Rudra turned and felt something loosen in his chest.
Real heroes. Five of them, cutting through the crowd with the kind of authority that didn't need to announce itself — people simply moved. They wore dark tactical gear with a small emblem on the shoulder, and they moved the way people move when arriving at a dangerous situation is just part of the job. No hesitation. No looking around. Already assessing as they walked.
The one at the front was clearly the leader. Older than the others, with the kind of composed, unhurried face that comes from having seen enough of these situations that very little surprises him anymore. He came directly to Rudra, looked him over once — taking in the broken mask, the damaged ribs, the blood on his face — and put a hand on his shoulder.
"You did good work, kid," he said. "You can rest now. Leave that thing to us."
Rudra said nothing. He was too tired to argue and too stubborn to sit down, so he stayed exactly where he was and watched.
The five of them moved toward Aagni together, spreading as they walked to approach from multiple angles simultaneously. Aagni watched them come with the same patient attention he had given everything else tonight — the slight tilt of the head, the pale eyes moving from one to the next, measuring.
The leader stopped about fifteen metres out. He reached to his side and drew a sword — a compact blade, not unusual in itself. He extended his arm, pointing the tip directly at Aagni. Then the blade began to grow.
It happened fast. The metal extended outward from the tip with a sound like a high-pitched hum, lengthening and narrowing as it went, covering the distance between them in less than a second. The point drove directly into Aagni's chest.
And stopped.
The blade bent slightly at the point of contact, the force of the extension pushing against the scales and finding no way through. Aagni looked down at the tip pressed against him, then at the leader holding the other end, with an expression that managed to communicate mild disappointment without involving any particular emotion.
He reached up and pushed the blade aside with one hand.
But it had done its job. His attention had been on the sword for the two seconds it took the other four to close the remaining distance.
The biggest of them — a man who looked like he had been built specifically for hitting things very hard — drove a straight punch directly into Aagni's face. No technique, no combination. Just maximum force applied in the most direct line available.
Aagni's head moved. Not far. But it moved.
He caught himself, turned, and threw a counter punch that caught the hero across the jaw and sent him sliding back several metres across the wet road. The hero shook it off and came forward again, because that was apparently what he was going to keep doing until told otherwise.
---
Arjun came down from the building while the exchange was happening.
He landed at street level and found Rudra standing at the edge of the cleared space, watching. Arjun looked at the fight — the five professionals working around Aagni in coordinated rotation, each one testing a different angle, none of them breaking through — and then looked at the two broken daggers in his hand, the remains of the rifle he'd left on the rooftop, and the general state of both of them after a night that had started at 4 AM and shown no signs of being merciful.
He walked over to Rudra and sat down on the kerb.
"I think that's enough for us," he said. "The professionals can handle the rest. We should be thinking about going home."
Rudra stayed standing for a moment, watching the fight. Then he sat down next to Arjun.
"You're right," he said. "But I want to see how this ends."
Arjun looked at him sideways. Then he looked back at the fight.
"Fair enough," he said.
They sat there together on the kerb in the middle of a street that was still half-blocked by news vans and crowd barriers and the wreckage of the car they had come through a window onto, watching five professional heroes attempt to do what the two of them had been attempting to do since midnight, and finding the results largely similar.
---
The team's coordination was real. There was no question about that.
They worked around Aagni in a rotation that kept him turning, kept his attention pulled in multiple directions at once, never let him fully settle into responding to one person before the next one was already engaging. The leader directed it from the outside — a word here, a gesture there, repositioning people with the efficiency of someone who has run this kind of unit for years.
Aagni was having a harder time than he had with Rudra and Arjun alone. The coordination was better, the power behind some of the strikes genuinely significant. He was blocking more, moving more, spending more effort to manage the space around him.
But they could not hurt him. No matter what angle they hit from, no matter how much force was behind it, the scaled skin gave nothing. Every punch, every kick, every strike that would have ended a fight against anything else simply registered and was absorbed. The wound on his stomach was being watched for — but Aagni knew that now, kept his arm low on that side, made every approach to it costly.
He was managing. Clearly. And everyone watching could see it.
The leader called a repositioning. The five of them pulled back briefly, tightening their formation, and in the pause Aagni straightened and rolled his shoulders — a small gesture, but one that communicated something clearly.
He wasn't tired.
Then the first drop of rain hit the ground.
Then a second. A third.
And within the space of a few seconds the sky opened up entirely — not a gradual building of drizzle but a sudden, total downpour, the kind that hits all at once and makes the air itself feel different. Heavy, cold, soaking through everything in moments. The street went dark with water. The crowd surged backward, people scattering for shelter, umbrellas appearing from nowhere, camera operators cursing and pulling covers over equipment.
Rudra felt it hit his face. He didn't move.
On the road ahead of them, the flame on Aagni's back began to flicker.
It was small at first — a stuttering, a reduction in the steady even burn that had been running across his scales since the transformation began. Then the patches started going out. Section by section, the fire retreating as the rain came down, dying in small areas that widened and connected with each other until the process had a momentum of its own.
The fear reached Aagni's face before the fire was fully gone.
It was the first time all night — across all of it, through everything — that his expression had contained anything that could be read as fear. Not the recalibration of the window moment, not the acknowledgment of the wound. Fear. Real and visible, however briefly, in the eyes of a creature that had not shown it to anyone.
Then the last of the flame went out.
One of the heroes — not the leader, not the biggest one, just one of them, reacting on instinct to the change — stepped forward and drove a punch directly into Aagni's face.
Aagni's head snapped back. His body followed it, stumbling sideways, one hand going to the ground to catch himself.
And when he straightened, there was blood on his lip.
Dark, real, unmistakable blood.
The street went briefly quiet despite the rain. Rudra stared from the kerb. Arjun sat completely still beside him. Even the crowd, pressed back to the edges of the space, seemed to hold a collective breath for one second.
Aagni had bled.
The leader let out a short, sharp laugh — not mocking, not triumphant, but the involuntary sound of a man who has just watched something genuinely surprising happen.
"There it is," he said. "That was your secret." He looked at Aagni with the steady attention of someone recalculating an entire approach in real time. "Looks like God is on our side."
Aagni straightened to his full height. He raised one hand and touched his lip. He looked at the blood on his fingers with an expression that moved through several things quickly and settled on something cold and concentrated.
He looked at the leader.
"Don't underestimate me," he said, "just because my flame is gone."
His voice had not changed. The flat, unhurried register was still there, still the same. But underneath it now, beneath the surface of that controlled delivery, was something that had not been there before the rain.
The fight had just changed.
And everyone standing in that street — heroes, crowd, the two exhausted people sitting on the kerb — knew it.