Chapter 8: First Trial — The Hunt

The forest shouldn't have existed.

That was Tanvi's first thought as she stepped through the portal and onto ground that was soft with centuries of leaf rot, into air so thick with green it felt like breathing through a wet cloth. Forests don't grow in divine realms. Forests are mortal things—messy, organic, governed by the slow democracy of evolution rather than the top-down dictatorship of divine will.

But this forest was here, and it was vast, and it was hungry.

"The Vana Pareeksha," Prithvika's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere—broadcast across the trial space like a celestial PA system. "The Forest Trial. The rules are simple. Survive until the horn sounds. Hunt or be hunted. The forest will provide weapons. The forest will also provide predators. There are no other rules."

Forty-two contestants. Scattered across the forest at random intervals. No allies, no maps, no supplies. Just bodies and powers and the particular terror of being prey.

Tanvi landed in a clearing. Ferns up to her waist, thick as a monsoon-season paddy field. Above her, a canopy so dense that the light filtered through in grey-green shafts, turning the air the colour of old glass. The smell was overwhelming—not unpleasant, but aggressive. Rotting vegetation and fresh sap and the mushroom-funk of mycelium and something else, something under all of it, a metallic sweetness that she associated with—

Blood.

The forest smelled of blood. Old blood. As if the soil itself were saturated with it.

How many people have died in this place?

She shoved the thought away. Veer had prepared her for this—hours of tactical briefings in the Kutil's courtyard, his calm voice laying out strategies with the precision of a military commander who also happened to be the son of the Death God.

Rule one: don't be where they expect you to be.

She moved. Not running—running in a forest was stupid; running made noise, caught on undergrowth, burned energy. She walked. Quickly, quietly, the way Kaka had taught her to move on the mudflats when the crabs were nesting and a wrong footstep could trigger a hundred angry claws.

Her power hummed. In this forest—this ancient, Aadya-adjacent space—the light in her blood was louder than usual, pressing against her skin like a dog straining at a leash. She could feel the trees. Not their physical presence—their history. These were old things. Old and aware, in the slow, patient way that forests are aware, consciousness distributed across root systems and fungal networks.

The forest will provide weapons.

She found one twenty minutes in. A branch—no, not a branch. A staff. Growing from the trunk of an enormous tree at exactly shoulder height, shaped like it had been designed for a human hand, its surface smooth and warm. When she touched it, it detached with a sound like a sigh—the tree releasing it willingly, the way a mother hands a child a tool.

The staff pulsed with faint silver light when she held it. Aadya-made. Of course.

A scream—distant, to her left. High, sharp, cut off abruptly. First contact. Someone had found a predator. Or a predator had found them.

Tanvi gripped the staff and moved deeper into the green.

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She found the first predator an hour later, and it was not what she expected.

The creature emerged from the undergrowth with the silence of a thing that had evolved specifically for killing in enclosed spaces—no rustle of leaves, no snap of twigs, just a sudden presence at the edge of her vision that made every nerve in her body fire simultaneously.

It was—roughly—a tiger. The way a nightmare is roughly a memory. Four-legged, massive, feline in its proportions. But wrong. Its stripes were silver on black, and they moved—shifting across its body like living tattoos, rearranging themselves in patterns that Tanvi's brain recognized as Aadya script. Its eyes were the same blood-dark red as Veer's, which was either a coincidence or a message, and she wasn't sure which option was more terrifying.

It looked at her.

She looked at it.

The forest held its breath.

Don't run,* Veer's voice in her memory. *Running triggers the chase instinct. In a hunt trial, the predators are designed to pursue. Standing your ground confuses their programming.

She stood her ground. The staff in her hands hummed—a defensive frequency, almost a warning.

The creature's silver stripes rearranged. It tilted its massive head—a gesture that looked, absurdly, like curiosity. Then it did something that no predator in any trial in three thousand years of Divyarohana had ever done.

It sat down.

And yawned.

Tanvi blinked. The creature blinked back—slowly, the way cats do when they're comfortable, when they've decided you're not a threat and therefore not interesting. Its stripes settled into a static pattern—Aadya script, Tanvi realized, that she could almost read, the way you can almost read a language you studied in school but never used.

"You're... not going to attack me."

The creature's ear twitched. Its tail—long, thick, tipped with silver—swept the forest floor in a lazy arc.

"Because of the Aadya thing. My power. You recognise it."

Another slow blink. The creature lowered its head onto its paws. A sixty-kilo divine predator, curling up at her feet like a housecat.

"Okay," Tanvi whispered. "Okay. That's—new."

A crash from the northwest. Someone fighting—the sounds of power being used, trees splintering, a voice she didn't recognize shouting something in Tamil. Another voice—deeper, panicked—in Hindi.

And then a voice she did recognize.

"TANU!"

Tejas.

She ran. The silver-tiger raised its head, considered, then rose and followed—loping beside her through the undergrowth with the easy grace of a predator that had decided this particular mortal was more interesting alive than dead.

She found Tejas in a clearing fifty metres away. He was standing back-to-back with Mrinal—the Bengali curse-specialist grinning with the manic energy of a woman who had found her element in chaos—while three more of the silver-striped predators circled them. These ones were not sitting down. These ones were snarling, their Aadya-script stripes blazing with aggressive patterns, their blood-dark eyes locked on the two mortals in their centre.

"About time," Mrinal said, not taking her eyes off the circling predators. "I was getting tired of being the only competent person here."

"You've known her four days," Tejas said. "She's always like this."

"I'm a delight and you're welcome." Mrinal's hands were wreathed in dark energy—her curse power, which Tanvi had not yet seen in action. It looked like smoke, if smoke had teeth. "These things are resistant to my curses. I've hit them with bad luck, localized entropy, and my special—which is literally a hex that makes you step on Lego for the rest of your life—and nothing's working."

Tanvi stepped into the clearing. The silver-tiger at her side padded in beside her.

The three circling predators stopped.

Looked at her.

Looked at the tiger beside her—their sibling, their pack-mate, now standing at a mortal's heel like a trained dog.

And, one by one, they sat down.

"What the—" Tejas started.

"Aadya resonance," Tanvi said. "They're Aadya constructs. They respond to me."

"So you're a divine animal whisperer now?"

"I'm a woman with a very confusing job description."

Mrinal lowered her curse-wreathed hands. "I want to be angry that you just solved our problem by standing near it, but honestly, I'm too relieved." She looked at the now-docile predators. "Can they fetch? I want to see if the cosmic tiger can fetch."

"Mrin."

"Right. Priorities. How do we survive until the horn sounds?"

They formed a plan—or rather, Tanvi formed a plan, Mrinal critiqued it, and Tejas charmed a nearby tree into growing a platform high enough to give them a vantage point. The forest was still dangerous—the predators responded to Tanvi, but there were other threats. Other contestants, some of whom had interpreted hunt or be hunted as permission to target their peers. And the forest itself was changing, shifting, corridors of undergrowth rearranging to channel contestants toward each other, forcing confrontations.

They saw three fights from their platform. One between two contestants whose powers were roughly matched—a woman who controlled fire and a man who controlled earth, their clash sending plumes of steam and debris into the canopy. Another, more one-sided—the massive Sikh man, Harjinder, walking through a nest of smaller predators like a truck through a traffic jam, his invulnerability rendering their claws useless.

The third fight was worse.

A boy—young, maybe nineteen, with the ability to manipulate plant life—was cornered by two contestants who had decided that eliminating the competition was more efficient than surviving the forest. They hit him with fire and force while he screamed for help, his plant-constructs burning and crumbling, his green power no match for their combined assault.

Tanvi was moving before she made a conscious decision. Down from the platform. Across the clearing. Staff in hand, power blazing.

"Tanu, wait—" Tejas, behind her. And Mrinal, swearing creatively in Bengali.

She reached the fight. The two attackers—a man with electrical abilities and a woman with sound manipulation—saw her coming and turned.

"Back off," the man said. Electricity crackled between his fingers. "This isn't your fight."

"You're killing a boy."

"This is a trial. People die in trials."

"Not while I'm watching."

She planted the staff. The light erupted—not the gentle glow she'd used in training, but something harder, brighter, a wall of silver-white radiance that slammed into the two attackers and threw them backward. They hit trees. They did not get up immediately.

The plant boy was on the ground. Burned. His clothes were smoking, his skin blistered. He was crying—not the dignified crying of an adult in pain, but the helpless, hiccupping sobs of a teenager who had just learned that the world was capable of being much crueler than he'd imagined.

Tejas arrived. Knelt. Put his hands on the boy's chest.

"What's your name?" Tejas asked. Calm. Focused. The charmer's mask replaced by the healer's concentration.

"R-Rohan." Between sobs. "Rohan Shetty. Mangalore."

"Rohan from Mangalore, I'm going to help you. You'll feel something strange in your blood—don't fight it. It's me."

He worked. Tanvi could feel it through their bond—the precise, surgical application of Tejas's power, redirecting blood flow to damaged tissue, accelerating the repair processes that the body already knew how to do but couldn't do fast enough. The burns began to close. The blisters flattened. Rohan's sobs softened to whimpers, then to confused silence.

"How—how are you—"

"I'm a healer." Tejas said it simply. Without qualification. The first time Tanvi had ever heard him claim the title aloud.

The horn sounded.

Deep, resonant, shaking the canopy. The trial was over. The forest—which had been steadily growing darker, more hostile, more alive—froze, then began to dissolve, the trees and undergrowth and predators dissipating like morning fog.

When the green cleared, the forty-two contestants—thirty-nine, Tanvi corrected, counting the spaces where people should have been—stood on the central platform of the Mandapa, blinking in the amber light.

Three gone. First trial. Three people who had been alive that morning and were now—

Honoured in memory.

Tanvi looked at the empty spaces where they'd stood during the Choosing. A girl from Patna with wind powers. A man from Coimbatore who could manipulate heat. A woman from Ahmedabad whose ability Tanvi never got to learn.

She looked at Rohan Shetty from Mangalore, standing whole and healed because her brother had refused to be a weapon and chosen to be a doctor instead.

She looked at Tejas, and through their bond, she sent him something that wasn't quite a word and wasn't quite a feeling. Something more fundamental than either.

Thank you.

He sent back the emotional equivalent of a shrug. But she could feel the truth underneath: he was shaking. The healing had cost him. Not in energy—in proximity. He'd been inside another person's blood, directing their biology, holding their life in his hands. The distance between healing and killing was, as he'd told Chiranjeev, the width of an intention.

He'd chosen right. This time.

The trials had only begun.

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