The rain hadn't stopped for three days.
Aryan sat on the broken steps of his one-room home in Rampur village, watching the water rise around his feet. The mud walls were crumbling. His father's medical bills sat in a wet pile on the floor — unpaid, hopeless, meaningless now that his father was gone.
He was nineteen years old and owned nothing. Not the house — the landlord had already sent a notice. Not his father's old cycle — sold for medicine that came too late. Not even the torn shirt on his back, which technically still had the shopkeeper's thread from where it was stitched on credit.
"Aryan."
His younger sister Priya, only twelve, stood at the door holding a steel plate with two plain rotis. No sabzi. No dal. Just bread and the quiet shame of poverty.
"Eat," she said softly.
He shook his head. "You eat."
"I already did," she lied.
He knew she was lying. She always lied when she was hungry so he wouldn't feel guilty. He took one roti and handed the other back without a word.
That night, as Aryan slept on the cold floor, something fell from the sky.
Not rain. Not lightning.
A pod — small, metallic, glowing faintly silver — crashed silently into the field behind his house. No explosion. No fire. Just a soft thud and a hiss of opening steam.
Aryan woke up. He didn't know why. Some pull, like a hand on his chest, dragged him outside.
Inside the pod was a dying creature — grey-skinned, four-armed, with eyes like burning amber. It was clearly not human. It was clearly not from Earth. And it was clearly terrified of something still out there, beyond the clouds, beyond the stars.
In its last breath, it pressed a small black device against Aryan's palm. A sharp sting. A flash of light behind his eyes.
Then it died.
And Aryan stood in the rain, holding a device he didn't understand, feeling something stir deep inside his chest — like a sleeping fire just beginning to wake up.
Three days later, a man in a silver coat appeared at his door. He introduced himself as Commander Zael, a recruiter for the Galactic Hunting Federation.
"The creature you touched," Zael said, "was a Class-3 Vorkai beast. Its essence bonded with you before it died. That has never happened to a human before. You now carry its strength in your blood."
"What does that mean?" Aryan asked.
"It means," Zael said, sliding a contract across the table, "that you are either going to become the greatest hunter this galaxy has ever seen — or you are going to die on your very first hunt."
Aryan looked at Priya. At the empty plate. At the landlord's notice on the wall.
He picked up the pen.
"When do we leave?"