They gave him a room in the Dharmaraksha facility. He did not think of it as his room. He thought of it as where he was sleeping while he figured out what came next.
The distinction mattered.
Parashu Guruji had stayed as well — Veera had not offered, but had not objected, and Arjun had made clear that his mentor's presence was not negotiable. They had been given adjacent rooms in a corridor that housed other field operatives, most of whom regarded Arjun with the specific expression of people who had heard things about someone and were attempting to reconcile the things with the person.
He was not there to be reconciled. He was there to learn.
For three days he moved through the facility like a man walking a new city for the first time — mapping it, not declaring it home. He attended the briefings Veera authorized. He read the files she cleared. He asked questions that made two senior wielders visibly uncomfortable, which he filed under: useful data.
He trained. This, at least, was familiar ground. The Dharmaraksha had practice halls in the Pratibimba — spaces specifically designed for wielder training, where the normal world's physics could be pushed gently and the consequences of a mishandled technique were contained. He was put in the lowest-tier group, which was appropriate given that he had known he was a wielder for seventy-two hours. He did not mind. He had learned everything he knew about fighting by starting from the beginning and being patient about it.
The trainer was a man named Rajan — forty, compact, with the economy of movement of someone who had drilled out all inefficiency and was left with pure function. He watched Arjun's first hour without comment. At the end of it he said, in the tone of someone making a purely technical observation: "You are the most controlled untrained wielder I have ever worked with."
"I have twelve years of other training," Arjun said.
"I know. But control is usually a thing we spend years teaching. You came with it."
"Someone spent years teaching it to me. He just didn't tell me what it was for."
Rajan looked at him for a moment, then nodded — a nod that was not agreement or disagreement but acknowledgment. He moved on to the next student. He was a good teacher: he gave you exactly what you needed and did not add sentiment to it.
Arjun worked. He studied. He waited for the light beneath his skin to tell him something.
It told him nothing. It pressed. It pulsed with his heartbeat. It had been pressing for four days and it had not broken through, and he was beginning to understand — from the files, from Parashu Guruji, from a conversation with Rajan that had started technical and become philosophical — that the Kavach would not awaken on a schedule. It would awaken when it chose to. When the moment carried enough weight to call it.
"You cannot force it," Parashu Guruji told him on the third evening, sitting on the floor of the guest room in the old way. "And you should not try. The Surya Kavach is not a technique. It is a truth about you. It will emerge when the situation demands the full truth of you."
"That sounds poetic," Arjun said. "It also sounds like I'm completely defenceless until it decides I've earned it."
"You are not defenceless. You have twelve years of very thorough training and a mind that processes threat faster than almost anyone I have ever trained. You are not armoured. That is different from defenceless."
"When it emerges—"
"It will hurt," Parashu Guruji said, simply. "The first time always does. The Kavach is the full expression of your dharma made physical. Having that much truth about yourself all at once is not comfortable."
"And after the first time?"
"It becomes easier to call. But the cost does not decrease." The old man looked at his own hands. "In my time, I used it completely four times. The first time I used it completely, I was in the Mirror World for six weeks afterwards. My body needed that long to reconstitute."
"And the people who kept using it? Who used it repeatedly, in the war?"
Parashu Guruji was quiet for a moment.
"Some of them are not here," he said. "Some of them are here but not entirely themselves. The Kavach gives, but what it takes does not come back."
Arjun thought about this. Sitting on the floor in a room in an organization he hadn't decided to trust yet, in a world he hadn't known existed a week ago, with a power sleeping in his blood that would eventually wake up and cost him something he had not yet learned the value of.
"Karna," he said, quietly.
"What?"
"My name. The middle one. My mother chose it, you said."
"Yes."
"Did she know? When she named me?"
Another pause. "She knew what you might become. Whether she saw the specific shape of it — the way it rhymes — I cannot say."
"Karna gave away his armour. His Kavach." Arjun looked at the wall of the room, which in the Pratibimba was blazing with accumulated meaning and in the ordinary world was just a wall. "He gave it away when the god asked for it, even though he knew it was the thing keeping him alive. Because he could not refuse a request. Because his generosity was his nature and also his destruction."
"Yes," Parashu Guruji said softly.
"She named me after the man who couldn't say no," Arjun said. "And then she spent nine years making sure I had people worth saying yes to."
He let that sit. His mother. This woman he had been moving around in his memory for fourteen years, keeping peripheral, and who was now coming into the centre of things with the force of something that had been held at bay a long time.
The attack came on the fourth morning.
Not at the facility — they were outside it, Arjun and Rajan on a training run through the Pratibimba-streets of Kothrud that was also Rajan's way of showing him how the Mirror World was navigated in motion. How you kept one awareness on the ordinary world and one on the Pratibimba simultaneously, so you didn't emerge from the veil in the middle of a road.
They were crossing a junction — the Pratibimba version of it, where the traffic lights were ancient signal fires and the road beneath the road was a pilgrim's path four hundred years old — when Arjun felt it.
Not heard. Not saw. Felt. The particular stillness in the space ahead that he associated with something that had already decided what it was going to do.
"Left," he said.
Rajan, to his credit, moved without asking why.
The thing that came from the right was not a person. It had been a person once, Arjun would understand later — a wielder who had lost the battle with their own power, or been consumed by an Astra that didn't choose them but they had tried to claim anyway. In the Pratibimba it appeared as a shape that was only approximately human, built from concentrated dark energy that bent the light around it. The Dharmaraksha called them Chhayas — shadows, remnants. The Asuri Sangh called them the cost of the current system. Both were right.
It was fast. Faster than anything Arjun had trained against. It came at Rajan first — Rajan, who was braced and beginning to call his own weapon, which burned red at the edge and was moving toward his hand.
It would reach Rajan first. Arjun calculated this in the way he calculated everything — without sentimentality, as pure spatial information.
He moved.
Not between them — that was the position of someone who expected to stop it. He moved beside Rajan and slightly ahead, into the Chhaya's path, and when it reached him he did the thing that twelve years of training had built into his body: he redirected the force rather than opposing it. One hand on its approximate arm, a pivot, turning its momentum against itself.
It worked, partially. The Chhaya was diverted. It was also, now, entirely focused on him.
Arjun had a moment — a specific, crystalline moment — of complete clarity. He had no weapon. His Kavach was sleeping. He had a redirected Chhaya three metres away that was gathering itself for something he did not have a name for and his body had already understood was going to be considerably worse than the first pass.
He thought: this is it. This is the moment Guruji described.
And then the Chhaya moved, and there was no more time for thinking.
What happened next, Arjun would describe later as: the inside of a sun. Not as a metaphor. As a physical description of what it felt like from within. The light beneath his skin — the light that had been pressing for five days, pulsing with his heartbeat, patient as a river — stopped being patient. It came up all at once, through every cell simultaneously, and it was not warm, it was burning, and it was not armour in the way of a thing put on, it was armour in the way of a truth made physical. The truth of him: twelve years of discipline and grief and loyalty and the particular quality of a person who cannot stop caring even when caring costs them.
The Surya Kavach blazed.
Gold-white, full spectrum, the light of something that had been waiting a long time to be allowed. It covered him from the ground up — not plate armour, not anything a human design had imagined. Something that had grown from within, that fit him the way a second skin fits, because it was not on him, it was him. The truest version of him, expressed as something the Pratibimba world could see.
The Chhaya hit it.
And stopped.
Arjun did not. He moved through the Chhaya's arrest — one motion, precise, the redirect extended into a full rotation — and the Surya Kavach did what divine armour does when it meets something that has lost its dharma. It burned through it. Not violently, not with destruction as the intention. The way sunlight burns through mist.
The Chhaya dispersed. What was left of it — the residue, the grief-shape of what it had once been — fell to the Pratibimba ground and faded.
Arjun stood in the burning.
Rajan was three metres behind him. The Dharmaraksha trainer, who had described himself as having seen most things the Pratibimba had to offer, was looking at Arjun with an expression that had nothing professional in it at all.
The Kavach was already fading. Already pulling back in. It had come up in a moment of crisis and it was retreating now that the crisis was over, returning to wherever it lived inside him, and what it left behind was—
He sat down. On the Pratibimba road. Legs simply stopped holding him up.
"That's the cost," Rajan said. Quietly. Not unkindly.
"Yes," Arjun said. He was looking at his hands. Ordinary hands again. The light gone back to sleeping. But the skin of his palms, where the Kavach had been most present, was different. Not burned — transformed. The lines there were slightly brighter. Would fade, mostly, over a few days.
Would not entirely disappear.
"Each time," Rajan said, crouching beside him, "it takes a mark. It comes back less completely than it left. Not debilitating — not for many years, if you are careful. But the Kavach is drawing on something that does not regenerate entirely."
"I know," Arjun said. "My mentor told me."
"And you called it anyway."
"You were in the path."
Rajan looked at him for a moment. "There will be people," he said, "who will put themselves in your path specifically because they know you will call it."
"I know that too," Arjun said.
"And?"
Arjun looked at his hands. The slightly brighter lines. The cost already written there, permanent.
"And I'll call it anyway," he said. "That's not a flaw. That's just what I am."
He said it without bravado, without the flavour of someone making a declaration. He said it the way you say something that is simply true — the way you say your name when someone asks for it.
Above them, in the Pratibimba sky, seven points of light moved their slow paths.
In the dark space where the eighth should have been, something — for just a moment — flickered.
And was gone.