The corporate office wasn't a workplace. It was a cage. Sterilised, white, and completely devoid of soul. Gagan Sharma, just Gagan here, sat stiffly at his desk. Twenty-seven years old, drowning in Excel. His tie felt like a nylon noose, the fluorescent lighting a steady, buzzing betrayal of the eyes. This was the contradiction: the agonising smallness of this life versus the cosmic fire he held in his veins.
The suit felt heavy. Beneath the tailored fabric, the midnight blue Nandi armour, the Vrishabha form, clung to his flesh. The gauntlet, that impossible bracelet, pulsed. Not with light, but with a dull, throbbing awareness. Figure it out, Gagan. Just figure it out, it seemed to murmur, less like a god, more like an irritated older brother.
He couldn't focus. KPI report. The letters blurred.
He activated his Earthen Echo. Nandi’s Hearing.
The world shattered. The silence of the office was a lie. He heard the CEO’s frantic, shallow heartbeat upstairs. The distant, lonely drip of water in a pipe. The city’s collective anxiety, a vast, miserable whine, filtered through the concrete.
Then, the discord. Sharp. Toxic. A structural lie that cut through the noise, not just disorder, but something actively, chemically wrong. It was a sickness in the very molecules of the city. The Syndicate. Of course. They don't just steal; they manufacture the rot now.
The next big mess, he recalled, the memory tasting of metal and rain.
He leaned back, forcing a breath. The pulse from the gauntlet was his anchor. Om Namah Shivay.
He shot up from his chair. Excel could go to hell.
He had to move. Now. He ducked into the cleaning supply closet, the smell of bleach sharp and ironically pure.
Gagan tapped his bracelet. Om Namah Shivay. His mantra. His trigger. The armour rapidly manifested, midnight blue merging with the shadows. The golden bull’s head emblem settled over his sternum, radiating Shiva's energy.
He moved to the window. Thirty-fifth floor. Just a launching pad. With a soundless burst of plasma from his boots, he engaged the Flight of the Bull.
He shot into the evening sky. Mach 5. The wind, screaming past him, sounded like a distorted roar. He wasn't flying; he was bulldozing the air, telling physics to sit down and shut up. Delhi became a neon smear below, a fragile map of the lives he guarded.
He landed on the roof of Goldenmilk Pvt. Ltd. The building itself felt like a false front, a claim of purity that shivered with deceit. The product: milk. A symbol of nourishment, of life, now weaponised.
He found the central lab. Dr Arman was there. Thin, brilliant, and maniacal.
He saw the process with his enhanced vision: a complex slurry of cheap chemicals forced into a structure that mimicked dairy. A perfect, profitable, toxic fiction.
“Profit is the only truth! Purity is a marketing myth!” Arman muttered to himself, adjusting a valve. “Goldenmilk is me!”
The Syndicate funds this, Nandi realised. They sell the lie.
He couldn't waste time. He pressed his hand against the security door. Not force, but precision. He channelled a low-frequency pulse, the perfect vibrational key. The lock hissed open. The Guardian entered the den of manufactured corruption.
The factory was a metallic scream waiting to happen. Nandi moved with heavy grace. He focused on the raw, chemical chaos, ignoring the sterile look of the place. He was tracking Arman's footsteps, which now registered as a frantic, panicked tremor beneath the steel decking.
He was intercepted. Three heavy-duty security drones. Lethal industrial models.
“Halt!” The voice was mechanical, dull.
Darts, hardened rubber. They fired.
Nandi didn't dodge. He raised his gauntlet. The sapphire light flared. Resonance. He unleashed a focused sonic barrier. The projectiles hit the invisible shield and immediately pulverised into dust. Molecular bonds ripped apart.
The drones adapted. Energy pulses fired. Nandi dropped the shield, ducked, and moved with impossible speed.
He struck the first drone. His Strength of Devotion was not muscle. It was disruptive. The chassis didn't dent; it shattered from the inside, circuitry tearing itself apart due to frequency overload.
The second drone pivoted. Nandi grabbed its arm. He introduced a frequency shift into the joint. Snap. The metal became brittle, breaking cleanly. He slammed the wreckage into the third.
Six seconds. Over. Faster now. Less hesitation, Nandi thought.
He cornered Arman at the Synthesis Reactor Core. The man was shaking, not with fear, but with a terrifying, cold excitement.
“I knew you would come, ‘Vrishabha’,” Arman hissed. “The Shadow Syndicate prepared for your devotion. You are the past trying to stop the market!”
“You are the poison born of greed,” Nandi stated. “You lied using the very symbol of purity.”
Arman laughed, a sharp, broken sound. He slammed a control button. The reactor core began to glow a violent, angry red.
“If you stop me, my legacy, my formula, goes into the city’s water table! You will be a destroyer!”
Nandi paused. The ethical trap. Precise.
Arman, triumphant, pulled a silver vial. “This is the final additive. My own synthesised DNA. It creates a sentient emulsion that stabilises the formula. I will be everywhere.”
The white substance hit the reactor fluid. The floor trembled. The toxic hum shifted to a grinding, physical shriek.
Arman’s body contorted. He vanished. In his place, a massive, unstable, liquid giant rose from the vats. Ivory and crimson fluid, constantly shifting, the Goldenmilk Abomination.
“You talk of purity while drowning in filth! I am progress itself!” Arman’s voice, amplified and distorted, hammered the metallic air.
“You’re the void that opens when devotion turns inward,” Nandi countered, his voice a low, steady chord.
The monster swung a colossal arm, a dense, razor-sharp sheet of toxic white fluid. Nandi channelled his power, a sapphire-white vibrational shield blooming an instant before impact. The clash released a deafening CRACK that knocked out the factory lights.
The liquid monster was relentless. It adapted. The next volley turned gaseous, a dense, toxic vapour filling the air.
Nandi coughed. The armour seals failed. The toxic cloud bypassed the metal, attacking Gagan beneath the suit. His vision blurred. A visceral panic tried to surface.
Arman’s voice echoed: “Tell me, bull, can devotion breathe poison? Can your sacred sound nullify a chemical equation?”
Nandi steadied himself. He focused on the pain, focusing on his core truth. Faith was not armour. It was alignment. The perfect union of Gagan’s will and Shiva’s power.
He closed his eyes. The bracelet on his wrist burned white-hot.
A brilliant blue-white light spread from his chest. He exhaled. The very air around him shifted. The toxic vibrations of the gas were met with a counter-vibration, an anti-frequency. The chemical bonds of the gas instantly broke. The toxic cloud turned into harmless, pure droplets of water.
Nandi opened his eyes. The light settled into a fierce, intense sapphire behind his visor. “Yes,” he said, his voice ringing with the authority of the storm. “It heals.”
Arman screamed, a wail of pure, frustrated hatred. He surged, tearing the factory structure apart.
“You can’t stop me! My formula is already in circulation! I am already in their blood!”
Nandi’s resolve was absolute. Lightning struck the ceiling, framing him in silver and blue.
He raised both hands. The sapphire glow became a white-hot corona. Complex, rotating fractals of sacred vibration formed in the air around him, halos of visible sound.
Arman mocked him: “You still cling to the divine! You’re just a man infected by a belief system you can’t even understand!”
“Belief doesn’t infect,” Nandi said, his voice amplified. “It heals.”
He struck with two hands.
The energy released was pure Resonance. A three-dimensional wave of vibrating white light tore through the factory. It struck Arman’s liquid mass, instantly undoing the unstable molecular bindings that gave the creature form.
Arman screamed as his body was violently separated.
“No… I was meant to transcend… immortal…”
Nandi extended both arms. The gauntlet transformed into a dazzling, spinning vortex of absolute energy. It pulled every single particle of the corrupted liquid toward it. The toxic product, the residue, every poisoned droplet in the facility, rose from the ground, drawn into the column of divine purification.
The white storm burst through the broken roof, merged with the thunderous clouds above, and then vanished in a final, blinding, silent flash.
Silence. Absolute. The storm had purified the scene. Nandi stood amidst a thick layer of fine, grey, inert chemical powder. The liquid poison was gone.
He knelt. Slow. Exhausted. He found the memory chips, the data on Goldenmilk’s distribution, the executive roster, and the chemical formula. The evidence.
He copied the necessary files with the gauntlet's data link. The fight was for balance; the data was for justice. Gagan Sharma’s hands ensured the consequences followed.
He used his remaining charge to ascend to an unfinished spire. He deactivated his helmet, letting the cool, rain-washed air hit his face.
The world below was quiet now. He heard the collective, grateful sigh of the city.
The cost was almost too high, Gagan thought. The sheer energy.
That is the burden, the Vrishabha spirit replied. Hold the line. Greed is a frequency that finds new conductors.
He watched the sun rise. Gold light. News reports flashed across the city’s large screens, a rapid-fire montage of arrests and government promises. They were celebrating a victory against fraud, not against a monster. The truth, delivered anonymously, was enough.
He felt a brief, quiet resonance of balance.
The voice returned, cold. Look beyond the rain. The contamination is no longer of the earth, but of the sky.
Nandi focused, listening to the city’s song. He tasted the air, using his Earthen Echo. A subtle, metallic tang, barely registering, was drifting from the far eastern industrial belt.
The Syndicate’s final move. The Chemical Sky.
He saw it in his mind’s eye: the sickly green-black of poisoned air and water. Rivers turning the colour of ash.
Project Black Rain
He closed his eyes. The power demand for that correction would be impossible. He would have to stretch his resonance to protect an entire atmosphere.
He opened his eyes. He let the metallic visor slide down, the sapphire light of the armour returning to its full, fierce intensity.
He whispered into the silence of the dawn.
“Then let it come. The Bull is ready for the storm.”
With a soundless burst of energy, Nandi launched himself from the spire, a midnight blue and silver shadow racing toward the polluted eastern horizon, toward The Chemical Sky.
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