Edward Voss.
It was the first time Rudra had heard a name like that — not unusual exactly, but distinctly foreign in a way that made it feel like it belonged to a different world than the one he had grown up in. Which, as it was rapidly becoming clear, might have been precisely the point.
"What the hell is an Earth Deva?" Rudra asked.
Edward looked at him for a moment, then reached up and put his hand beneath the collar of his shirt. He pulled out a necklace — and held it up where Rudra could see it clearly.
Rudra went still.
It was identical to his own. The same shape, the same weight to how it hung, the same quality of the stone at the centre that seemed to catch the light differently from ordinary gemstones — not reflecting it so much as holding it. The only difference was the colour. Where Rudra's stone carried a deep, dense hue that he had never been able to fully categorise, Edward's was a warm earthy brown, the colour of soil after rain.
"We Devas have the same kind of power as you," Edward said. "This is called a God Stone. There are eight of them in total, each with its own nature and ability. Yours is the Power Stone." He tucked the necklace back beneath his collar. "Mine is the Earth Stone."
Rudra could not immediately process all of this. His eyes dropped to his own necklace — the one Arthur had given him, in that dim apartment, on a night that felt like it belonged to a completely different version of his life. Arthur had never fully explained what it was. He had given it to Rudra without much ceremony, as if the giving itself was more important than the explanation, and Rudra had wor2n it since without fully understanding why it mattered.
Eight of them. There were eight?
"Does that mean you're a hero?" Rudra asked.
A puzzled look crossed Edward's face, and then something clicked behind his eyes — the particular expression of someone realising that a word they use constantly does not mean the same thing to the person they are talking to.
"A hero?" He considered this. "Technically, yes — but we prefer to call ourselves Soul Fighters."
Arjun, who had been standing quietly in the corner of the room following the conversation with the focused attention he brought to everything, looked just as confused as Rudra. He had assumed the man was some category of senior hero — unusual, clearly well-connected, but operating within the same framework he had always understood. Soul Fighters was a name he had heard, but never with any particular detail attached to it.
Both of them knew, at this point, that they were missing a significant amount of context.
Rudra finally said what both of them were thinking. "This conversation is getting more confusing with every sentence. Can you start from the beginning and explain it clearly?"
"Is that so?" Edward said. He didn't seem offended by this — if anything he seemed to find it reasonable. "Then I will do my best."
He settled back slightly, and his tone shifted into something more deliberate. The manner of someone who has explained something complex many times before and has learned how to do it efficiently.
"The Soul Fighters are an organisation whose purpose is to maintain peace in this world — the world as God created it. We have been doing this work for tens of thousands of years." He paused to let this land. "Deva is a title given specifically to the holder of a God Stone. It carries the highest authority within the entire organisation."
The room was quiet while both Rudra and Arjun absorbed this. Some things were beginning to arrange themselves into a shape that made sense. Others were raising new questions faster than the old ones were being answered.
"So what do you want from me?" Rudra asked.
Edward looked at him directly. "The Power Stone ended up with you. Under normal circumstances, my responsibility would have been to retrieve it — by whatever means necessary." He let this sit for exactly one second. "But the more I have learned about you and observed your actions, the more I believe you are more than qualified to hold it. More than qualified to become a Soul Fighter." His eyes moved briefly to Arjun, then back. "So I am here with a request. For both of you. Join us, come into the system properly, and help us end Horns."
Rudra and Arjun looked at each other.
The look that passed between them covered a great deal of ground in a short time. What if this organisation was no different from Horns — powerful people with resources and their own agenda, using others to protect it? What if joining meant putting the people they cared about in the path of something even larger than what had already found them? Arthur had trusted the wrong people once, and it had cost him everything.
But Arthur had also trusted Rudra with the stone. And if what Edward was saying was true — if this organisation had been maintaining peace for tens of thousands of years, if the structure existed for a genuine purpose — then fighting outside it, alone and without support, was simply the harder and slower version of doing the same thing with less.
Rudra looked back at Edward. Something had risen in his chest during the silence — not quite excitement, but adjacent to it. The feeling of a door being opened onto something much larger than the room he had been standing in.
"I will become a Soul Fighter," he said.
"That is exactly what I expected to hear." Edward stood. "Come with me."
---
They left the apartment and walked.
Edward moved through the streets with the ease of someone who knows a city well enough to stop seeing it — taking turns without hesitation, choosing routes that kept them away from the main roads without being obvious about it. Rudra fell into step behind him and watched the city pass. He had walked these streets his whole life — had run through some of them, had fought in some of them, had made decisions in others that could not be undone. They looked the same as they always had. Nothing about the morning communicated that anything had changed.
But something had. Significantly.
Rudra had no idea where they were being taken. He had expected, if pressed to guess, some version of a headquarters — probably something that looked ordinary or even run-down from the outside, the kind of building designed to be overlooked, with something entirely different on the inside. That was how these things worked in every story he had ever come across. Hidden in plain sight, tucked into the ordinary fabric of the city.
The reality, when they arrived, was stranger than that.
Edward led them into an alley — not unusual in itself, the city was full of them. But they went deeper into it than alleys normally allowed, the walls on either side narrowing and the sounds of the street fading behind them until there was nothing ahead but a blank dead end of bare concrete and silence. No door. No signage. No indication that they had arrived anywhere at all.
Rudra looked at Arjun. Arjun looked at the wall.
Edward glanced behind them once — checking the entrance of the alley, confirming they were unobserved — and then reached into the pocket of his long coat. He withdrew a key.
It was like nothing Rudra had seen before. The material appeared to be glass, or something glass-adjacent — almost completely transparent, catching the light at certain angles and disappearing at others. Holding it in the open air, it looked like Edward was carrying a sliver of nothing between his fingers.
He pressed it against the blank concrete wall.
A door appeared.
Not gradually, not with any particular effect — one moment there was wall, and the next there was a door, as clean and complete as if it had always been there and they simply hadn't been looking at the right spot. A frame, a handle, the faint suggestion of what lay beyond it in the narrow gap at the threshold.
Edward looked at both of them before he opened it.
"When I open this door," he said, "try not to scream. And conduct yourselves like gentlemen."
Rudra was about to ask what that was supposed to mean.
Edward opened the door.
And Rudra understood immediately why he had said it.