The lead Asura stepped in. Wide stance. Stupid.
Indra didn't bother with a block. He just leaned into the motion, boots grinding into the ash, and threw a right. It wasn't a technique; it was a dismissal.
Knuckles met breastplate.
The air just… gave up.
It didn't look like combat. It looked like a magic trick gone wrong. One second the Asura was screaming, the next he was a fine, pink mist hanging in the vacuum where his chest used to be. The kinetic force didn't stop at the meat; it punched a hole through the atmosphere, a tunnel of compressed air that shrieked outward like a jet engine.
The shockwave hit the back ranks. Armor buckled. Femurs snapped. A thousand demons dropped, clutching ears that were suddenly leaking dark fluid.
Indra stood in the wet silence of the clearing. He flexed his hand. Steam, or maybe smoke, curled off his skin.
"Glass," he muttered. "All of you."
He glanced sideways. The cages. The mortals inside were huddled, hands over their heads, frail things made of soft water and panic. If he hit anything harder, the vibrations alone would turn their insides to soup.
He sighed… A sharp, irritated snap of his fingers.
Crack.
The sky tore open. Not a storm, just a single, jagged line of blue-white voltage that hammered down around the pits. It solidified instantly—a cage of humming static. Inside, the air went dead still. Safe. Outside, the world kept burning.
Then the ground shook. A rythmic thudding, getting louder.
Kravyad.
The warlord cleared the crater rim in a single jump, crossing half a mile of dead air. He came down like a landslide, a blur of grey muscle and bad intentions, a fist the size of a wrecking ball aiming to smear Indra into the geology.
Indra didn't move his feet. He just looked up and raised a palm.
Thud.
No explosion. Just a heavy, dead stop. The kinetic energy had nowhere to go, so it went down. The ground cratered, sinking fifty feet in a heartbeat, dust pluming up in a choking ring.
When the dust settled, Indra was standing on a pillar of uncracked stone, holding Kravyad's fist like a parent catching a toddler's tantrum.
"Momentum," Indra said, his voice quiet, cutting through the ringing in the air. "But no anchor."
He squeezed.
Kravyad's knuckles ground together—wet, crunching gravel. The warlord howled. Indra twisted his hips, a casual torque of the spine, and whipped his arm.
Kravyad went airborne. He didn't fly; he tumbled, an ugly mass of limbs smashing through a ridge of obsidian before skidding across the ash plains. He carved a trench in the planet's face, finally stopping in a heap of bruised grey flesh.
He scrambled up, shaking. Humiliation is a hell of a fuel.
Void energy spilled out of him—sickly purple light that pulsed like an infection. He grabbed a slab of jagged iron from a wrecked ship, twenty tons of scrap metal, and roared.
He charged. The ground turned to slush under his hooves. He swung the slab.
Indra ducked. The wind of the swing took the top off a hill three miles away.
Indra didn't fight. He drifted. He moved through the violence with insulting economy. Left. Right. A half-step back. The iron club smashed the ground where he'd been a microsecond ago, showering him with dirt.
"Sluggish," Indra breathed.
He stepped inside the guard. Buried a fist in Kravyad's gut.
Whump.
Kravyad folded. Eyes bulging, breath gone. Black bile sprayed from his teeth.
Indra spun—a roundhouse that connected with the jaw like a bell tolling for a funeral. Kravyad spiraled up, hitting the cloud layer before gravity remembered him.
Indra bent his knees. The stone beneath him powdered.
He launched.
He caught the demon at the apex. Grabbed him by the throat. Turned the fall into a dive.
They came down like a meteor.
They hit a mountain peak. The granite didn't stand a chance—it shattered into shrapnel. They kept going, driving down through the roots of the range, the tectonic plates screaming in protest. Lava hissed up through the cracks.
Impact. Valley floor.
Kravyad lay in a crater of his own black blood. His chest heaved, a broken bellows wheezing against the silence. The purple armor was gone, stripped away to reveal raw, grey skin.
Indra landed. Softly. His white robes were still pristine. He smoothed a wrinkle on his sleeve, frowning at a speck of dust.
"Is that it?" Indra asked. "Is that the Void?"
Kravyad snarled, forcing himself up on trembling arms. "I… am… eternal."
He lunged. A desperate, clawing swipe.
Indra sighed. The sound was heavy with boredom. "You're tedious."
Kravyad staggered back. He spat a tooth onto the grey rock. "You judge the shell," he rasped, clutching his chest. "You ignore the core."
The warlord straightened. The purple light died, replaced by a low, nauseating hum. Green veins bulged against his grey skin—radioactive, toxic light.
"I scavenged the Deep Dark," Kravyad growled. "Found a rock that bled green fire. I ate it."
Heat rolled off him in waves. The ground beneath his hooves turned to glass.
"I am not a warlord," he roared, his voice layering over itself, distorted and wrong. "I am the end."
His body seized. Bones snapped, lengthening with wet pops. Grey skin split like overripe fruit, revealing an exoskeleton of emerald crystal. He grew, towering forty feet high, a reactor meltdown with claws. The air tasted of ozone and copper.
"I tested this on the Moon," Kravyad boomed. The voice vibrated in Indra's teeth. "I cracked the core. I turned a celestial body into gravel."
Indra tilted his head. "A moon. Cute."
Kravyad moved.
Fast. Too fast for something that big. He vanished and reappeared in Indra's personal space. The fist—green fire and crystal—connected with Indra's jaw.
CRACK.
The sound deafened the valley.
Indra became a projectile. He hit the first mountain peak and the granite vaporized. He didn't slow down. Through the second. The third. The fourth.
Five ancient peaks reduced to rubble in the span of a breath.
He slammed into the base of a dormant volcano ten miles out. The mountain collapsed on top of him, burying him under a billion tons of rock.
Kravyad didn't wait. He leaped, a green comet screaming toward the burial site, fists locked together.
"DIE!"
He hammered into the debris field.
The planet buckled. The crust gave way, and Kravyad drove Indra down, punching him through the bedrock, deep into the mantle. Lava geysered up, mixing with the dust.
Kravyad stood in the center of the ruin, panting, green steam hissing from his vents.
Silence.
Then, a rumble. Not a quake. A heartbeat.
The crater floor bulged.
BOOM.
Magma and rock exploded upward.
Indra stepped out of the fire.
He rolled his neck. A sharp crack. He brushed a smudge of dirt from his collar, his expression tightening with genuine annoyance.
"You broke a moon," Indra said flatly. "I hold the planets in place."
Kravyad roared—fear bleeding into the rage now. He threw a punch that could have cracked a continent.
Indra caught it. One hand.
The shockwave blew the clouds off the sky. Indra's feet sank inches into the stone, but his arm didn't waver. He squeezed. The emerald crystal of Kravyad's fist fractured.
"My turn," Indra whispered.
He threw a right hook. Simple. clean.
It hit Kravyad's torso.
The armor didn't just break; it disintegrated. Green crystal turned to dust. The ribcage collapsed. The warlord bent double, vomiting glowing green sludge.
Indra grabbed a horn, wrenched Kravyad's head down, and slammed his face into the rock.
"You ate a rock," Indra said. Cold. "You mutated your flesh. And for what?"
He planted a sandal on Kravyad's neck. The demon thrashed, clawing at the foot of the King of Heaven. It was like trying to bench press a mountain.
"You're still just mortal," Indra said.
"I… I am… supreme…" Kravyad gurgled, blood bubbling.
"You're boring."
Indra raised his hand. The sky turned a bruised, violent purple. The air pressure dropped so fast it popped eardrums miles away.
"Release."
Lightning didn't strike. It obeyed. The bolts wove together in his palm, solidifying into the Vajra. The scepter hummed—the sound of a thousand storms trapped in a bottle.
Kravyad looked up. His eyes widened. He understood, finally.
"Wait—"
Indra drove the Vajra down.
"Burn."
White light. Blinding. Absolute.
Sound ceased to exist. Gravity gave up. The energy didn't burn Kravyad; it erased him. The radiation, the mutation, the soul—unraveled at the atomic level.
Then, darkness.
Indra stood alone in the smoking, glass-bottomed crater. The Vajra dissolved into sparks.
No ash. No body. Just… gone.
Indra turned. The heat rolled off him. He walked toward the thunder cage. The prisoners inside stared, wide-eyed, at the being who had just rewritten their geography.
Indra snapped his fingers.
Snap.
The dome vanished.
"Rescue is coming," he said. No speech. No reassurance.
He stepped forward, and space tore open. The Kalachakra spun in the void, a doorway back to Swarglok. He stepped through without looking back.
The diamond floor of Swarglok reflected his boots. The air here didn't smell like sulfur and blood; it smelled of lotus and starlight.
Indra walked past Chitraratha, heading for the Storm-Seat. He poured a goblet of Soma. The golden liquid settled, still and perfect.
"The filth is gone," Indra said, taking a sip. "Send the chariots. Get them home."
"It is done, My Lord?"
Indra looked at his hand. Not a scratch. Not a drop of blood. Just the memory of dust.
"It is done."
He swirled the nectar, watching the light catch the gold.
"Chitraratha?"
"Yes, Lord?"
"Next time," Indra said, staring into the cup. "Find me something that can actually fight back."