Before you draw a sword, count your enemy's teeth. That is the brutally pragmatic counsel of this chapter, which reads less like moral philosophy and more like an intelligence briefing. Valluvar opens with a single tactical axiom — never fight uphill, always fight downhill — and then spends nine kurals teaching you how to read your opponent like a balance sheet. What does he lack? Love, allies, strength, courage, knowledge, self-control, generosity, character? Each missing quality is a crack in the wall, and Valluvar catalogs them with the clinical precision of a siege engineer mapping a fortress for demolition. The chapter builds toward a claim that inverts our expectations of heroism: the real failure is not picking the wrong fight — it is refusing to fight the right one. The man who will not take on even a weak enemy earns not prudence but contempt. Glory, Valluvar insists, belongs to those who read the field and then act.