frantic network of encrypted carrier pigeons and swift, silent couriers arrived by the hour. The intelligence they carried was meticulously intercepted, parsed, and then deliberately fed back into the gears of both warring factions.
The Tritiya Netra's objective was beautifully, chillingly clinical: ensure that neither side gained a swift or decisive advantage.
When the Royalist vanguard threatened to puncture Mir Jafar's lines near Plassey, an embedded Third Eye operative intercepted the Sultan's supply manifests. The operative intentionally leaked the precise coordinates of the ammunition carriages to the Duke's scouting units. Armed with this stolen intelligence, Mir Jafar's cavalry launched a devastating midnight raid, obliterating the Royalist black-powder reserves in a cataclysmic eruption that leveled supply chain. The Sultan's momentum ground to an immediate halt, forcing his vanguard to fall back in bitter frustration.
Conversely, when Duke Mir Jafar attempted to consolidate his positions and declare an independent state in the east, the Third Eye pivoted. Another deep-cover agent, posing as a disillusioned rebel officer, delivered forged documents to the Sultan's grand vizier. These papers detailed a section with enough vulnerability in Mir Jafar's southern flank. Blinded by the opportunity to crush the traitorous duke in a single blow, the Sultan immediately detached eight thousand elite infantrymen to strike the phantom opening.
The resulting clash was a horrific, grinding meat-grinder that stretched over three continuous days. The sun beat down unheedingly as the delta mud churned into a thick, crimson mire, where brother slaughtered brother for a lie.
Hundreds of kilometers away, within the sterile confines of the Northern Command headquarters, twelve-year-old Crown Prince Vikramaditya Deva received these updates with absolute detachment. His flawless photographic memory cataloged the rising casualty rates of the Bengal forces with mathematical precision. Every Royalist division torn apart, every rebel battalion ground to dust, was a direct subtraction from the ultimate resistance his own armies would face when they finally marched.
The strategy of artificial friction was working flawlessly. The Bengal Sultanate was hollowing itself out from the core, its vast military manpower systematically evaporating in a war born of engineered whispers. From the shadows, Vasuki's operatives continued to stoke the fires, ensuring that the structural integrity of the entire eastern empire was irrevocably broken before the first Khurda rifle was even leveled across the border.