They did not march in uniforms.
They ran in silence.
Under bridges, across dry riverbeds, through abandoned temple courtyards, and over the rooftops of sleeping neighborhoods, training began — not as drills, but as habits.
Vikram didn't call it an army.
Not yet.
But it was forming.
It started with nine.
The seven from The Black Threads, plus two street wrestlers from Kotla — thick-bodied boys with cauliflower ears and a loyalty to roti more than anything else. Vikram had touched both after a fight near the Chandni Chowk drain. Their orbs pulsed with Endurance, Pain Tolerance, Ground Recovery — all fused and copied across the first batch.
They trained at dawn.
Not in fields.
But in the hidden yards behind old dharamshalas. In butcher lanes when the vendors were gone. On temple rooftops where no one looked up.
Sattu — the former press boy — became their ground commander. Not because he was the strongest, but because he could memorize formations with unnatural speed.
The drills were unspoken.
No whistles. No shouted commands.
Just patterns.
Run. Climb. Drop. Circle. Vanish.
Each boy's movement was refined with absorbed skill orbs: Beginner Balance, Intermediate Sprint Form, Urban Climbing, Low Visibility Escape.
These weren't battlefield tactics.
They were urban survival instincts, weaponized.
Vikram trained them personally — not always with words, but by standing among them. Observing. Measuring. Tuning their skill sets in Magicnet like a smith tempers steel.
He fused knowledge from:
A retired Rajput rifleman
A Sikh wrestler from Old Delhi
A blind knife sharpener with hand sensitivity beyond logic
From them, he built orbs:
Intermediate Silent Takedown
Beginner Melee Timing
Beginner Weapon Handling
Intermediate Night Vision Awareness
And fed them, one by one, into the training cadre.
Not all at once.
Just enough to push the next day further than the last.
Food came from surplus vendors under Vikram's control. No beggars went hungry near training sites. That was the rule. If someone starved within reach of the trainees, it was considered a failure of the group.
Discipline was seeded not with fear.
But with purpose.
"These drills are not for display," Vikram told them once, under the neem tree by the old press wall. "You are not freedom fighters. You are not revolutionaries."
One of the boys — Rafiq, fast hands, sharp eyes — frowned. "Then what are we?"
Vikram looked at him. Then spoke evenly.
"You are the cure."
No one spoke after that.
They understood.
By the second month, he added twelve more boys.
Then twenty.
By the third month, he had forty-five active trainees, all under twenty, most invisible to the city, each linked to Magicnet, each upgraded with handpicked fused skills.
They could scale a wall without sound.
Disappear in alleys.
Track a man across rooftops.
Memorize faces.
End a threat without a shout.
These weren't soldiers.
They were precursors.
The first fragments of a force that didn't yet have a name. But would one day be called a shadow army — not because it hid, but because it was everywhere and nowhere at once.
And as the drills spread through midnight rooftops, the British slept, unaware.
Delhi was changing shape.
And somewhere in the walls of an abandoned press, Vikram wrote one word in chalk:
"Jagrik"(The Awakened)
They would not be known today.
But when the empire fell, their names would whisper through stone.