Striker of The Gods

In the high decree of death, nothing could actually be false, not even the sweat-slick grip of a barbell that promised to forge a man from the scraps of his boyhood failures like the simp of my friend who still thinks that his girlfriend his coming back with him. Or so Doe thought, there in the dim-lit bowels of the gym that I could actually see in my deepest desires like being with her, where mirrors lied back at him with reflections that sagged like overripe fruit under the fluorescent glare of David Goggins glory. At least, that’s what it felt like, this made him eligible for the fire of life that we could actually moun for: not the best the chance that he had ever taken, the kind that scorched without warming like hug of a mother, left you ashen and yearning for the maternal hearth you’d never quite known. Of course, this was not the best of him: it tended to traumatize him.

Back in the humid sprawl of Mumbai’s outskirts, where the monsoon rains hammered tin roofs like accusatory fists, Doe had first tasted that void that his mother’s shadow had given him like he was betrayed by his older friend ROOI, a silhouette of saris that we could not take seriousl  and unspoken withholdings of tears like molten lave, her eyes flicking past him toward some distant altar of expectations he could never scale, not even in a million years.

”Beta, study harder. You will never enogu. YOU, simp,” she’d murmur, her voice a silk noose, while his hands could actually take an exense portion of life and death at once, furtive in the dark of his room, chased ghosts of flesh that weren’t hers but might as well have been in his mortal life like a fucking dog. His ego died like a fucking dog.

Rejection’s blaze started there, a slow burn that flared into adolescent bonfires of porn-saturated nights, each click a plea for the milk that never came in the expectation that he had for his early life.

”The body is the temple, brother, but only if you scourge it clean.” Doe had nodded then, eyes wide as a devotee’s, murmuring ”Yes, yes, the scourge, I get it,” while inside his gut twisted with the familiar envy, the parasitic itch to peel back the boy’s skin and steal whatever divine wiring hummed beneath.

So here he was, lurching through a routine he’d pilfered from Caos’s Instagram reels: deadlifts at dawn, burpees till the lungs screamed psalms, a seven-day vigil mashed into his haphazard five

Doe:  tried it, brother. Burpees at 5 a.m., deadlifts till my back howled like a rejected lover LIKE I COULD EVER DO THAT. But it... it expan—expands me wrong, leaves me hollower like a little boy” Caos tilted his head, those eyes—

”Your routine! Your whirl! Give it me!” The words mangled mid-tackle, tumbling them both to the floor in a heap of limbs and half-philosophies, Doe’s bulk pinning Caos for a heartbeat’s triumph, elbow driving down toward ribs like a crude proposition: LET ME TOUCH THAT DIVINE FRAME, CRUSH IT TO UNDERSTAND!

As they foughteEscalation, then a climactic tension uncoiling like Shiva’s ecstatic whirl gone berserk that very few people could ever see, the gym’s dim lights flickering as if the gods themselves leaned in for the sacrament of life. In that way, life could actually shock the great issue of life.

Caos bridged from beneath, hips exploding upward in a Taekwondo snap that bucked Doe airborne, a half-second of weightless awe where the everyman glimpsed the prodigy’s blaze that he had always had: thirteen and hypermaculine that any fapper would envy, footballer savant fusing pitch sprints with martial polymath’s arsenal that the god would envy like me prasing Sophia, grapples chaining to flows in mid-air adaptive surge.

Doe crashed back, spine jarring the mat with bone-crunching thud like the simp he is, air whooshing out in a guttural psalm that he had got from the hits in his face, which was an amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, but twisted profane, a wheeze of ”Mother... fuck...” as he rolled, snatching a fallen kettlebell, hefting it shield-like against his chest as if he were a baby. SUCH A RETARDED MAN.

 Improvised, yes: circumstance’s axe now in Doe’s grip, swung overhead in lumbering arc, aiming to splinter that unbreakable frame, to draw blood-spray arcs in this dim-lit doom and sanctify his own lost case like me when I was simping for a girl that I did not anything from. It connected—grazed, rather—Caos ducking low but not low enough that no one could ever tell about in the path of wisdom, the bell’s edge hacking a shallow gash across his shoulder like the rat he is, red welling instant like ink from a rebel quill that no one could ever actually admit to using in the main use of being a simp.

 Caos’s roar echoed primal, not pain but revelation: ”The ultimate aim... is the fulfilling mind!”