The nickname came slowly, quietly, the way shadows move across a sunlit field.
It wasn't in the papers. It wasn't official. No one asked the coaches to write it down. But parents, siblings, teammates, and rivals began whispering it in Guntur.
"The boy is… the Devil," one parent muttered, watching him position fielders during a school match.
"Look at how he makes the game bend," another whispered.
It wasn't a comment on skill. It wasn't about sixes or wickets. It was about control. The way he could manipulate outcomes without being seen, the way he understood sequences before anyone else had even noticed them. The Devil didn't play for applause. He played for inevitability.
Even at twelve, Arjun noticed the whispers. He didn't deny them. He didn't encourage them. He merely cataloged them.
Names mattered less than perception. Power—true power—lived in subtlety. He realized the nickname was an asset, not an insult. A shadow attached to him would keep people alert, cautious, obedient in their own ways, even without his touching them.
That evening, standing on the terrace of the family home in Guntur, he imagined the future.
The city lay below, quiet in the heat of twilight. He saw stadiums in his mind—hundreds of them. Cricket pitches, corporate boardrooms, defense corridors, financial centers, tech parks. And at the center of all of them, unseen but directing, he moved like a phantom.
He touched the red earth of his home, inhaled the humid air, and whispered to himself:
I will win silently. I will build quietly. I will make the world obey without knowing it.
And in that moment, for the first time, he felt it: the weight of a destiny that no one else could even see.
The Devil had been named.
But the empire had only begun.