The Uprising Before the Drop
August 6, 20103:15 PM
Aritra's Private Villa, Jadavpur, Kolkata
The shouting faces on screen blurred into static. Their mouths opened and closed, their fingers jabbed at invisible enemies, and their slogans tumbled over each other until they became meaningless.
Aritra leaned back in his chair, the wide teak armrests cool against his forearms. His villa was silent except for the faint ripple of Dakhuria Lake beyond the balcony, the water stained gold under a soft afternoon sun. It was the only movement that felt real.
The screen showed men who had never played a game in their lives — young men, sent out in small packs to torch Nova store banners, to smash glass with borrowed bricks, to chant lines they hadn't written. In Patna, the local Nova Experience Store stood with its glass façade webbed with cracks, the glowing WarFall: Dominion logo flickering behind a haze of smoke from a half-burned cardboard cutout of PhantomRift.
In Lucknow, they had been slightly more creative — dumping old, broken CRT televisions into the street, claiming "digital pollution" was corrupting India's youth. By the time the media vans arrived, half the televisions were still showing saas-bahu serials.
The panel debate running on Global24x7 had already devolved into layered shouting — a retired colonel, face red and glistening, railing about how gaming addiction was a moral cancer, while a youth psychologist tried, pointlessly, to explain that video games weren't the problem.
The third panelist, a spokesman for Rashtradhwaj's youth wing, leaned into the chaos, his voice perfectly modulated for national television. "Our children are being trained to fight imaginary wars instead of contributing to the nation. This game, this WarFall, is not just entertainment — it is social engineering designed to weaken our culture, to dismantle our values."
Aritra muted the screen.
It was the same script he'd seen in China, in South Korea, even in Brazil — only the language changed. When something too popular, too uncontrollable, too organic emerged, they always called it a cultural threat. And when that failed, they called it an addiction. When that failed, they sent boys into the streets to break glass and pose for cameras.
None of it mattered.
His fingers hovered over the polished glass of his Nova Prime, triggering the hidden command sequence only he knew. In the top corner, a small, nearly invisible icon appeared — Lumen, Aritra's silent shadow, the watcher no one else knew existed.
Data filled the screen.
The protests were seeded three days earlier — funds transferred through a cutout NGO, masked as "youth outreach for cultural preservation." The funds originated from Shiv Samriddhi Sangathan, the cultural arm of Rashtradhwaj Party. That wasn't surprising. They had been circling BVM's political victories like vultures, looking for weak spots. WarFall was perfect — an easy symbol to vilify without needing to understand it.
But Lumen never stopped at the first layer.
Beneath the domestic noise, it had already flagged the deeper threads — a media consultancy in Singapore, Talon Global Communications, had sent identical "cultural threat assessment memos" to regional broadcasters in India, Malaysia, and Thailand. Talon Global wasn't real, not really. Its funding line traced back to Xyrell Technologies, a Beijing-based giant whose entire consumer hardware business had been gutted when Nova devices crushed Chinese phone exports across Southeast Asia.
This wasn't a protest.
This was a coordinated asset freeze, dressed up in street-level outrage.
The footage cut to Bhopal, where a trio of teenage boys in school uniforms were being interviewed after hurling stones at a Nova billboard. None of them could name a single map in WarFall. One of them admitted — on live television — that he didn't even own a phone.
The anchors didn't care.
They had their clip.
Aritra's thumb rested lightly on the corner of the screen, where Lumen's heatmap of online sentiment pulsed in real-time. For every news channel framing WarFall as digital heroin, there were fifty thousand Omnilink comments, meme chains, and clip compilations flooding back up the pipeline.
#MyGameMyPride#WarriorsNotAddicts#AshuraSyndicateForever
The protests weren't stopping anyone.
They were marking the players, making them defiant instead of embarrassed. Every sign that called them addicts was a reminder that, for the first time, the biggest game in the world wasn't American, Japanese, or Korean.
It was theirs.
On a second feed, a drone camera tracked the Bengaluru counter-protest — nearly three hundred students, all of them holding signs in English, Hindi, and Kannada. Gamers Are Not Criminals. Games Are Not Drugs. From the edge of the crowd, someone had dragged out a speaker, blasting WarFall's main theme, and the chant rose in sync with the beat.
The local news crew covering it clearly hadn't expected the counter-wave. They were awkward, unsure whether to cover it like a protest against the protests or ignore it entirely.
That was always the mistake.
They thought this was about a game.
They didn't understand that games had already stopped being games years ago.
Aritra leaned back again, letting the lake air fill his lungs. The sun was setting low, half-hidden behind a curtain of clouds, casting the lake in streaks of gold and shadow.
There were no calls to make.
Ishita would be coordinating BVM's media response — careful, polished, designed to frame BVM as defenders of youth choice without ever tying them too directly to the game. Aditya would handle the political side — calling out the vandalism, demanding accountability, but never naming the Rashtradhwaj Party directly.
They would do their jobs.
Aritra's job was simpler.
He watched.
He listened.
He already knew how this story ended.
The protests would burn out. The panels would scream themselves hoarse. And on August 10th, when 400 players dropped onto Emberfall Ridge in front of the largest audience in human history, no one would remember which politician called them addicts.
They would only remember who won.
A ripple crossed Dakhuria Lake, disturbing the perfect surface, sending slow waves rolling toward shore.
Aritra didn't look up.
The game had already begun.
The American media didn't quite know how to frame him.
Rabin Halder — CEO of Aegis Gaming — had the look of a new-age success story, the kind that Western media loved when they needed a face for India's tech boom.
On CNBC, his image floated beside a Bengal map, his bio condensed into friendly bullet points — Jadavpur University graduate, indie game developer turned CEO, visionary behind WarFall: Dominion.
The anchor's smile was warm, but slightly patronizing. "So this is the man shaking up the entire global gaming industry?"
The tech analyst across from her nodded, fingers laced. "He's young, he's ambitious, and above all — he's not part of the old Indian corporate elite. That's what makes him dangerous. He doesn't owe anyone anything."
The segment cut to clips of Rabin's public appearances — interviews where he smiled easily, switching between fluent English and effortless Bengali, cracking jokes about how his parents still didn't fully understand what he did, talking about growing up near Jadavpur, gaming with his college friends, and building something that put India on the global map.
Every word had been scripted by Ishita.
Every smile timed by Aritra.
In Beijing, they didn't see the warmth.
In the polished boardroom, the head of China's Technology and Cultural Security Division flipped through Lumen-tracked intelligence reports on Rabin Halder, assuming they were his own.
"Any vulnerabilities?" the official asked, not looking up.
His aide paused. "None immediately visible. No political affiliations, no financial irregularities, no past scandals. Married once, divorced quietly. No children."
The senior man tapped the file's cover. "What about personal ambitions?"
"He appears patriotic," the aide said. "Speaks openly about Indian pride and the importance of local innovation. But…" The aide hesitated.
"But what?"
"There's… a gap," the aide admitted. "Before Aegis Gaming, there's almost nothing. A few minor development credits in small mobile studios, but no clear funding source for Aegis's initial growth. It's like the company appeared fully formed."
The senior official's fingers drummed the table. "Hidden backers?"
"Possible," the aide admitted. "But if there are, they're better hidden than anything we've seen."
The senior official closed the file.
"Find him. Study him. Every man has a price."
The Chinese state was preparing for a negotiation that would never come.
They were trying to buy control from a puppet who didn't even have the strings in his hands.
In Riyadh, Prince Fahad bin Khalid Al Saud stood in his private study, watching Rabin's latest interview play on a muted screen. The Bengali tech prodigy, as the global press had dubbed him, sat with a casual ease that most corporate leaders spent years cultivating.
The prince watched him speak about India's rise in gaming, about how WarFall belonged to the players, about his dream of building a global esports ecosystem rooted in South Asia.
None of it was Rabin's dream.
But the prince didn't know that.
A draft invitation already sat on the prince's desk — a formal request, inviting Rabin Halder to Riyadh for private talks after the Finals. Full diplomatic honors, five-star accommodation, private security. A soft pitch, followed by a hard offer.
"Bring the Finals here," the prince murmured to himself. "Bring everything here."
He signed the invitation.
The man who would receive it — Rabin Halder — would accept, smile, pose for photos, and drink Saudi coffee.
And the man who would read every word of the prince's follow-up negotiation — Aritra Naskar, invisible and untouchable — would never have to step into the light.
In the skies over Mumbai, more international delegations were already descending — envoys from Riyadh, corporate spies from Beijing, and American investment groups hungry for a slice of the ecosystem they couldn't control.
They were all preparing to court Rabin Halder.
None of them knew they were talking to a shadow.
And the shadow was watching them all.