Kampot Province. The Teuk Chhou Zoo.
The air tasted like river mud and old rain. Thick. It clung to the skin, a suffocating second layer that made every breath feel like manual labor.
Aryan leaned his hip against the rusted railing, staring into the middle distance. He checked his watch. Not because he had somewhere to be, but because the stillness was itching under his skin. Back at the bungalow, Silas was unconscious, sleeping off the chemical hangover of the potion. Aryan was out here trying to walk off the excess energy, testing the humming durability of a body that no longer played by standerd rules.
The zoo was a tragedy of concrete and moss. The jungle was slowly eating it alive. Vines choked the walkways; iron bars were flaking away into orange dust, surrendered to a thousand monsoons.
A handful of tourists drifted through the heat—sweaty backpackers with sunburned shoulders and a local family pointing out the monkeys to a toddler.
Aryan closed his eyes for a second. His senses were dialed too high. He could hear the wet rasp of a gibbon breathing fifty yards away. The smell of stale popcorn. The friction of dry leaves skittering over pavement.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the woman.
She was standing near the safety barrier, a few feet down the line. Indian. Maybe early twenties. She wasn't looking at the animals with that vacant, glazed-over tourist stare. She looked… heavy with something she was carrying inside.
She wore a simple cotton kurta and jeans, hair dragged back into a bun that was losing the fight against the humidity. She held a tote bag tight against her side, knuckles white, like it was the only thing anchoring her to the ground.
SCREE-POP.
The sound wasn't loud, just wrong. Like a bone snapping.
At the far end of the row, gravity finally won. The hinges on the main gate, corroded to nothing, simply gave up. The iron door drifted open, lazy and heavy.
The male lion stepped out.
It wasn't majestic. It was a ruin. Ribs sawing against patchy fur, mane matted with dirt. But it was still four hundred pounds of confused, hungry biology. It shook its head, blinking at the sudden lack of bars.
The panic didn't hit all at once. It rippled.
"Lion!" A scream, high and thin.
Then, chaos. The instinct to survive is ugly. Tourists scrambled, elbows flying. The local family yanked their children backward, stumbling over tree roots.
In the crush, a hand slipped.
The little girl—five, maybe six—went down. She hit the dirt path hard. She didn't scramble up. She just froze, eyes locked on the animal, paralyzed by the sheer size of the thing.
The crowd dissolved into the tree line. The path cleared.
The lion turned. Yellow eyes fixed on the small, isolated shape on the ground.
The predator switch flipped.
The cat lowered its head. Shoulders bunched. A growl started low in its chest—a sound you feel in your teeth before you hear it.
It coiled to spring.
"Hey!"
The shout cracked the air.
The woman in the kurta. She hadn't run. She'd stepped in.
She swung the heavy tote bag—a clumsy, desperate haymaker—and let it fly. It wasn't graceful. It sailed through the humid air and thumped heavily against the lion's flank.
The beast flinched, snarling. The focus broke.
The lion swung its massive head around. It forgot the girl. It looked at the woman.
She stood her ground, but Aryan could see the tremor running through her frame, shaking her from the ground up. She'd bought the kid three seconds of life, and the price was probably her own.
"Run!" she screamed at the child, her voice cracking.
The lion roared. A blast of hot, rotting meat. It charged.
Aryan moved.
No thought. Just a detonation of muscle. He covered the thirty feet in a blur that the human eye couldn't track.
As the lion leaped, jaws opening to crush the woman's vertebrae, Aryan stepped into the trajectory.
He dropped his weight. Caught the animal in mid-air.
Left hand into the mane. Right arm hooking the foreleg.
Impact.
The momentum slammed into him, driving his boots two inches into the packed dirt. Normal bones would have shattered. Aryan's skeleton, dense with the Vardaan, soaked up the kinetic energy like a sponge.
Behind him, the little girl scrambled up and bolted, vanishing into the green.
Now, just the three of them. And the dust.
The lion thrashed, panicked, claws raking for purchase on Aryan's arms.
RRRAAARRGH!
Aryan didn't flinch. He just gritted his teeth.
He pivoted his hips—basic leverage—and slammed the animal into the earth.
CRUNCH.
The ground shuddered.
Aryan drove his knee into the beast's neck, pinning the muscle to the dirt. He didn't want to kill it. It was just an animal doing what animals do. He applied pressure. Just enough to say stop.
The lion wheezed. Its eyes rolled back, confused by a force it couldn't understand. It went limp. Submission.
Aryan let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He looked up.
The woman was staring at him. Her chest heaved, sucking in the wet air. Her eyes were wide, trying to process the physics of what she just witnessed.
A man had just wrestled a lion. And the lion lost.
Aryan stood up, dragging the groggy beast by its mane across the dirt like a sack of rice. He shoved it back into the concrete pit.
He slammed the iron gate.
The latch was dust. The hinges were gone. It swung loose.
Aryan scanned the debris. He saw a piece of rusted rebar, maybe an inch thick, lying in the weeds. He grabbed it.
He threaded the rod through the gate handles and the frame.
Then, he squeezed.
The muscles in his forearms coiled like steel cables beneath the skin.
GRIND.
The solid iron didn't just bend; it yielded. It folded like wet clay. He wrapped the metal around the frame, twisting it into a knot.
He stepped back, wiping rust flakes from his palms onto his jeans.
He turned to the woman.
She hadn't moved. Her gaze flicked from the twisted iron knot back to his hands.
"You…" she whispered. The word dissolved.
"Adrenaline," Aryan said. He tried to keep his voice flat, boring. "Makes you do crazy things."
She looked at the knot again. "Adrenaline doesn't turn cold iron into taffy."
Aryan walked toward her. "The girl is safe. The cat is locked up. That's the win."
He adjusted his shirt, covering the bruising on his arm that was already fading, the skin knitting itself back together.
"I need to go," Aryan said.
"Wait."
She stepped into his path. She wasn't tall, but she took up space.
"You saved my life," she said. "And hers."
"I just stepped in."
"I have a place," she said, gesturing toward the town. "My restaurant. The Spice Route, down by the river. Let me get you something to eat—it's the least I can do."
Aryan hesitated. His stomach was empty. And the silence of the bungalow, with nothing but Silas's snoring, felt suddenly loud.
"Okay," he said.
The Spice Route.
It was barely a building—more of an open-air shelter perched on the riverbank. The rain had started again, a sudden tropical downpour hammering against the tin roof, drowning out the world.
The air here smelled better. Cardamom. Wet earth. Frying onions.
Aryan sat at a corner table, back to the wall.
Meera—she'd told him her name on the walk over—set two clay cups of masala chai on the scarred wood. Steam curled up, ghost-white against the dark rain outside.
She sat opposite him. She didn't drink immediately. She watched him over the rim of her cup.
"You're not a tourist," Meera said softly.
Aryan took a sip. The tea was perfect. Sharp ginger, heavy milk. "I am. Just passing through."
"Tourists don't catch lions," she said. "And they don't tie knots with rebar."
Aryan set the cup down. The clay clicked against the wood. He met her gaze.
"Listen," Aryan said. "I have a complicated life. I prefer to keep the volume down."
Meera studied his face. She looked at the hardness in his jaw, the eyes that seemed too old for the rest of him.
"I've been in Cambodia for three years," Meera said. "I've seen smugglers, ex-military, people running from things you wouldn't believe. I know how to keep a secret."
She pushed a plate of pakoras toward him.
"Eat," she said. A small, tired smile touched the corner of her mouth. "You burned a lot of fuel wrestling that cat."
Aryan picked up a pakora.
"My name is Aryan," he said.
"Meera," she nodded. "Welcome to Kampot, Aryan."
He took a bite. Outside, the rain hammered the earth. But for the first time in months, the noise inside Aryan's head went quiet. Just the rain, the heat of the tea, and a pair of dark eyes watching him from across the table.