The days slipped by, one after another, in quiet repetition. On the surface, nothing had changed. Rudra continued waking up early, still helping his mother dry clothes on the terrace before breakfast, still boarding the same late bus to college where he'd find his usual seat near the back window and spend half the ride pretending to scroll through his phone. His classes went on as usual—lectures drifting between diagrams and assignments, teachers rotating through with tired chalk-stained shirts and half-remembered instructions, while Vinay whispered jokes and Aanya passed him notes filled with equations written in unnecessarily neat handwriting.
But beneath all that, something was slowly consuming his attention. Not from compulsion, not from pressure, but from a subtle shift in the way his mind stayed anchored—not in this world, but in another.
Since the Lich began his methodical conquest of the second realm, Rudra had come to understand how the Zix Core truly measured value. It didn't care about loyalty. It didn't reward effort. It responded only to results—emotional impact, world-scale consequences, ideological shifts that moved populations from belief to panic or from despair to rebellion. And through this cold, detached system, Rudra had found clarity. By allowing destruction to spread, he gained. By letting people suffer, the system fed. The logic was ruthless, but simple.
Then something complicated that logic.
It began almost imperceptibly—a delayed drop in point gain from a ruined city, followed by inconsistent chaos feedback despite the Lich's forces winning battles. At first, Rudra assumed it was a technical delay or a minor resistance cell that would collapse without attention. But when the pattern repeated across multiple regions—when soldiers who should have surrendered continued to fight, and civilians who should have fled began organizing underground networks—he paid closer attention.
And at the heart of those inconsistencies was one figure.
No system flag. No system tag.
Just a single emotional thread cutting through the noise—stable, unwavering, and far too familiar.
The Zix Core couldn't project a full image yet. Rudra had not unlocked the Hero, and thus could not directly control or see him. But what the system did allow was ambient emotional syncing, a kind of empathic tether, faint and incomplete, but consistent. The more Rudra tuned in, the more that presence defined itself—through exhaustion that didn't weaken, determination that didn't require reward, and a clarity of purpose Rudra hadn't seen in anyone since... himself.
He began tracking it between classes. Not consciously at first, not obsessively. Just quietly.
A few minutes in the library while pretending to read.
A ten-minute wait after dinner when everyone else had gone to sleep.
Then longer—entire evenings spent in his room, the light off, the Core active, Rudra seated cross-legged in the corner, not meditating in the traditional sense but syncing—allowing the slow, constant emotional state of the Hero to filter into his perception.
At first it was only physical—tired limbs, scraped knuckles, the soreness of wearing armor too long without rest.
Then came thoughts—not words, but emotional patterns. The Hero's frustration when he couldn't save everyone. His focus when walking through ruined streets. His silence at funerals.
He was always moving. Always doing something. Never waiting for help.
And most striking of all—he was never angry.
Even when comrades died.
Even when plans failed.
Even when priests abandoned their posts or nobles broke their vows.
The Hero grieved, but he never grew bitter.
And the more Rudra observed him, the more that absence of resentment became harder to ignore.
It reminded him, disturbingly, of how he himself used to think—before the Zix Core, before the hidden realms, before power came dressed in algorithms and avatars. There was a time when Rudra believed that one man's efforts, even unseen, even thankless, could hold the line.
Watching the Hero was like watching that belief still breathing somewhere.
Still trying.
Still refusing to rot.
One night, seated at his desk while the street outside hissed with summer rain, Rudra stared blankly at the Core interface glowing faintly before him. He didn't activate anything. He didn't touch the panel. He simply stared, and for the first time in weeks, said something without needing a command.
"…How long can you keep going like this?"
No answer came. Only a slow pulse of warmth—meaning the sync was stable.
And Rudra realized he wasn't asking out of doubt.
He was asking because he wanted to know.
Not out of challenge, not out of strategy.
But because, on some level, part of him didn't want the man to stop.
—
Weeks passed. The bond remained unspoken.
By now, the Lich's forces had covered nearly one-third of the realm. Major cities were either gone or spiritually broken. The skies remained dim, and the land trembled with the weight of unnatural energy.
But there were still bastions.
Pockets of resistance not because of their military might, but because of that one man's presence.
A town of herbalists that should've collapsed under plague still functioned. A ruined fortress now acted as a hospital. An orphanage hidden beneath the ruins of an academy had been restored, not by priests or kings, but by one man lifting bricks between battles.
Rudra began anticipating his moves—not tactically, but intuitively.
He knew, for example, when the Hero would skip a stronghold and go to a village instead.
He knew when the Hero would refuse to kill a retreating enemy.
And he began to notice that every time the Hero stood back up after falling, the sync line pulsed in Rudra's chest.
Not strongly.
Not dramatically.
Just enough to make him realize… something had shifted.
He was no longer just watching.
He was connected.
And though he had not yet unlocked the Hero avatar, though the system still kept them formally separated, Rudra understood—fully and without denial—that he was now emotionally entangled with the one man who posed a spiritual counterweight to everything he had been doing.
And it didn't worry him.
It interested him.
Because if the Hero could make people fight without commands, rebuild without being told, believe without seeing proof—then he was more than just a resistance figure.
He was a multiplier.
And if Rudra could learn how that worked…
If he could study belief the same way he had studied fear…
Then the next stage of his plan wouldn't need to rely on fire and screams.
It would run on hope.
And hope, once ignited properly, never stopped burning.