Epic Fail - Page 11

Chapter 7: The Great Unravelling

They won’t tell you this in the sanitised versions—the pixel-cleaned epics, the Insta-worthy reels where blood is a metaphor and death is a poetic fade-out. No, darling, the end was none of that. The end was wet. The end was loud. The end was so real it felt fake. I sat through it all, the broken-faced step-sister of a crumbling empire, and let me tell you: it reeked.

 

First to jump ship? Vibhi. My brother. The moral thermometer of Lank.OS. The one who folded his hands, adjusted his imaginary halo, and said to Ravn, ‘This isn’t right. Let’s return S-Ita. Let’s not wage war over stolen affection.’

 

I laughed. I actually laughed out loud when I heard. Vibhi, sweet child, you were never moral. You were lonely. And you thought the golden boys on the other side would hold you better than we ever did. So he defected. With the fanfare of a man who thinks history will be kind to him. Spoiler: it won’t.

 

Then came the war proper. Oh gods, the war. You couldn’t walk ten steps without your foot sinking into something soft and human. Fur, flesh, splintered bones—it was all one sticky broth of death. The Ram.exe army—clean, grinning, their eyes too bright, their weapons too sharp—descended on us like they’d been programmed for this since birth. And standing at the heart of it, my nephew, my golden boy—Meghnad.

 

They called him Indrajit in the old war files because once, long ago, he’d done the unthinkable: dropped the so-called King of the Heavens. But here? Here titles meant nothing. Here, all that counted was whose blood hit the dirt first.

 

I saw him ride—Meghnad—his body streaked with ash, his mouth set like iron. He wasn’t scared. He wasn’t shaken. He was incandescent. The air around him shimmered with heat and exhaustion and fury. He took down the first wave like he was slicing through paper dolls. The monkeys fell. The giants of their army crumpled. Even the smug digital twin of a god—LX-One—hit the ground, breathless, broken. Meghnad’s Shakti Astra—his ultimate code—ripped through the air and felled him.

 

For one delicious moment, the battlefield froze. I remember the taste of it—copper on my tongue, hope in my chest. But the universe? The universe doesn’t let people like us win.

 

They brought the Flying Mountain.

 

Don’t laugh. I’m not joking. They actually flew a mountain. Some blessed monkey—probably cursed with eternal optimism—lifted an entire piece of earth, soared through burning skies, and dropped the cure like a cosmic prank. LX-One blinked. Sat up. Smiled.

 

Meghnad’s fate was sealed.

 

The duel that followed—I can barely speak of it without the acid rising in my throat. He fought. He fought like stars collapsing. He burned brighter than any of them. But Ram.exe—the untouchable avatar—and his resurrected sidekick had the weight of the script on their side. The ending was already written.

 

They cut him down. Not cleanly. Not heroically. It was ugly. His blood splattered across the dust. His breath rattled out of his chest like a broken wind-up toy. His eyes—those beautiful, dark eyes—didn’t close. Even as he fell, he stared upwards. As if trying to remember what sky looked like before wars. His body—my boy’s perfect, bloodied body—was left to burn. Because that’s what they do to threats. They turn them to ash.

 

I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I just... sat. Tracing the line of my scar. Counting my breaths. And knowing the next horror was already waiting.

 

And so came Kumbh-K.exe.

 

They dragged him out of sleep. They woke him. My brother. My gentle, monstrous, soft-spoken titan. He didn’t want this. He never wanted this. But love makes you stupid. Family makes you suicidal.

 

I watched them dress him in metal he couldn’t carry, push weapons into hands built for feasting, for laughter, not slaughter. He marched because they told him to. Because loyalty is a disease.

 

When he stepped onto the field, the ground actually shook. The enemy froze. Even the coded heroes hesitated. For a heartbeat, we had our last hope.

 

And then they destroyed him.

 

Not immediately. No. They chipped away. Wound by wound. Arrow by arrow. Until even he—the unstoppable, the immovable—began to fall.

 

I felt something inside me snap when he hit the earth. The sound it made—oh gods, the sound—it was like bones breaking inside my skull. They say the earth remembers the footprints of giants. I wonder if it remembers when they die.

 

Kumbh-K.exe was too kind for this world. He was too soft. The kind of softness the universe eats alive.

 

And all around us? Fire. Walls collapsing. Soldiers screaming. The air tasted like metal and old death. And Ravn—he still stood. Or rather, he still wobbled. His ten heads—those public relations filters he wore like crowns—were cracking. Dimming. Glitching out. One by one. Until only his real face—small, terrified, human—remained.

 

And across the charred ocean, the Ram.exe army marched on. Polished. Untouched. Unbothered. They never flinched. Not once. Even as bodies stacked higher than the walls of Lank.OS, they smiled.

 

I sat in the ruins. Scarred, forgotten, half-mad. And I whispered, ‘Let them fight. Let them burn. I am done.’

 

Because in the end, there’s no justice. No right side. No victory. Only bodies. Only ash. Only the same dying song played on infinite loop.