Chapter 173: Sun Wukong 2
"Let’s play."
Nicholas was gone before the last word finished leaving the monk’s mouth.
Space folded and spat him out forty meters back at the broken rim of the stage, and he came out of the fold already turning, already measuring, every instinct built across two lifetimes screaming the same single instruction at him.
’Do not let that thing get inside arm’s reach.’
He had watched the staff come down once. That was enough. A weapon that could crater the stage from nowhere and then shrink into a walking stick was not a weapon he could trade blows with, and the creature holding it had spent its entire mythology beating things that were bigger than it.
’So I don’t fight him. I fight the distance.’
The problem was that Nicholas had no ranged attack.
He had a copied spatial ability he had spent the entire tournament using the way its original owner used it, as a door. Fold, step, arrive. A transport tool. Vixen had shown him it could be more than that when she collapsed an entire arena into a grinder, and he still remembered the number the system had put in front of him when he tried to price that technique. He could not afford her scale.
But he did not need her scale.
’She collapsed a region. I don’t need a region. I need a thimble.’
Nicholas raised his hand, and instead of opening a fold, he closed one.
The air in front of his palm buckled. A knot of space the size of a marble twisted in on itself, folded, and kept folding, light bending around it into a small ugly smear that hurt to look at with a normal eye. It sat there shivering, straining against its own geometry, wanting very badly to spring back out to the shape it was supposed to be.
So he let it go.
The distortion crossed the stage in less than a heartbeat and struck the ground three meters left of the Monkey King, and the stone there simply stopped being stone. A perfect sphere of the stage was gone, sheared out along a curve, the edges of the hole polished smooth as glass.
’Spatial bullets,’ Nicholas thought, and something cold and pleased moved through his chest for the first time since the headband appeared. ’Cheap. Fast. And they don’t care how hard you are, because they don’t hit you. They delete where you’re standing.’
Up in the American alcove, Selena’s hand had frozen halfway to the rail.
"He just made that up," she said. "He made that up right now, in front of a god, in a final."
"He’s been holding that ability for two rounds and never once used it as a weapon," Dana said, eyes narrowed at the stage. "Either he’s a genius or he’s out of options."
"With him it’s usually both."
Down on the field, the Monkey King looked at the hole in the floor, then at Nicholas, and his grin got wider.
"Oh," he said. "Oh. Now that’s a good trick."
Nicholas opened both hands and threw everything he had.
Distortions filled the air between them, dozens of them, small and vicious and fired at every angle he could reach. He did not aim them all at the body. He had never in his life aimed everything at the body. He put four at the head to make him lift the staff, six at the knees to make him plant, and salted the rest across the ground around his feet so that anywhere he moved, he moved into one.
The Monkey King swung the staff.
He did not dodge. He did not shield. He simply swung, one long lazy arc that came around faster than Nicholas’ eye could follow, and every distortion that touched the golden rod winked out of existence with a small flat crack, like knuckles popping. The staff came back the other way and cleared the second wave. Then a third, a fourth, faster each time, until the air between them was full of small dying pops and the after-images of a rod moving in six places at once.
The wind came off the swings in slabs. It rolled across the stage, hit the ruined stands at the far end, and shoved what was left of them another ten meters back.
Nicholas stopped firing and stood very still.
’It isn’t blocking them.’
That was the part he did not like. A fold in space was not a bullet. There was nothing to stop, nothing to deflect, no force to absorb. When the staff touched them they were not knocked aside, they were undone, space snapping back into its proper shape like a hand had reached in and smoothed it flat.
’That thing isn’t just heavy. It doesn’t accept being interfered with. It’s not part of the argument at all.’
He filed it, because there was no time to do anything else with it, and because a hitman who waited until he understood a weapon before he worked around it was a dead hitman.
"MY GOODNESS, folks, Phantom has a RANGED ATTACK!" Julie’s voice climbed two octaves. "Where has THAT been all tournament?! He’s putting holes in the stage! He’s putting holes in the air! And Tianzun, or, well, whoever that is now, is just... swatting them? He’s swatting them like flies!"
[Zerox4575: bro invented a new skill mid final and it STILL didn’t work 💀]
[Marypaz13: the way the staff just erases them?? what is that thing MADE of]
[SirAnime_lord: notice he aimed at the ground too. he’s not trying to hit him. he’s herding him]
[Will_1631: phantom fans stay winning until the monkey swings once]
[MarcoTiebosch: sixty thousand people and not one of them is sitting down]
The Monkey King spun the staff up over his head and drove the butt of it into the ground.
A wave of gold went out from the impact in a ring. It passed under every distortion Nicholas had left seeded across the stage, and one after another, in a neat spreading sequence, all of them died. The traps he had spent thirty seconds and a painful amount of CP laying down were gone in under two.
’He cleaned the whole board with one hit. Fine.’
"You’re being careful," the trickster said, delighted, rolling the staff across his knuckles. "You’re a very careful little man. Is that how you got up here? Did you tiptoe past everyone?"
Then he thrust the staff forward, and it grew.
It came at Nicholas like a bridge falling sideways, lengthening and thickening as it crossed the stage, and by the time it reached him it was wider than he was tall and still swelling. There was no blocking it. There was nothing in Nicholas’ body or borrowed arsenal that could meet that much weight moving that fast.
So he did not meet it.
He opened a fold directly in front of himself, wide as a doorway, and dropped a second one above and behind. The staff punched through the first, ate the empty air of the fold, and came out over his own head, and Nicholas jumped and caught the top of it as it passed under him.
He landed on the golden rod and ran.
The wind tore at his coat. The surface bucked and shuddered beneath his boots as the staff kept extending under him, and he sprinted along its length toward the grinning thing at the far end of it, ribs aching, breath burning, closing the distance he had spent the whole fight trying to keep.
Because he had to. That was the ugly little truth sitting under every calculation he had made since the headband appeared.
’The Void doesn’t work at range. It never has. Whatever that thing is, whatever is looking out through him, the only way I take it off the board is with my hand on his skin.’
Twenty meters. Fifteen.
The staff shrank.
It collapsed under his feet in an instant, dropping him, and he was still falling when he saw it reappear at hand length in the trickster’s grip. Nicholas twisted in the air, hand out, reaching for any part of him, fingers open and the Void coiled and screaming to be let out.
His palm closed on a shoulder.
And the shoulder burst into a puff of white smoke.
Nicholas hit the ground rolling and came up into a stage that was no longer empty. There were six of them. Then eleven. Then more than he could count, monkeys in saffron robes standing across the ruined arena in every direction, each one with a golden band on its brow, each one with a staff, each one grinning at him with the exact same grin.
The colosseum made a sound he had never heard sixty thousand people make.
’Clones. Of course it’s clones.’ Cold went down Nicholas’ spine, and for once it had nothing to do with fear of dying. ’The Void takes everything I have to fire. One shot. One target. If I spend it on smoke, I lose. Not the fight. The whole thing.’
He had the Third Eye. He could open it right now and see which of them was real.
And the moment he opened it, the thing behind the wheel would be looking back at him.
A staff came at his head from the left.
He caught it on his forearm and felt the bone flex, and the clone holding it turned to smoke against his shoulder as he shoved through. Another swing came from behind, and he folded three meters sideways, and a third was already there waiting when he arrived, because of course it was, because they did not need to guess where he would go when there were forty of them standing on every square meter he could reach.
The fourth one hit him in the ribs.
The sound of it carried to the top row. Nicholas felt his feet leave the stone, felt something on his right side give in a way that was going to matter later, and tasted copper before he had finished moving. He landed badly, skidded, and came to a stop on one knee with his hand pressed flat against the ground and blood running down his chin.
The clones did not close in. They stood around him in a wide grinning ring and waited, the way a thing that has never once been in danger waits.
Nicholas spat, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and started to laugh quietly.
"That hurt," he said.
Then he closed his one good eye, and opened the other one.