Weapons win battles. Justice wins everything else. That is the blunt claim of this chapter, and Valluvar makes it without a single concession to the romance of military power. The sceptre — the kol — is not a symbol of authority. It is authority itself, and it bends for no one: not for kinship, not for sentiment, not for the ruler who wields it. In ten couplets, Valluvar constructs an argument so tightly wound it reads like a contract between the ruler and the ruled. The people look to just governance the way the earth looks to rain — not with hope, but with biological necessity. Justice protects the king who practices it; injustice devours the king who does not. And in the final couplet, the most unsentimental image in all of political philosophy: punishing the cruel is not cruelty. It is weeding. The farmer does not mourn the weed. He pulls it so the grain can breathe.