"Oof! Alright, alright, calm down, you monster," Siddanth laughed brightly, catching the heavy dog mid-air and staggering back half a step.
Ronny was frantic with joy, his tail wagging so hard his entire back half was vibrating. He licked Siddanth's face relentlessly, whining and barking in a high-pitched octave reserved strictly for his favorite humans.
Siddanth dropped to one knee, ignoring the dull ache in his sprained ankle, and aggressively rubbed the dog behind the ears, wrestling with him on the warm concrete.
"I missed you too, buddy. You've gotten entirely too heavy," Siddanth muttered, burying his face in the dog's golden fur. For a man who had just spent a month carrying the weight of a billion expectations on his shoulders, the simple, unconditional love of a pet was the ultimate grounding force.
"If you let him, he will keep you in the driveway for the next three hours."
Siddanth looked up.
Standing on the elevated front porch, framed by the grand wooden doorway of the farmhouse, were the three people who anchored his universe.
Vikram Deva stood with his hands resting casually behind his back, a look of pride radiating from his face. Beside him, Sesikala Deva was holding a polished silver aarthi plate, the small oil lamp flickering gently in the afternoon breeze.
And standing right next to his mother, wearing a simple, elegant yellow kurti with her hair pulled back into a loose braid, was Krithika. Her eyes were shining with a warmth that completely erased the fatigue of his travels.
Siddanth gave Ronny one last pat, pushed himself up, and limped slightly up the steps.
He didn't say a word. He walked straight up to his mother and bowed his head.
Sesikala rotated the silver thali in front of him. She pressed her thumb to his forehead, applying a neat, vibrant red tilak. Only after the ritual was complete did she set the plate aside on a small table.
She immediately pulled her son into a tight, fierce hug. Siddanth wrapped his arms around her, burying his face in her shoulder. The silent, powerful embrace communicated everything that needed to be said. He was home. He was safe.
"Come. I have been cooking since six in the morning."
Siddanth turned to his father, touching Vikram's feet before accepting a firm, warm hug.
"Good to have you back, Siddu," Vikram smiled, patting his back.
Finally, Siddanth turned to Krithika.
"I thought Anjali was coming with you?" Siddanth asked, stepping closer to her.
"She wanted to," Krithika smiled, offering him a warm side-hug, mindful of his parents standing right there. "But she missed way too many classes while we were in Australia. Her college professor explicitly threatened to fail her if she bunked today's practical labs. She sent you a list of demands for souvenirs instead."
"Of course she did," Siddanth laughed, wrapping an arm around Krithika's shoulders and guiding her into the house.
The dining table was a sight to behold. For a man who had spent the last one hundred and twenty days subsisting on heavily regulated, protein-heavy, bland international hotel buffets and catered stadium food, it was absolute paradise.
Sesikala had pulled out all the stops. There was a massive, steaming pot of authentic Hyderabadi mutton biryani. Bowls of natukodi pulusu (spicy country chicken curry), gongura mamsam (sorrel leaf mutton), crispy fried fish, and three different types of homemade pickles were laid out across the long wooden table.
For the next hour, Siddanth was subjected to a coordinated, relentless feeding campaign orchestrated entirely by his mother and his girlfriend. Every time he managed to clear a section of his plate, Krithika would quietly slide another piece of chicken onto it, while Sesikala added more rice.
"I am physically going to burst," Siddanth groaned, leaning back in his chair, tapping his stomach.
"Eat the curd rice to cool your stomach," Sesikala ordered, completely unsympathetic to his plight.
The conversation around the table was blissfully domestic. They talked about the new irrigation pipes Vikram wanted to install and Ronny's ongoing war against the local squirrels in the backyard.
By 3:00 PM, Krithika checked her watch and let out a reluctant sigh.
"I have to head back," she said, standing up and smoothing her kurti.
Siddanth pulled his phone from his pocket. "I'll have Ramesh bring the SUV around,"
Siddanth walked her out to the porch where the sleek, black NEXUS corporate SUV was already idling.
"Get some sleep, Sid," Krithika said softly, turning to face him before she got into the car. She reached up and gently brushed a stray lock of hair from his forehead. "You look like you've been running on pure adrenaline for four months. Turn your phone off. Don't look at the news. Just rest."
"I will," Siddanth promised, leaning down to press a soft kiss to her cheek. "Call me when you get off work."
He watched the SUV drive down the long path and exit the main gates before turning back into the house. The massive, heavy meal, combined with the sheer, sudden absence of pressure, hit him like a physical tidal wave.
He limped up the wooden staircase to his bedroom. He didn't even bother unpacking the massive kitbags resting near his wardrobe. He simply stripped off his t-shirt, closed the heavy blackout curtains to plunge the room into absolute darkness, and collapsed face-first onto the cool, incredibly soft mattress of his king-sized bed.
Within sixty seconds, the Perfect Rhythm trait activated, pulling him down into a deep, dreamless, cellularly restorative sleep.
Siddanth woke up to the sound of absolute silence.
He rolled over, glancing at the digital clock on his nightstand. It was 7:45 PM. He had slept for nearly five solid hours. The dull, throbbing ache in his right ankle had subsided significantly, replaced by a manageable stiffness.
He sat up and stretched, feeling his spine pop in a satisfying sequence.
He picked up his phone. There were dozens of unread messages from BCCI officials, franchise managers, and various corporate heads. He ignored all of them. He had instructed Rahul, his executive assistant, to act as an impenetrable firewall for the next two weeks. Unless the servers at NEXUS were literally on fire, Siddanth was not to be disturbed.
He wanted a total, uncompromising break from the sport that had consumed his every waking moment since November.
Siddanth grabbed his laptop from his desk and carried it back to the bed. He propped himself up against the pillows and opened a dedicated, high-speed streaming application.
For the next three hours, the Vice-Captain of the Indian cricket team completely vanished. He loaded up One Piece, picking up the anime exactly where he had paused it on the flight back from Melbourne. He watched Luffy punch his way through adversaries, utterly captivated by the simple, straightforward narratives of animated pirates and ninjas. It was the perfect, mindless escapism.
Around 10:30 PM, a soft knock on his bedroom door broke his binge-watching session.
"Sid? Are you awake?" his mother's voice called out.
"Yeah, Amma. Come in," Siddanth replied, pausing the episode.
Sesikala walked in carrying a tray with a bowl of light, comforting dal, fresh rotis, and a glass of warm milk. "I didn't want to wake you earlier. You were sleeping so deeply. Eat this, it will be easy on your stomach after the heavy lunch."
"Thanks, Amma," Siddanth smiled, taking the tray.
She sat on the edge of the bed while he ate, running her hand affectionately through his hair. "It's good to have you home, ra. The house feels alive again."
"It's good to be home," he agreed softly.
After he finished eating and his mother left with the empty tray, Siddanth didn't return to his anime. A different kind of itch had begun to surface in his brain. The Perfect Rhythm trait had restored his physical energy, and his hyper-active mind needed an outlet that wasn't related to leather balls or corporate stock values.
He walked over to his desk and pulled out a highly advanced, proprietary digital drawing tablet he orderd rahul to bring for him when in Australia.
Siddanth sat down, booted up the tablet, and picked up the digital stylus.
Instantly, a warm, tingling sensation rushed from his visual cortex down through his right shoulder and into his fingertips. The Master-Level Sketching & Fine Arts trait merged seamlessly with the Eiji Niizuma Synchronization reward he had received after the World Cup.
The combination of the two traits was absolutely terrifying. He possessed flawless spatial reasoning, perfect shading capability, and the ability to visually map complex imagery. But more importantly, the Niizuma trait granted him limitless creative stamina and hyper-speed drafting capabilities.
His hand became a blur.
He wasn't sketching a simple portrait or a landscape. He was drafting something incredibly complex, something highly technical, but deeply artistic. The stylus danced across the digital canvas with inhuman speed, dropping perfect geometric lines, flawless architectural curves, and intricate shading without a single moment of hesitation or second-guessing.
"VEDA," Siddanth spoke quietly into the room, not breaking his focus from the tablet.
"Online and listening, Siddanth," the smooth, localized voice of his AGI responded from his desktop speakers.
"I need you to open a background compiling sequence," Siddanth instructed, his eyes darting across the screen as his hand moved rapidly. "I am pushing a new visual rendering engine to the private server. I want you to optimize the brush-stroke latency. The current predictive algorithm is lagging by four milliseconds when I apply heavy pressure to the stylus. It's disrupting the flow."
"Acknowledged. Analyzing the input vectors now," VEDA replied. A brief pause followed. "I have isolated the latency bottleneck in the pressure-sensitivity sub-routine. I am rewriting the localized predictive physics engine to anticipate your stroke trajectory based on your wrist angle."
"Good. Apply the patch," Siddanth murmured, continuing to draw.
He was building custom software, an advanced rendering program perfectly tailored to his superhuman drawing speed, while simultaneously drafting a highly secretive project on the canvas itself. He didn't want to think about cricket, but he loved creating.
He sketched and coded in a state of absolute, unbreakable flow late into the night.
For the next ten days, this became Siddanth's absolute, unwavering routine. The Fortress of Solitude protocol was fully engaged.
He refused to step out of the gates of the Shamshabad estate. While his teammates were slowly reporting to their respective IPL franchise camps across the country, Siddanth, protected by the medical mandate to rest his sprained ankle for four weeks, completely isolated himself.
He slept, he ate his mother's phenomenal cooking, he watched hours of anime, and he locked himself in his room to sketch and write code with VEDA.
However, the CEO of a multi-billion dollar tech empire couldn't entirely vanish.
On a Tuesday afternoon, Siddanth was sitting on the veranda, enjoying the peace, when his phone rang. It was Arjun.
Siddanth put the phone on speaker, resting it on the wooden table. "Tell me you aren't calling to drag me into a board meeting, Arjun."
"Relax, hermit. I'm keeping the corporate wolves at bay," Arjun's sharp, energized voice came through the speaker. "I'm just calling to give you the post-event analytics on the NEXUS Global Security Challenge. The hackathon officially concluded yesterday."
Siddanth leaned back in his chair, suddenly interested. "And? Did anyone breach the outer firewall?"
"Not even close," Arjun laughed, the sheer triumph evident in his voice. "We had over four thousand of the best cybersecurity teams, white-hat hackers, and university engineering departments from around the globe attacking the VEDA Operating System environment simultaneously for a week. They hit us with zero-day exploits, brute-force algorithms, and sophisticated phishing protocols. The bounty was sitting right there."
"And the root architecture held," Siddanth stated, though it wasn't a question. He knew his code.
"It didn't just hold, Sid, it actively mocked them," Arjun confirmed proudly. "The ghost protocols you created isolated and trapped the malware in sandbox environments before they could even locate the primary kernel. Nobody claimed the bounty. The media is going absolutely crazy. Wired and TechCrunch just published massive front-page articles calling the it the most secure digital environment ever created."
"That is exactly the narrative we needed," Siddanth nodded.
"It gets better," Arjun continued, shifting into rapid-fire business mode. "Because the hackathon proved our security is practically impenetrable, my phone hasn't stopped ringing. We are suddenly drowning in B2B enterprise contracts. Two major international banks and a European defense contractor have just formally requested licensing proposals to migrate their entire server infrastructures onto the NEXUS. The revenue projections for Q3 are going to be astronomical."
"Handle the contracts, Arjun. Just the security frameworks," Siddanth advised seamlessly. "And make sure the legal team locks down the patents on the localized predictive video codec we launched last month."
"Already on it," Arjun assured him. "By the way, the Apex smartphone launch during the hackathon keynote? A massive success. We've sold out the first three manufacturing runs. The supply chain is stressed, but holding. You just keep resting that ankle, Skip. I've got the empire running on autopilot."
"Thanks, Arjun. Let me know if anything catches fire," Siddanth said, ending the call.
He smiled, looking out over the mango orchards. It was a terrifying partnership. He provided the flawless, visionary technological architecture from his basement, and Arjun executed the global corporate domination from his boardroom.
While Siddanth successfully avoided the media and the corporate world, there was one person who possessed an unrestricted, all-access pass to his isolation.
Since Krithika commuted to her corporate job during the week, she reserved her weekends entirely for him. On Saturday mornings, she would arrive, instantly injecting energy back into the quiet farmhouse.
On the second weekend of his rest period, it was raining heavily in Hyderabad. The sound of water lashing against the glass windows of his bedroom created a cozy, insulated atmosphere.
Siddanth was sitting at his desk, deeply engrossed in his digital drawing tablet. The stylus was a blur of motion as he added complex, microscopic details to his secretive project. He hadn't heard the car pull up outside over the sound of the rain.
Suddenly, the heavy wooden door to his bedroom clicked open.
Siddanth's reflexes, honed by years of facing 150 kmph fast bowling, were instantaneous. Before Krithika had even fully stepped into the room, Siddanth's left hand blurred across the keyboard. With a perfectly timed, fluid keystroke, he instantly executed a pre-programmed macro.
The highly complex blueprints he was drafting vanished from the screen in a microsecond. They were seamlessly replaced by a completely mundane, generic rendering of an Excel spreadsheet tracking the farmhouse's seasonal mango yields. He simultaneously dropped the digital stylus and grabbed a wireless mouse, casually scrolling down the fake spreadsheet.
"Hey," Krithika said cheerfully, walking in carrying two mugs of hot coffee. She walked over and set a mug down on his desk, peering over his shoulder at the monitor. "Still working? I thought this was supposed to be a rest period."
Siddanth didn't flinch. His expression remained entirely composed, projecting an aura of bored, administrative fatigue. He executed the deception flawlessly.
"Just reviewing the agricultural logs with Nanna's farm manager," Siddanth lied smoothly, clicking on a random cell in the fake spreadsheet. "Boring stuff. The mango yield projections are slightly down for the next quarter due to unexpected rainfall."
Krithika peered closer at the screen, her corporate-trained eyes scanning the columns. The spreadsheet looked incredibly detailed, mathematically sound, and entirely plausible. She didn't suspect a thing.
"You really need to learn how to delegate, Sid," Krithika sighed, stepping back and handing him his coffee. "Arjun handles the tech empire, let your dad handle the mangoes. You are supposed to be recovering."
"I know, Shorty. I'm done for the morning," Siddanth smiled. "How was the rest of your week?"
"Brutal. I am officially tired of reading supply chain manifests," she groaned, collapsing onto a chair in the corner of his room.
Siddanth turned his chair around, a mischievous smirk forming on his face. He stood up, walked over to the massive flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, and picked up two PlayStation controllers.
"Mortal Kombat?" she asked, raising an eyebrow as he tossed a controller onto her lap.
"Prepare to lose," he warned.
For the next two hours, they engaged in a fierce, highly vocal digital war.
Siddanth played the game exactly as he played cricket. He was methodical, precise, and entirely focused on executing specific, high-damage combos he had memorized. He picked Sub-Zero, maintaining his distance, throwing ice projectiles to freeze her character, and waiting for her to make a mistake so he could punish her with a perfectly timed counter-attack.
Krithika, on the other hand, played with absolute, unadulterated chaos.
She had absolutely no strategy. She didn't know a single combo. She picked Scorpion, leaned forward, squinted at the screen, and simply began mashing every single button on the controller as fast and as aggressively as humanly possible, her thumbs an absolute blur.
"Krithi, you aren't even blocking!" Siddanth protested as her character suddenly unleashed a chaotic, completely unpredictable flurry of low kicks and high punches that somehow broke through his carefully constructed defensive block.
"I don't need to block! The buttons guide me!" she laughed frantically, furiously mashing the X, Triangle, and Circle buttons simultaneously. This randomly caused her character to teleport across the screen and hit Siddanth's character in the back of the head.
"That makes zero logical sense! You don't even know what move you just executed!" Siddanth argued, his brow furrowing in frustration as his health bar rapidly depleted. He tried to execute a complex, six-button freeze combo to regain control of the spacing.
But Krithika's relentless, arrhythmic button-mashing completely interrupted his animation sequence. As Siddanth tried to dash backward, Krithika accidentally squeezed both the L2 and R2 triggers simultaneously.
Her character immediately executed an unstoppable, cinematic X-Ray move that brutally crushed Sub-Zero's digital ribs.
"Oh wow, I broke your ribs!" Krithika cackled loudly, completely delighted by the gruesome animation. "Take that, Mama's Boy!"
"You didn't even mean to press those triggers!" Siddanth groaned, his health bar vanishing.
He was heavily invested. He unconsciously engaged his Predator's Focus trait to read the digital frames and anticipate her attack patterns.
But to his absolute horror, he realized there was no pattern.
He blocked high, expecting an overhead attack, but Krithika randomly mashed the low kick button four times in a row, sweeping his legs out. He tried to jump over a projectile, but she accidentally triggered a spear attack that caught him mid-air, initiating a brutal cinematic animation.
FATALITY.
The screen flashed red and black as her character brutally finished the match.
Krithika dropped her controller on her lap and threw her arms up in the air with a loud, triumphant cheer. "YES! Undisputed champion of the house! Flawless victory!"
Siddanth stared at the gruesome 'Game Over' screen, completely devoid of words.
He looked down at the controller in his hand, looked back at the screen, and let out a long, heavy, defeated sigh.
With a low grumble of pure annoyance, Siddanth tossed his controller onto the plush carpet. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest, sinking back into his gaming chair, absolutely refusing to look at her smug face.
"You didn't even know how you did that," Siddanth grumbled, sounding incredibly sulky for a twenty-three-year-old billionaire. "You can't read a pattern if the person playing has no idea what they are doing."
Krithika laughed loudly, walking over and wrapping her arms around his neck from behind, resting her chin on top of his head. "I know. But it's so much fun watching your brain crash."
The rain continued to fall outside, drumming heavily against the roof of the farmhouse.
Inside the bedroom, surrounded by the glow of the television and the sound of Krithika's laughter, Siddanth finally felt the last lingering threads of the World Cup pressure completely wash away. He was exactly where he needed to be.
The rest of the world could wait. Right now, he just desperately needed to figure out how to block Scorpion's teleport attack before she humiliated him for the fifth time in a row.
Later that evening, after the rain had stopped and the skies had cleared, Siddanth's driver took Krithika back to her home in Tarnaka.
The farmhouse settled back into its quiet, peaceful rhythm. Siddanth walked out onto the veranda. He leaned against the wooden pillar, looking out over the lawn toward the massive, professionally installed box-cricket turf net he had built for his own practice.
It was sitting completely empty.
A sudden thought crossed his mind. The IPL season was currently underway. While he was sidelined with his sprained ankle, missing the initial phase of the tournament for the Sunrisers, the rest of the cricketing world was busy playing.
He pulled his phone from his pocket, scrolling through his contacts until he found the name he was looking for. He hit the call button.
The phone rang twice before it was answered.
"Hello, Siddanth," Sachin Tendulkar's warm, familiar voice came through the speaker.
"Good evening, Paaji," Siddanth smiled respectfully. "I hope I'm not disturbing you. How is everything in Mumbai?"
"Everything is good, Sid. Just watching the IPL matches on TV," Sachin replied. "How is the ankle feeling?"
"It's healing well, Paaji. The swelling is down. I'll be back on the field for the Sunrisers in about ten days," Siddanth assured him. He paused for a brief second before getting to the reason for his call. "Paaji, the IPL has started. Why hasn't Arjun flown down to Hyderabad yet?"
There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.
"Sid, you are injured," Sachin explained, his voice carrying a gentle, protective fatherly tone. "You are rehabilitating. I know you promised to train him, but I wasn't going to send a teenager to bother you while you are trying to recover. Your health comes first."
Siddanth let out a soft chuckle. He had suspected that was the reason. The 'God of Cricket' was simply being too polite to impose on a recovering player.
"My rankle is resting, Paaji. My brain is perfectly fine," Siddanth stated, his tone firm but incredibly warm. "I don't need to run in and bowl to fix his wrist position. I can correct his delivery stride while sitting in a chair."
"Are you sure, Sid? I don't want to burden you," Sachin asked, though the hope in his voice was evident.
"Send him over, Paaji," Siddanth insisted. "The farmhouse is entirely too quiet anyway. Have him fly down tomorrow. We'll start working in the nets immediately."
Sachin let out a relieved laugh. "Thank you, Siddanth. Really. He has been begging me to let him go since the tournament started. I'll book his flight for tomorrow morning."
"Perfect. I'll have my driver pick him up from the airport," Siddanth said. "Goodnight, Paaji."
"Goodnight, Sid."
Siddanth ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket. He looked back out at the empty cricket net under the moonlight. The rest period was nice, but the master was ready to get back to teaching.
Tomorrow, the apprentice was arriving.