Karna's Heir - Chapter 8

Chapter 8: The Price of Immortality

The alleyway hung in a stunned, gunpowder-scented silence. Ajay stared at his own leg, at the torn fabric of his trousers, at the pristine, unharmed skin beneath. He poked it. Definitely still attached. No gaping wound. No blood. Just… leg. A perfectly ordinary, if somewhat grimy, leg that had just demonstrated an extraordinary ability to disagree with a .38 caliber bullet.

On the cobblestones, the shattered fragments of lead glinted dully. Babu, Ravi, and Shankar simply gawked, their faces a comical rictus of terror and disbelief. Babu’s cheap revolver was still pointed vaguely in Ajay’s direction, but his hand trembled so violently the barrel described wild, erratic circles.

“Well,” Ajay said, his voice a little shaky but laced with a wild, burgeoning exhilaration. “That’s disappointing. I was rather hoping for a cool scar, you know? Something to tell the grandkids about, assuming I ever live long enough to have grandkids, which, given my current career trajectory as ‘unkillable goon magnet,’ seems statistically improbable.” He bent down, picked up one of the larger bullet fragments, and examined it. “And here I thought bullets were tougher than that. They really are making cheap ammo these days, eh?”

The realization, the mind-blowing epiphany from moments before, now slammed into him with its full, earth-shattering weight.

Karna’s Kavacha and Kundal. He was fused with divine armor. He was, by all conventional definitions, unkillable. A hysterical laugh, part terror, part disbelief, part sheer manic joy, bubbled up and escaped him.

“Unkillable!” he cackled, spreading his arms wide, the grin on Ajay’s face probably looking utterly deranged to the three petrified gangsters. “Do you hear that, lads? Your humble servant Ajay here is apparently playing life on ‘God Mode’! Fists bounce, rods bend, tasers tingle, and bullets? Bullets apparently turn into shrapnel confetti! Shetty is going to be so annoyed. This really throws a wrench in his ‘feed Ajay to the fishes’ retirement plan for me.”

He took a step towards them. They flinched as one, stumbling backwards. The power was intoxicating. For a week, he’d been a terrified rat, scurrying through the underbelly of Mumbai, hunted, helpless. Now… now he was something else. Something unbreakable.

But even as that heady sense of invincibility surged through him, the engineer’s pragmatic brain, that relentlessly logical part of Aryan Sharma that had survived death and rebirth, began to whir, sifting through the euphoria, looking for the inevitable caveats, the fine print in this divine contract.

“Okay, so,” he mused aloud, pacing a short line before the cowering trio, who seemed content to let him monologue as long as he didn’t get any closer. “Bullets shatter. Fists are ineffective. Electricity is mildly invigorating. That’s… an impressive suite of features for this new body upgrade. Top marks for durability. But…”

He paused, his brow furrowing. “But they can still catch me, can’t they?”

The thought landed with a cold thud, dampening his elation.

“If there are enough of them,” he continued, thinking it through, “they could overwhelm me. Pin me down. Tie me up. I’m not suddenly super strong. I’ve still got Ajay’s wiry, underfed physique. Good for slipping through crowds, not so good for wrestling a dozen angry goons.” He looked at his own arms. “No bulging biceps of invincibility here. Shame.”

“They can’t kill me,” he reasoned, tapping his chest where the invisible Kavacha lay, “but they can certainly make my existence incredibly unpleasant. Like a never-ending group project with incompetent, homicidal teammates who are all determined to make me suffer for not doing my share of the work – which, in this case, is handing over myself.”

The image of a prison cell swam into his mind. A dark, damp, cramped space. “They can just hold me in prison and throw away the key,” he muttered, the words tasting like ash. “I’d be the world’s most durable, most bored inmate. ‘Exhibit A: The Unkillable Man. Please Do Not Feed The Demigod.’ Wonder if they have good library facilities? Because eternity is a long time to go without decent reading material.”

And what about other things? “Being unkillable doesn’t mean I don’t get peckish,” he went on, his gallows humor kicking in. “Or thirsty. Can I starve to death while being perfectly immune to bullets? That’s a philosophical quandary I’d rather not test empirically. Or suffocation. Drowning. Do the Kavacha and Kundal come with a built-in oxygen supply? I should have asked for the user manual before I so spectacularly merged with them.” He pictured himself at the bottom of the ocean, very much alive, very much unable to breathe, surrounded by curious fish. “That would be a new low in ironic deaths. Or, rather, ironic un-deaths.”

He was an indestructible punching bag. A man who could not be conventionally slain, but who could still be captured, restrained, and subjected to all manner of prolonged suffering that didn’t involve direct, lethal impact. The price of this immortality, this invulnerability, was the potential for an eternity of torment if he fell into the wrong hands. And Shetty’s hands, he knew, were very, very wrong.

His gaze snapped back to Babu, Ravi, and Shankar. Their initial terror was slowly, very slowly, being replaced by a dawning, desperate calculation. Babu’s eyes flickered. He might be scared, but he was also Shetty’s man. Failure to bring Ajay in, or at least the item, would mean his own gruesome end.

“He… he’s a demon!” Babu croaked, but there was a new edge to his voice. “But Shetty wants him! He wants the item! Get him! Tie him up! We don’t have to kill him, just… just subdue him! We drag him to Shetty!”

The other two looked uncertain, but Babu’s fear of Shetty was clearly a powerful motivator. They began to spread out, attempting to flank Ajay, their expressions a mixture of terror and grim determination.

Ajay knew, with chilling certainty, that the window for escape, for leveraging his newfound invincibility through shock and awe, was closing fast. Talking his way out was over. Bluffing was over. They knew he had something extraordinary protecting him. They’d be more cautious, but also more desperate to capture him, to bring this inexplicable phenomenon to their boss.

“Right,” Ajay thought, his brief moment of maniacal glee evaporating, replaced by cold, hard desperation. “So ‘diplomacy’ is off the table. And ‘surrender’ sounds like a recipe for a very long, very dull, and possibly very painful existence as Shetty’s personal party trick. ‘Watch the unkillable man! Poke him with sticks!’. No, thank you.” His gaze hardened. “Looks like we’re going with ‘violent, panicked escape’. My favorite.”

He was still just one man, with Ajay’s normal, wiry strength. He couldn’t fight them conventionally and win if they all managed to get a hold of him. But his invulnerability gave him a terrifying edge: he could take risks, absorb damage that would cripple or kill a normal man, and keep going. He could be reckless in a way they couldn’t.

He saw his opening. Ravi, still clutching the bent iron rod, was a little too far to Babu’s left. Shankar, the big brute, was hesitating, clearly unnerved. Babu himself was fumbling with his revolver, perhaps trying to reload, his hands still shaking too much.

Ajay didn’t wait. He lunged.

Not with any trained skill – he was an engineer, not a street fighter – but with the desperate speed of a cornered animal. He went straight for Ravi, the one with the improvised weapon.

Ravi, startled, swung the bent rebar wildly. Ajay didn’t try to dodge. He couldn’t. He just barreled forward, taking the blow on his shoulder. The clang was loud, the force staggering, but he just grunted, his feet barely faltering. He crashed into Ravi, his momentum carrying them both towards the alley wall. Ravi yelped as his head cracked against the brick, his grip on the rod loosening.

Ajay snatched the bent rebar from Ravi’s dazed grasp. It felt heavy, awkward in his hand, but it was a weapon. Shankar, seeing his compatriot down, let out a roar and charged, arms outstretched, intending to grapple Ajay in a bear hug.

“Sorry, lad,” Ajay grunted, swinging the rebar in a desperate, clumsy arc. “But my pain receptors are on an extended vacation. Yours, however…”

The iron bar connected with the side of Shankar’s charging head with a sickening, wet thud. It wasn’t a sound Ajay had ever heard before, outside of movies. Shankar’s eyes rolled up, his charge collapsing into a boneless fall. He hit the cobblestones with a heavy groan and lay still, a dark stain beginning to spread from under his head.

Ajay stared for a horrified microsecond. “Oh,” a distant part of his mind registered with clinical shock. “That’s… a lot of blood. Definitely not mine. That’s new. And alarming.”

He didn’t have time to process. Babu was screaming, a mixture of rage and terror, fumbling with his gun. “You’ll pay for that, Ajay! You’ll die for that!”

“Bit of a contradiction there, Babu, considering current evidence,” Ajay yelled back, adrenaline and fear making him reckless. He charged Babu, brandishing the bloody rebar. Babu finally got his gun up and fired, wildly.

The bullet whined past Ajay’s ear, so close he felt the heat of its passage. Another struck him in the chest – a heavy, painless thud. He barely broke stride.

He slammed into Babu before the gangster could fire again. The gun clattered from Babu’s nerveless fingers. Ajay swung the rebar. Babu shrieked and threw his arms up to protect his head. The bar crunched down on his forearm with a sickening crack of bone.

Babu screamed in genuine agony, collapsing to his knees, clutching his shattered arm.

Ajay stood over him, panting, the rebar dripping. Ravi was moaning, trying to push himself up. Shankar was ominously still. The alley was a scene of carnage. His carnage.

The engineer in him was horrified. The pragmatic survivor, the one fused with Karna’s battle-lust or perhaps just desperate to live, was grimly assessing the situation. He had to get out. Now.

He didn’t check if Shankar was dead. He didn’t want to know. He just knew he had to run.

He dropped the rebar – it clanged loudly on the cobblestones – and bolted. He burst out of the alleyway and into the relative chaos of the railway station approach road, leaving behind him a scene of brutal, desperate violence.

He ran. He ran as if all the demons of hell, and Shetty, were at his heels. Adrenaline coursed through him, a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth. The horror of his own actions – the sickening thud of the rebar, the crack of Babu’s arm, Shankar’s still form – warred with the terror of pursuit and the lingering, wild exhilaration of his invulnerability.

“Note to self,” he gasped as he pushed through the unheeding crowds, his lungs burning. “Add ‘aggravated assault’ and ‘possible accidental homicide’ to the rapidly expanding list of things I’ve done since waking up in this godforsaken body. It’s becoming quite the criminal resume. Mom would be so proud.”

He was unbreakable. He was unkillable. But he was also, he realized with a fresh wave of despair, becoming a monster. And he was still very, very much hunted. The price of this immortality was already proving to be terrifyingly high.