After defeating the twenty-one elites, Indra stood in the silence of the courtyard. He looked at the mace and the daggers. They were good, but they were short. To face a million men, he needed reach. He needed a weapon that could pierce a line of shields and keep the tide of bodies at a distance.
He realized then: the spear was the king of the battlefield.
Indra sent for the oldest blacksmith in the capital, a man named Lohit, whose family had forged weapons for the kings of Ohm for seven generations. Lohit was blind in one eye from the forge's heat, but his hands knew the soul of iron.
"I need a spear that will not snap when it hits bone," Indra said, his voice cold. "It must be balanced for a god, but heavy enough to crush a horse's skull."
Lohit worked for forty days and forty nights. He used a rare meteorite ore found in the deep mines of the Eastern Ghats. He tempered the metal in oils infused with mountain herbs and cooled it in the winter winds. When he was finished, he presented the weapon to Indra.
The spear was seven feet of dark, matte-black steel. The head was shaped like a lotus leaf, broad and razor-sharp, with a central ridge that ensured it would never bend. It had no decorations. It was a tool of pure death. Indra gripped the shaft, made of a reinforced black teak bound in steel wire. It felt like an extension of his own arm.
Indra began his true training.
He did not practice against men anymore; they were too slow. He practiced against the elements. He stood under the Great Waterfall of Ohm, thrusting his spear against the falling weight of thousands of tons of water. At first, the water threw him back. But after months, Indra's thrusts became so precise and powerful that for a split second, he would part the waterfall, creating a dry hole in the curtain of crashing water.
He practiced in the forests at night, blinded by a cloth over his eyes. He learned to hear the sound of a leaf falling and would pin it to a tree trunk with the tip of his spear before it hit the ground. He practiced his footwork in the shifting sands of the desert, learning to move his heavy frame without leaving a deep footprint.
He developed a style that the world had never seen. He called it the "Heavenly Piercing." By the age of eighteen, Indra was no longer just a talented warrior. He had become a force of nature. In the 2,000-year history of the Empire of Ohm, there had been legends and heroes, but none had reached this level of perfection. He could thrust his spear a hundred times in a minute, and each strike was a killing blow.
He could stand in a narrow pass and, with a single sweep of the heavy shaft, break the legs of ten charging soldiers. His skin seemed as hard as the bronze armor he wore, and his eyes had become like glass—seeing everything, feeling nothing.
General Veda watched him from a distance, feeling a cold sweat. He had wanted a weapon, but he had created a monster. Indra was now the strongest man to ever walk the soil of Ohm. He was ready to face the million-man army of the Gamma Empire.
But as Indra stood on the palace walls, staring toward the Weeling Province, he felt a strange itch in his chest. For the first time, he wondered why the stars said he should have died at fifteen.