The air in Assam was heavy that evening, not with monsoon rain, but with the kind of stillness that comes before a storm. My bare feet pressed into the cool earth of the village path, the gamocha draped around my neck fluttering slightly in the dusk breeze. I wasn't moving fast — not because I couldn't, but because I wanted them to feel my arrival before they saw me.
Ahead, the British outpost at Tezpur squatted like a leech — brick walls, sandbagged gun nests, Union Jack fluttering above. A week ago, they'd raided three nearby villages, dragging away young men for forced labor, and beating elders who refused to give up rice stores. One of the elders was still coughing blood when I visited him this morning. That had been enough.
From the shadows of bamboo groves, villagers watched in silence as I stepped into the open. Word had already spread about the man who pulled prisoners from Lahore without a scratch, who walked into gunfire and came out laughing. Whispers called me Roja Gor- the royal rhino .
I didn't care for the title, but it was working. Fear was already walking ahead of me into the British barracks.
---
Inside the outpost, a bored sepoy noticed me first.
"Hey! Tum— ruk!"
The rifle came up. I kept walking.
The crack of the Lee–Enfield split the evening air. The bullet hit my chest — not just hit, it slammed, driving me back a half step. I looked down, watching the lead deform against skin that now felt as dense as the rhino hide my strength mirrored. My shirt tore, but the skin underneath was unbroken. I exhaled slowly, feeling the faint itch of healing muscle knitting beneath.
"You're going to need more than that," I said in Assamese. My voice was calm, but the sepoy paled anyway.
---
Then the storm broke.
I moved — not at full speed, but enough that to their eyes I was a blur between lantern flickers. My right hand gripped the rifle barrel and bent it like it was soft copper. His eyes went wide; then my shoulder hit him like a battering ram, sending him through a table.
The other soldiers shouted, boots pounding. A British officer stepped out, revolver in hand. "Bloody hell—"
I was on him before he could finish. His punch landed on my jaw; the force reverberated in my skull, but my neck muscles absorbed it. My return strike — a palm heel — collapsed his nose and dropped him like a sack of grain. I didn't stop.
---
I wanted to test myself.
Two rifles cracked from the far side of the courtyard. I didn't dodge.
One bullet hit my ribs, the other my left thigh. Pain flared, sharp, immediate — but even as I turned toward them, I felt flesh already pushing the rounds out. My healing was faster now, more efficient than it had been in Lahore. Fighting was making me stronger.
I grabbed a water barrel, hoisted it one-handed, and hurled it into the gun nest. Wood shattered, knocking both riflemen out cold in a spray of water and splinters.
---
By the time I walked into the barracks, the fight was over. Men groaned on the ground. The air smelled of gunpowder, blood, and wet earth. I kicked open the locked storeroom, found the bound villagers inside.
"You're free. Go," I said.
They didn't move at first, staring like they were trying to memorize my face. One old man whispered a prayer in Assamese, touching my arm before leaving.
---
Outside, the crowd had grown. Villagers from as far as six miles away had come, drawn by the noise. They saw the British flag trampled into mud, the guns bent and broken, the Red Horned Lion walking through the twilight with prisoners at his side.
Somewhere deep inside the forest, I heard the long, low call of a hornbill — a sound the old ones said was a good omen.
---
Interlude – Calcutta, British Headquarters
Major Arthur Blake's knuckles were white on the telegram.
"Again," he muttered. "This is the third assault in as many weeks. And now in Assam."
The man across from him, a railway magnate with connections in the Governor's office, adjusted his monocle. "You don't understand, Major. It's not just attacks. The natives are talking. Stories of a man who can't be shot, who fights like some jungle god. If that spreads—"
"It will spread," Blake said grimly. "And we will be ready. I'm calling for reinforcements from Shillong."
---
But in Assam, the storm had only begun.
Because I had felt it — the pull in my muscles, the new resilience in my bones. Every fight was sharpening me, thickening my hide, hardening my blows. If the British wanted to escalate, I would welcome it.
They had rifles.
I had the strength of a one-horned rhino and the will to use it.
And I was just getting started.
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