Carrying a girl's bag across the BSSS quad at 9:50 in the morning is basically the college equivalent of putting up a billboard on the MP Nagar highway.
Especially when the bag is a cream canvas tote with a little knitted sunflower keychain dangling off the zipper.
"You look very manly right now, bhai," Rohit said around a mouthful of bun-maska, walking two steps ahead of us and grinning like an absolute maniac. "Very domestic. Ten out of ten."
"Shut up and eat your bread," I muttered, shifting the strap of Meera's bag higher up my shoulder.
It wasn't even heavy—just a sketchbook, two registers, and a pen pouch—but it felt like it weighed fifty kilos because every single person between the main gate and the arts block was staring straight at it.
Conversations died down as we walked past. A group of second-year commerce guys sitting on the stone parapet literally stopped mid-laugh, their eyes tracking us like CCTV cameras.
Beside me, Meera was walking at an easy, unbothered pace, sipping the last of her iced drink through a straw.
"Your ears are red again," she said quietly, not even looking at me.
"They aren't."
"They look like tomatoes, Veer."
"Because fifty people are staring at us like we just escaped from a zoo!" I whispered back through my teeth. "Look at that guy near the notice board—he just took his headphones off to ask his friend who I am!"
Meera glanced over, completely unfazed. "Let him ask. By lunch, half the college will think you're some mysterious heartbreaker who keeps a low profile."
"Until they see me trip over my own shoelaces."
"Then don't trip." She bumped her shoulder lightly against mine. "Chin up, fake boyfriend. Twelve o'clock ahead."
I looked up toward the corridor stairs.
My stomach tightened instantly.
Standing right near the archway leading into the ground-floor hallway was Priya. She had her usual posse of four girls around her, plus Kabir—her gym-obsessed boyfriend—leaning against the pillar with his arms crossed over his tight black t-shirt.
They had been talking about something, but the second we stepped onto the paved walkway, one of Priya's friends tapped her elbow harshly.
Priya turned around.
Her eyes locked onto me first. Then they dropped to the sunflower tote bag hanging off my right shoulder. Then they shifted to Meera walking right beside me, so close our sleeves were brushing.
For a split second, Priya's face went completely blank. Then, slowly, her jaw tightened.
Two weeks ago, if I had walked past this group, I would have stared at my shoes, pulled my phone out to pretend I was reading a text, and taken the long way around the library just to avoid hearing Kabir snicker.
I almost looked down out of sheer habit.
Before I could, Meera's fingers brushed against the back of my wrist. She didn't grab my hand—just a light, barely-there touch—and leaned in close enough that her hair tickled my cheek.
"Tell me something funny," she whispered.
"What?" I blinked, looking down at her. "Right now?"
"Yes. Quick. Or just laugh like I said the funniest thing you've ever heard."
I looked at her deadpan face, thought about how utterly ridiculous my life had become since yesterday afternoon, and didn't even have to fake it. A genuine, slightly breathless laugh escaped my throat.
Meera smiled back, tilting her head up at me as we walked right past the pillar.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Priya stiffen. She hadn't expected me to ignore her. She definitely hadn't expected me to walk past laughing with Meera without sparing her a single glance.
Rohit, of course, had zero chill. As we passed Kabir, Rohit slowed down for half a second, gave Kabir a massive, obnoxious two-finger salute, and said loudly, "Morning, bro! Nice weather today, haan?"
Kabir's face twitched, his ears turning dark red, while Priya glared holes into the back of Meera's sweater.
Once we rounded the corner near the staircase and stepped out of earshot, I let out a shaky breath and started laughing again.
"Rohit, you're going to get us jumped outside the gate," I said.
"Let him try," Rohit snorted, tossing his crumpled paper wrapper into the dustbin. "Did you see his face? Guy looked like he swallowed a raw lemon. And Priya—bhai, I swear she was one second away from throwing her register at your head."
Meera held her hand out as we reached the door of Room 204. "Alright, hand it over. You survived your shift."
I slipped her tote bag off my shoulder and handed it back. Somehow, my shoulder felt weirdly light without it. "Do I get paid for this?"
"I bought you cutting chai."
"Rohit paid for the chai!"
"Details," she said, walking into the lecture hall ahead of us.
Room 204 was one of those old, high-ceilinged classrooms on the second floor with long wooden benches, tall arched windows looking out over the central courtyard, and four ancient ceiling fans that squeaked with every rotation.
Usually, the girls sat on the left row near the windows, and the guys piled into the back benches on the right.
I headed straight for my usual third-to-last bench, sliding in near the aisle. I expected Meera to head over to the front left row where a couple of girls from our batch were waving at her.
Instead, she walked right down the middle aisle, stopped at my bench, and looked at Rohit, who was about to sit next to me.
"Excuse me," she said politely.
Rohit froze, blinked twice, and then practically vaulted over the wooden backrest to sit on the bench behind us. "All yours, bhabhi ji! I didn't want to sit with this idiot anyway!"
"Rohit, don't call her that," I hissed, my face heating up as three guys across the aisle turned around to gawk.
Meera slid onto the wooden bench right beside me, setting her bag on the desk and pulling out a thick spiral notebook and a black gel pen.
"You know you didn't have to sit here, right?" I muttered under my breath, flipping open my own half-empty register. "We're in class. Nobody expects us to be glued together during Professor Tiwari's lecture."
"Those two guys in the second row were saving a seat for me," she replied quietly, nodding subtly toward two seniors-turned-repeaters who were currently glaring at the back of my head. "If I sat alone, they would've spent the whole hour asking me for notes. Sitting with you is much quieter."
"Quiet for you. Those guys look like they want to stab me with a compass."
"Don't worry. If you fall down the stairs, I'll catch you this time."
I bit the inside of my cheek to stop from smiling.
Just then, Professor Tiwari walked in, slapping his attendance folder onto the wooden podium. The chatter in the room died down into a low murmur of rustling pages and scraping chairs.
For the first forty minutes, everything was painfully, boringly normal.
Tiwari sir droned on about macroeconomic policy in his flat, monotone voice that could put an insomniac into a coma. Outside the tall arched windows, the morning sun was bright, reflecting off the whitewashed walls of the administrative block across the ground.
Near the end of the lecture, a shadow fell across my notebook.
Meera had pushed the corner of her spiral pad toward my side of the desk. Written in neat, slanted handwriting at the bottom margin were five words:
Are you always this quiet?
I glanced at her. She was looking straight ahead at the blackboard, resting her chin on her palm like a model student.
I clicked my pen and wrote underneath:
Only when I'm trying not to get murdered by the guys in row two.
She didn't look down immediately. When Tiwari sir turned back to the blackboard to wrap up the final points of his diagram, Meera glanced at the page, her lips twitching, and wrote back:
Coward. Tell me something real. Why did you actually help me that day in the canteen?
My pen hovered over the paper.
Look, any normal guy in BSSS would have jumped headfirst onto that floor just for a chance to say hi to her. Half the boys in the canteen had practically broken their necks trying to get there before me.
I clicked my pen and wrote underneath:
Because your heavy register landed straight on my left shoe, and you were blocking my way to the samosa counter.
I pushed the notebook back an inch.
Meera read it.
Her shoulders shook. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, trying so hard not to laugh out loud that her eyes actually watered. She quickly scribbled underneath:
So I came second to a ten-rupee samosa? Good to know where I stand.
"You're terrible," she whispered under her breath, nudging my elbow.
"Hey, those canteen samosas run out by 1:15," I whispered back. "It was a life-or-death situation."
Right then, the brass bell in the corridor outside rang out, signaling the end of the ten o'clock period.
A collective sigh of relief echoed across Room 204. Benches scraped back, bags unzipped, and students immediately pulled out their phones as Professor Tiwari snapped his attendance folder shut, gathered his chalk and duster, and walked out the front door toward the staff room.
With the lecture finally over, the classroom erupted into its usual between-period noise—people stretching, laughing, and heading toward the doors for a quick break.
"Bhai, thank God that's over," Rohit groaned from the bench behind us, leaning his elbows on our backrest. "One more minute of macroeconomics and my brain would've leaked out of my ears."
Meera was just zipping her pen back into her pouch to say something to me when the heavy wooden door of Room 204 banged wide open so hard the brass handle rattled against the wall.
Every conversation near the front died instantly.
Standing in the doorway was Kavya.
Behind me, Rohit let out a low, terrified whistle. "Oh, bhai. We are dead. Funeral is tomorrow."
I froze in my seat.
Kavya was my childhood friend—we'd grown up in the same colony since we were six years old, back when she used to beat up the neighborhood boys for stealing my cricket bat. Now, at nineteen, she was a state-level kickboxer and a total gym freak. She wore a fitted black cropped hoodie, high-waisted cargo pants, and a gym duffle slung over one toned shoulder. With her sharp jawline, high ponytail, and athletic, head-turning figure, half the guys in the sports department were terrified of her, and the other half were hopelessly in love with her.
Up until today, Kavya had never cared about who I talked to. She knew I was an awkward idiot who couldn't talk to girls, and after Priya rejected me, Kavya had pretty much gone back to treating me like her personal property—dragging me to carry her protein shakers and acting like I'd be single until I turned forty.
Except right now, her dark eyes were locked straight onto our bench like heat-seeking missiles.
She marched down the wooden steps of the aisle, pushing past a couple of guys who were trying to leave the room, and stopped right beside my desk.
"Veer," Kavya said, dropping her duffle bag onto the floor with a heavy thud.
"H-hey, Kavya," I stammered. "Didn't your period in the commerce block just end too?"
"Forget my period." She planted one hand flat on my desk, leaning in so close I could smell her mint chewing gum. She didn't even look at Rohit; her eyes flicked sharply from my face to Meera sitting inches away from me. "The second our lecture ended, some girl from my batch showed me a text saying you walked through the main gate carrying a transfer student's bag and telling everyone she's your girlfriend. Tell me right now—what kind of stupid prank are you pulling?"
The whole classroom was holding its breath. Nobody even bothered leaving for break anymore.
"It's not a prank, Kavya—" I started.
"Don't give me that crap, Vaqzy!" Kavya snapped, using my childhood nickname as her eyebrows pulled together. "I know you inside out! You've known me for thirteen years, you don't hide anything from me, and two days ago you wouldn't even leave your room! Now suddenly you're dating someone without even telling me?! Are you for real?!"
There was something sharp and raw underneath her anger—not just annoyance, but a sudden, fierce possessiveness, like someone had walked into her house and stolen something she'd assumed would always belong to her.
Beside me, Meera didn't flinch.
She looked at Kavya's hand on my desk, then up at Kavya's flushed face. Within two seconds, Meera's sharp intuition read the exact situation—she saw right through the "protective childhood friend" act and recognized the jealousy burning in Kavya's eyes.
Meera didn't get loud. Instead, she calmly closed her spiral notebook, slid her hand across the wooden bench, and laced her fingers tightly right through mine on top of the desk.
"He is for real," Meera said, her voice smooth, polite, and dangerously steady. She tilted her head up at Kavya with a soft, territorial smile. "I'm Meera. And yes, we're in a relationship. He probably didn't get the chance to tell you because it happened so recently."
Kavya stared down at our interlocked hands.
For three full seconds, nobody breathed.
A muscle feathered in Kavya's jaw. Her fingers curled into a tight fist against the wood of my desk, her knuckles turning white. I had seen that look on her face before—usually right before she knocked someone out in the sparring ring.
"A relationship," Kavya repeated, her voice dropping an octave as she glared straight back at Meera. "Really. Since when does Veer hold hands in the middle of a lecture hall?"
"Since he started dating me," Meera replied without blinking, tightening her grip on my fingers.
"Look, both of you, calm down—" I tried to pull my hand back before a war broke out in Room 204, but Meera held on like a vice, and Kavya stepped even closer, opening her mouth to snap back.
She never got the words out.
Because right at that exact second, the bright October sunlight pouring through the tall arched windows went out.
Not like a cloud passing over the sun.
It was as if someone had thrown a massive black curtain over the entire sky of Bhopal.
"What the—?" Kavya blinked, her head snapping toward the window.
Inside the dim classroom, the air suddenly turned freezing cold. My breath puffed out in a white mist right in front of my face.
BZZZZZZT!
Forty phones across the lecture hall vibrated at the exact same instant.
It wasn't a normal ringtone. It was a violent, ear-splitting static screech that echoed off the stone walls, loud enough to make people clap their hands over their ears.
"Arrey, what happened to the lights?!" someone yelled from the front row as the ceiling bulbs flickered purple and exploded in a shower of tiny sparks.
"Check your phone!" Rohit scrambled over the backrest of our bench, shoving his glowing screen into my face. "Bhai, look at this!"
My own phone was vibrating so hard in my pocket it felt like it was going to shatter. When I pulled it out with my free hand, the screen wasn't showing my wallpaper anymore. The battery icon was spinning wildly, the clock was glitching through weird, alien geometric symbols, and a blood-red warning box was flashing dead center without a single bar of network.
Then, the phones died. Every screen in the room went pitch black at once.
And in the suffocating silence that followed—
DONG.
A bell rang.
It didn't come from the college bell tower. It came from above—from the darkened, bruising violet sky itself, and at the exact same time, from somewhere deep inside our own skulls.
DONG.
The sound was ancient, heavy, and resonant, vibrating right through the marrow of my bones. Several students near the doors dropped to their knees, clutching their heads and groaning as the pressure in the room spiked tenfold.
"Veer!" Kavya's fierce demeanor cracked for the first time; she stumbled back half a step against my desk as the wooden floor beneath us began to tremble violently. "Veer, the ground—!"
I looked down.
The concrete floor of Room 204 was splitting apart—not into dust and rubble, but into rivers of blinding, liquid silver-blue light.
Outside the tall windows, the entire BSSS campus was glowing like a fallen star. Massive, interlocking rings of glowing runes—wider than the entire football ground—were spinning across the earth, and pillars of light were rising up the walls, locking the entire college inside a colossal, three-dimensional magic circle.
DONG.
On the third chime of the invisible bell, gravity vanished.
My stomach lurched violently as my sneakers lifted two inches off the floor.
Pens, notebooks, wooden chairs, and Kavya's heavy gym duffle floated upward into the freezing air. Around the room, students were screaming in blind panic, flailing helplessly as streams of glowing blue particles rose from the floor and began wrapping around their bodies like ribbons of light.
"VEER!" Rohit yelled, his feet kicking in mid-air as a vortex of silver light surged up from the floor tiles beneath him. "Bhai, my legs—I can't feel my legs!"
I reached out wildly with my left hand, trying to grab Rohit's jacket, only for my fingers to brush straight through a burst of blinding white sparks as Rohit's body dissolved into thousands of rising particles of light.
"Rohit!" I shouted.
"Veer, hold on!"
On my left, Kavya lunged forward, her hand clamping tightly onto my forearm just as my right hand remained locked with Meera's.
The glowing runes beneath our bench flared with the intensity of a thousand suns. A roaring wind tore through the room, smelling of ozone, old iron, and something ancient and wild. I felt a terrifying pulling sensation right behind my navel—like an invisible hook had latched onto my soul and was yanking me straight upward through a tunnel of shattered glass and starlight.
The walls of Room 204 dissolved. The screams of our classmates echoed and stretched, fading into a hollow, whistling roar as our bodies turned weightless, pulled limb by limb into the blinding white current of the magic circle.
I couldn't see. I couldn't breathe. All I knew was the crushing grip of Meera's fingers in my right hand, Kavya's nails digging into my left arm, and the endless, dizzying sensation of falling upward through an ocean of light.
And then—gravity slammed back into us all at once.
THUD!
I hit a hard, ice-cold floor on my knees, gasping for air as my lungs burned like fire.
All around me, dozens of bodies were groaning and coughing, sprawled across polished white marble tiles veined with gold. Rohit was face-down two feet to my right, clutching his head and groaning. Kavya was on one knee beside me, her hand still gripping my sleeve, her chest heaving as she stared around in stunned disbelief. And beside my right hand, Meera slowly pushed herself up, her dark hair spilling over her shoulders.
We weren't in Room 204 anymore. We weren't even in Bhopal.
The air here was thick, cool, and smelled faintly of incense and cold stone. Massive pillars of carved white marble, thicker than banyan trees and inlaid with glowing gold filigree, stretched up toward a vaulted ceiling so high it looked like an indoor sky. Dozens of bewildered BSSS students were scattered across the grand hall, crying, trembling, and clutching their useless phones.
And then, the heavy silence at the front of the hall made everyone freeze.
Slowly, I lifted my head and looked forward, up a wide flight of crimson-carpeted marble steps.
There, atop the dais, stood a towering, ornate throne forged of solid gold and deep blood-red velvet.
Sitting upon it was a woman who didn't look like she belonged to the human race.
She had cascading hair of pure, spun gold, topped with a tilted, sharp-peaked golden crown that gleamed under the hall's crystal chandeliers. A dark royal mantle trimmed with thick white fur rested over her shoulders, a heavy golden medallion glinting against her chest.
She wasn't standing to greet us. Instead, she was leaning lazily to one side against the golden armrest, her right elbow propped up, resting her pale, flawless cheek lightly in the palm of her hand. Her legs were casually crossed at the knee, one booted foot dangling slightly in mid-air, as if the sudden arrival of a hundred terrified humans from another world was barely worth shifting her posture for.
Her piercing eyes—cold, ancient, and impossibly regal—drifted slowly across the trembling crowd on the floor below, before stopping dead center.
Right on me.. ? BUTWHY?????
Author's Note
Hey guys!
As promised, here is Chapter 12—and the real story of BSSS has officially begun! Not only did Kavya just crash the party, but our entire college group just got pulled straight into another world.
Writing this chapter honestly helped me get through a really tough few days. Keeping my head in Veer, Meera, Kavya, and Rohit's story is keeping me grounded while my family deals with everything Thank you again for all your kind comments and messages on the last chapter—I read every single one of them.
Drop a comment and tell me: Team Meera or Team Kavya? And who do you think that golden-haired Queen on the throne is?