Mahabharat: Shiva's Last Variable

(A/N):

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The centre of Malikavana had transformed into an arena.

Neither swords... Nor spears...

Nor Astras were being used.

Only two warriors...

Locked in Malla-Yuddha, the ancient art of wrestling.

But unlike the opening exchange...

The flow of the battle had completely changed.

Devaratha no longer sought to overpower Pushpasura with a single decisive throw.

Nor was he searching for a killing blow.

His objective had become something entirely different.

Every movement... Every hold... Every lock...

Every throw...

Had only one purpose.

Pain.

Pushpasura lunged forward with both arms spread wide, intending to seize Devaratha around the waist.

The moment their bodies collided, Devaratha felt the familiar surge of overwhelming physical strength.

Yet instead of resisting it directly...

He moved with it.

His body rotated beneath Pushpasura’s shoulder, slipping behind him in one fluid motion.

His right arm trapped Pushpasura’s elbow.

His left hand clamped firmly around the wrist.

Then...

He twisted.

CRAAACK!!

The sound of bones snapping echoed across the battlefield.

"AAAAAAARGHHHHH!!"

Pushpasura’s roar shook the plains.

His entire arm bent backwards at an impossible angle before hanging limply by his side.

The Rakshasa King’s face twisted in agony.

His regeneration immediately activated.

Bones slid back into place.

Torn muscles knitted together.

Within seconds...

The arm was whole again.

Pushpasura barely had time to breathe.

Devaratha was already upon him.

A low sweep took away his footing.

The moment Pushpasura hit the ground...

Devaratha trapped one leg beneath his own.

He clasped the ankle with both hands.

Then violently rotated his hips.

KRAAAK!!

The knee exploded sideways.

"AARRRGHHHHHH!!"

Another scream echoed through Malikavana.

The leg twisted unnaturally before the regeneration forced it back into its proper position.

Pushpasura rolled away, instantly regaining his footing.

His breathing had become heavier.

Not because he was injured.

But because...

Every regeneration forced him to experience the injury before erasing it.

His entire nervous system screamed each time.

Again.

Pushpasura charged.

Again.

Devaratha met him head-on.

This time their foreheads collided.

Pushpasura attempted to overpower him through brute force.

Instead...

Devaratha suddenly shifted his weight.

His forearm slid beneath Pushpasura’s chin.

His other hand locked behind the Rakshasa King’s skull.

A sharp twist.

CRRRAAACK!!

The sound travelled unnaturally far.

Pushpasura’s neck snapped violently to one side.

His body collapsed for the briefest instant.

"RRRAAAAAAHHH!!"

Another scream.

Another instant of regeneration.

His head slowly straightened with sickening cracks before he immediately stood again.

The watching Rakshasas could scarcely believe what they were witnessing.

"This..."

One general whispered.

"...isn’t wrestling anymore."

Another swallowed nervously.

"No... He isn’t trying to pin our King."

"He isn’t trying to defeat him."

"He’s..."

The general couldn’t finish.

Because another scream interrupted him.

CRACK!

A shoulder dislocated.

CRUNCH!

Three fingers shattered.

KRAAAK!!

An elbow bent backwards.

Every time Pushpasura regenerated...

Devaratha was already searching for another joint.

Another nerve. Another lock. Another hold.

He fought with terrifying precision.

Not wasting movement. Not wasting energy.

Every attack was directed towards the places that produced the greatest agony while remaining impossible to ignore.

The battlefield became haunted by a sound few had ever imagined hearing.

Pushpasura’s screams.

Again. And again. And again.

The Rakshasa King’s voice echoed from one end of Malikavana to the other.

Even warriors engaged in battle instinctively stopped fighting for brief moments.

Both armies turned their heads toward the centre.

The sound chilled them.

The allied soldiers had grown accustomed to Pushpasura’s arrogant laughter.

Today...

Only cries of pain remained.

Pushpasura staggered backwards.

His chest rose violently.

His regeneration continued repairing every injury almost instantly.

Yet something was different.

His movements had become rougher.

His breathing was uneven.

His expression no longer carried only rage.

There was frustration.

Confusion. Even fear.

’Why... Why does it hurt this much?’

Every regeneration should have removed the injury.

Instead...

The pain seemed to linger.

No...

It was becoming worse.

His entire body felt strangely sensitive.

Every broken bone. Every torn ligament.

Every twisted joint.

The pain exploded through his nerves before the regeneration erased the physical damage.

But the sensation itself...

Remained vividly imprinted upon his mind.

Far away...

Parashurama watched silently.

"...."

A faint smile crossed his face.

"That’s the way to go."

Hanuman, standing beside him, looked towards the immortal sage.

"You already knew. Before you gave him your advice yesterday right?"

Parashurama nodded slowly.

"Pushpasura’s blessing has become his burden."

Hanuman looked back towards the battlefield.

Parashurama continued quietly.

"His body grows stronger every day."

"But to sustain that growth... His flesh... His muscles... His bones... His nerves..."

"They are constantly being remade."

"There is no true rest."

"No complete recovery."

"The more his body evolves... the more sensitive it becomes to disruption."

Hanuman’s eyes widened slightly.

"So every time Devaratha breaks a joint..."

Parashurama finished the thought.

"...Pushpasura experiences pain greater than the previous day."

"He regenerates."

"But regeneration cannot erase the suffering that comes before it."

He folded his arms.

"Strength alone cannot win every battle."

"There are enemies whose bodies cannot be destroyed."

"In such cases... The battlefield shifts."

"It is no longer a contest of flesh."

His ancient eyes settled upon Devaratha.

"It becomes a contest of will."

At the centre of the battlefield...

Devaratha calmly raised his guard once more.

His breathing remained controlled despite the relentless struggle.

He no longer looked for victory.

Victory would come later.

Today...

He was patiently striking at something far more fragile than bone.

The resolve hidden beneath Pushpasura’s monstrous body.

For even the strongest mountain...

Could one day crack...

If the same hammer found the same fault...

Again... And again... And again.

The days passed like grains of sand slipping through an hourglass.

The twenty-seventh day...

Then the twenty-eighth... The thirtieth... The thirty-fifth... The fortieth...

Every sunrise began with the deafening cry of conches.

Every sunset ended with smoke rising from countless funeral pyres.

The war itself had settled into a terrifying rhythm.

Bhagavan Parashurama continued to tear through the Rakshasa legions wherever resistance grew strongest.

Entire battalions broke apart the moment the immortal sage entered the battlefield.

On the eastern front,

Karna and Shakuni had become a combination the Rakshasas dreaded.

Shakuni directed the ground forces with calculated precision while Karna’s arrows descended from impossible angles, preventing every attempt to surround the allied army.

Elsewhere, Ashwatthama’s strategies steadily tightened the allied formations, slowly reclaiming territory that had once belonged to the Rakshasas.

Little by little...

The battlefield tilted towards Dharma.

But none of that compared to what unfolded every day at the centre of Malikavana.

From the twenty-sixth day onward...

The duel between Devaratha and Pushpasura had changed completely.

There were no more contests of elegant swordsmanship.

No spectacular exchanges of Astras.

No attempts to overwhelm one another through brute force alone.

Instead...

Every morning, after exchanging only a few blows with their weapons, both warriors would silently cast them aside.

The battlefield already knew what came next.

Malla-Yuddha.

A wrestling match.

The surrounding soldiers no longer questioned it.

They simply stepped backwards, creating the enormous circle that had become sacred ground for the duel.

And then...

The suffering would begin.

Pushpasura charged with the force of a raging elephant.

Devaratha received him calmly.

A twist.

A shoulder lock.

CRAAACK!

An elbow shattered.

The Rakshasa King’s roar echoed across the battlefield.

Before his arm had completely regenerated...

Devaratha had already moved behind him.

A sweep. A fall.

A crushing hold.

KRAAAK!!

A knee exploded sideways.

Again... A scream. Again...

Regeneration.

Again... Another lock.

Every day... Without exception.

Some days Devaratha broke his wrist so many times that even the allied soldiers stopped counting.

Other days... It was his shoulders.

His ankles. His ribs.

Sometimes Devaratha trapped Pushpasura’s fingers one by one, bending them backwards until every joint snapped before calmly stepping away and allowing the regeneration to restore them.

Occasionally...

He twisted Pushpasura’s neck so violently that the Rakshasa King’s body collapsed lifelessly for a brief instant before the regeneration restored it.

Every injury disappeared.

Every scream remained.

The cries of Pushpasura became as familiar as the sound of the war conches.

They echoed across Malikavana from sunrise until sunset.

Even newly arrived soldiers quickly learned to recognise them.

"He’s fighting the King again... Pushpasura has started screaming."

Neither army laughed anymore.

The spectacle had stopped being entertaining weeks ago.

It had become unsettling.

Watching someone endure the same agony hundreds...

Then thousands...

Of times slowly wore upon everyone witnessing it.

Inside Pushpasura...

Something far more dangerous than physical exhaustion had begun taking root.

At first...

He had endured through hatred.

Then through pride.

Then through sheer stubbornness.

Now...

Every morning he found himself dreading one thing.

Not Devaratha’s sword. Not his strength.

His hands.

Those calm, relentless hands.

Hands that always seemed to know exactly where to seize.

Exactly where to twist.

Exactly where pain lived.

Every time Devaratha stepped closer...

Pushpasura’s body instinctively tensed before his mind even realised why.

His muscles remembered.

His nerves remembered.

His bones remembered.

The regeneration restored his body...

But it could not erase memory.

By the forty-fifth day...

Even the Rakshasa commanders noticed it.

"My King..."

One general whispered after sunset.

"...his movements... They’ve become hesitant."

Another quietly nodded.

"He no longer charges first."

"He waits."

"He watches Devaratha’s hands."

No one dared say the truth aloud.

Pushpasura...

Was beginning to fear being grabbed.

Devaratha noticed it too.

Every hesitation. Every slight recoil.

Every unconscious step backwards.

He understood.

The body had become conditioned.

Not by defeat.

But by repeated suffering.

Yet he showed no excitement.

No arrogance. Only patience.

Every day he simply repeated the lesson.

Again. And again. And again.

Then...

The fifty-sixth sunrise arrived.

The conches roared.

Both kings entered the now familiar arena.

They circled one another.

Neither spoke.

Pushpasura suddenly laughed.

But there was no confidence within it.

Only frustration.

"I know exactly what you’re trying to do."

He glared at Devaratha.

"You think you can break my spirit."

"You think pain will make me surrender."

His crimson eyes burned wildly.

"You’ll fail!"

With a furious roar, he charged.

The wrestling match resumed.

For nearly half the day...

Nothing changed.

Another arm broken.

Another shoulder dislocated.

Another agonising scream.

Another instant of regeneration.

Pushpasura’s breathing became ragged.

His vision blurred from the relentless cycle of pain.

Finally...

Something inside him snapped.

"ENOUGH!!"

The roar shook the battlefield.

Instead of reaching for another grapple...

Pushpasura leapt backwards, creating nearly thirty metres of distance.

Dark Yogic energy exploded from every pore of his body.

The very air distorted.

The roots beneath the battlefield writhed violently as torrents of black energy spiralled towards him.

They did not spread across his body this time.

Instead...

Every strand of Yogic energy converged upon a single point.

His right fist.

The aura around it became so dense that space itself appeared to ripple even though it was not the case.

The ground beneath his feet caved in.

Even distant soldiers instinctively retreated.

Pushpasura’s breathing became heavy.

His eyes had turned almost completely black.

"I don’t care if this isn’t wrestling anymore!"

His voice boomed across Malikavana.

"I just need... one moment!"

He launched himself forward like a falling meteor.

The fist descended.

Devaratha’s instincts screamed.

This was different.

This wasn’t merely physical strength.

It carried compressed Yogic energy powerful enough to shake even Parvati Kavach.

Rather than meeting it head-on...

Devaratha immediately abandoned his stance.

He stepped back.

Then another. Then another.

The massive fist crashed into the earth where he had stood only an instant before.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!

The battlefield erupted.

A crater hundreds of feet wide exploded into existence.

Columns of earth and shattered stone shot into the sky.

The shockwave alone forced both armies backwards.

Dust engulfed the centre of Malikavana.

Within that cloud...

Pushpasura remained standing.

His chest rose and fell violently.

For the first time in nearly thirty days...

There was distance between him and Devaratha.

No hands seized him.

No joints twisted. No bones snapped.

No unbearable pain.

Pushpasura closed his eyes for a single precious moment.

He drew in a deep breath.

It was only a few seconds...

But to him...

Those few seconds felt like the sweetest relief he had experienced since the wrestling matches had begun.

Across the battlefield, Devaratha watched quietly.

He did not pursue immediately.

Instead... He observed.

A faint smile touched his lips.

’So... You’ve reached the point where escaping the pain has become more important than maintaining the duel. Good.’

’That means the battle is no longer against your body. It’s against your mind.’

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(Author note:)

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