Edward led them out of the headquarters through a different door than the one they had entered from, into a courtyard where the carriage was waiting again. The journey was shorter this time — low over the city rather than high above it, the streets of Shambala visible below as a familiar pattern of cobblestone and medieval rooftops threaded with technology. Rudra watched it pass through the window and said nothing. His mind was still occupied with the room they had just left. Five raised hands. An exam in six months. The stone sitting on the table while Alistair looked at it.
They landed in front of a gate.
The gate itself was already larger than most buildings Rudra had been inside. Wrought iron, detailed in a way that suggested the detail mattered rather than being merely decorative, standing at least four metres tall at its highest point. Beyond it, through the bars, a garden stretched further back than the gate had any right to contain — wide and manicured, with paths of pale stone cutting through deep green lawns, trees positioned with the considered spacing of something designed rather than grown.
At the end of the garden, a building.
Rudra looked at it and felt, for the second time since stepping through the door in the alley, the particular sensation of a word failing to cover what he was looking at. Building was technically accurate. So was structure. So was architecture. None of them quite reached it.
White marble — not the pale, slightly greyed white of old stone, but a clean, deep white that seemed to generate its own light from within the surface. Three storeys, each with tall windows framed in carved stone. Columns at the entrance. Statues at regular intervals along the roof's edge — figures with weapons and instruments and things he couldn't identify from this distance, each one carved with the same considered precision as the gate.
The interior was worse. Or better, depending on your relationship with things you were afraid to touch.
Every surface had been attended to with an intensity that communicated, without requiring explanation, that a great deal of money and a great deal of time had been involved. The floors were polished to a depth that reflected the ceiling above them. The walls carried paintings — not decorative prints but actual paintings, large and detailed and framed in gilded wood. Furniture positioned in each room with the confidence of things that had never needed to consider whether they belonged. Vases on pedestals. Chandeliers with more arms than Rudra could count.
Two maids passed through a far doorway and disappeared without looking up.
"I didn't know you were this rich," Rudra said, turning slowly to take all of it in. "It's like you're some kind of noble. Or royalty."
Edward considered this for a moment.
"I'm glad you like my guest house," he said.
Rudra turned to look at him. The sentence arrived and sat there, its meaning assembling itself gradually.
"Wait." He looked at Arjun. Arjun was looking at the ceiling.
"Wait," Rudra said again.
"This is a guest house?!" They both said it at the same moment, with identical expressions.
"Yes," Edward said. "And from today, this is where you will live and train for the next six months."
He said it the way people say things that have already been decided, in a tone that did not invite discussion about the guest house or its status as such. He left them in the entrance hall with a maid who showed them each to a room, and as he left he looked back once.
"You must both be exhausted after this morning. Rest today. Training begins tomorrow at dawn." A pause at the door. "Be ready for it."
Then he was gone.
Rudra's room was larger than his entire apartment in Mumbai. He sat on the edge of the bed — which was large enough that lying across it sideways would not have found the other side — and looked at the ceiling and thought about nothing in particular for several minutes. Then he thought about the exam. Then about Aagni. Then about the stone on Alistair's table. Then he lay back and stared upward and thought about what kind of training Edward had in mind, and whether it was going to be harder or easier than everything he had already been through.
He fell asleep telling himself it would be fine.
He woke up at dawn with the particular feeling of someone who is about to find out they were wrong.
---
The training ground was at the back of the guest house — a wide, open space of flat stone with a clear sky above it and nothing on it except the three of them. No equipment. No weights. No targets or sparring dummies or anything that resembled the training Rudra had done in the months before the P.R.I.S.M. fight.
Edward stood in front of them with his hands behind his back and the unhurried expression of a man who has prepared for this conversation.
"I will start from the beginning," he said. "By now you have both heard the words soul and astra without understanding what they mean. That changes today."
Arjun nodded. "I've been wondering about those for a while. I've studied a great many fighting styles and martial disciplines in my life, but I have never encountered either term until Shambala."
"As expected," Edward said. "Nothing outside of Dev Lok uses this system. You can think of it as a fighting style that draws on the very essence of life. It was created by Shiva and passed down through his students to every generation of Soul Fighters since."
They listened closely.
"Every living being has an internal energy. We call it soul. Normal people use it constantly without ever knowing — it is what moves through a person's body in extreme moments. A mother lifting a vehicle to pull her child free. A man who has never fought in his life standing between a wild animal and his family. A person running faster than their body should allow when their life depends on it. Every one of those moments is soul, operating without training, without direction, on pure instinct and necessity."
Rudra felt something click into place — a retroactive understanding of moments he had experienced himself. The night on the roof with Aagni. The building. The street. There had been points in all of it where he had done things his body should not have been capable of. He had attributed it to adrenaline, to desperation, to the particular clarity that comes when the only options are act or fall.
Not adrenaline. Soul.
"With training," Edward continued, "you learn to access it deliberately. You can use it to sense the presence of people around you — even through walls, even without sight. You can channel it through your body to increase your physical capabilities beyond any natural limit. You can coat a weapon in it and multiply the impact of every strike it lands. And at the highest level of development, you can project it outward — release it as a directed force, a wave, a concentrated point of impact."
He paused. Both of them were very still.
"We Soul Fighters train with soul every single day. It is not a technique you use when you need it. It is a condition you maintain continuously, the way a musician maintains their instrument. The stronger your soul reserve, the more you can draw on it. The more refined your control, the more precisely you can apply it."
Rudra asked, "and the astra?"
Edward said. He exhaled. "it's the unique ability."
"When your mastery of soul reaches a certain threshold — or, in some cases, when you are pushed to an extreme you cannot survive by ordinary means — something unlocks. A specific ability that belongs entirely to you and no one else. No two astras are the same. It emerges from who you are at your core, from what defines you — though occasionally it is simply random, which is less poetic but equally real."
He looked at both of them steadily.
"Every Soul Fighter you have met has one. The five Devas have developed theirs to their maximum possible level. That is part of what makes them Devas."
Arjun asked, "what exactly do we need to do to awaken both?"
"Now that," Edward said, "is a good question." He let a moment pass. "The traditional method is meditation. Consistent, sustained, daily meditation. It strengthens the mind, which in turn allows the soul reserves to grow. The process works. It has worked for every Soul Fighter in the organisation's history."
Rudra and Arjun waited.
"It takes five to six years to fully awaken the soul," Edward said. "And another five to eight years after that to reach true mastery of it."
The training ground was quiet.
Rudra ran the numbers. Five years minimum just to awaken. Then five more to master it. Ten years of dedicated daily work before a fighter was operating at the level the exam presumably required, and people in Dev Lok began that process at five years old because ten years brought them to fifteen — a functional starting point.
He and Arjun were not five.
"Wait." He could hear his own voice coming out with the particular flatness of a person trying to stay calm about something that does not deserve calm. "That's more than ten years. We have six months. How is that supposed to work? How is any of this supposed to work?"
Edward looked at him for a moment. Then, for the first time since the guest house reveal, he smiled. Not the polite smile of a host or the composed smile of a Deva. A genuine one, carrying the particular energy of a person who has been waiting for the right moment to say something.
"That is true," he said. "Normally, it would be impossible. But fortunately for you. I have spent the better part of the last several years developing a method that drastically shortens that time."