Chapter 166: Maltreatment
Walküre’s wings flared, and she dove.
And Nicholas was no longer trying to beat her.
He was trying to use her.
He let the dive come, let the burning spear scream down at him, and at the last possible instant he didn’t block, didn’t counter, didn’t feed a single ounce of force into those hungry wings. He simply folded space a half-step sideways, and let her own committed momentum carry her past him into the stone.
The spear cratered the stage. And before she could arrest herself, before the wings could catch her, Nicholas’ boot came down on the haft of her own weapon, pinning it flat, and his palm shoved the small of her back, driving the field-dressed wound into the stone.
She gasped. It was the first sound of pain she’d made all match.
’There it is,’ he thought coldly. ’You burn brighter when I hit you. So I stop hitting you.’
What followed was not a fight.
It was a dismantling.
Nicholas moved through her guard like a man who had already read the end of the book. Every time her wings flared to feed on an impact, there was no impact to feed on. He struck at joints, not center mass, taps and shoves and precise little redirections that carried no violence for the flames to drink, each one aimed at the stiffness in her stance, the dressed wound, the balance she was fighting so hard to keep. He swept her ankle and she stumbled. She caught herself on the spear and he kicked it out from under her. She reached for the sky to launch and he was already there, one hand closing on her wing-wrist, folding her back down to the earth she’d been trying to leave.
The wings blazed, desperate for fuel, and found nothing.
You cannot burn hotter against a man who refuses to give you a fire.
"HE’S... he’s taking her apart," Julie said, her voice caught somewhere between awe and discomfort. "Folks, Walküre’s ability feeds on force, and Phantom just... stopped giving her any! He’s not fighting her, he’s HERDING her!"
Walküre gritted her teeth and threw everything she had left into one blazing spear thrust, the whole of her burning wings pouring down the shaft, the kind of blow that had split Danqing’s sky. It was magnificent. It was the last defiance of a soldier who did not know how to quit.
Nicholas tilted his head two centimeters, let it pass his cheek, and pushed her stumbling wrist so the entire strike carried her off her own feet and face-first toward the boundary.
She caught herself at the very edge. Barely. Panting. Her wings guttering low for the first time in the match, starved.
And Nicholas simply walked after her, unhurried, giving her nothing.
It stopped looking like a duel. It started looking like something crueler, a grown man walking down a child who kept swinging at empty air, and the colosseum’s roar slowly curdled into an uneasy murmur. There was no drama in it. No back and forth. Phantom had found the one thing that turned her greatest strength into dead weight, and he was applying it with the patience of a man doing his taxes.
[Opalion: this isn’t a fight anymore. this is homework]
[Zerox4575: he figured her out in ONE exchange and now he’s just... not letting her play the game]
[MarcoTiebosch: I feel bad. I actually feel bad. she’s giving everything and he’s giving her NOTHING]
[Cyndy9338: the scariest thing phantom’s done all day is decide to make it boring on purpose]
[Marypaz13: this is what a professional looks like. no ego. no showing off. just the shortest line to the end 😨]
In the American alcove, Selena watched with her arms folded, something conflicted in her expression. "He’s humiliating her."
"No," Dana said quietly, her eyes sharp on the stage. "He’s respecting her. He knows exactly how dangerous she is, so he isn’t giving her a single window to be dangerous in. Not one." A pause. "That’s the most seriously he’s taken anyone all day. He just isn’t taking her seriously in a way that looks good on camera."
Down on the stage, Walküre pushed herself up on trembling arms, her wings barely more than embers now, and looked at the man standing calmly over her. There was no cruelty in his face. No triumph. Only a flat, professional focus, the look of a man finishing a task on a schedule.
"...You won’t even let me burn," she rasped, half a laugh, half a sob. "Three hundred fighters would kill to make you bleed, and you decided I wasn’t worth the risk of a single hard punch."
"You were worth exactly that much caution," Nicholas said, and meant it as the compliment it was. "That’s why you never got the chance."
He stepped in, took the spear from her failing grip with one hand, swept her remaining support with his foot, and laid her down against the boundary stone with an almost gentle finality, one knee pinning her, her own spear turned and resting a hair’s breadth from the seal at her collar.
There was nothing left to feed the wings. There was no force to turn, no fire to climb. Just a tired soldier, pinned, with nothing left to give.
Walküre closed her eyes.
"...I yield," she breathed.
BWOOOOOM.
The horn sounded, and the colosseum’s applause came slow, and strange, and enormous, sixty thousand people clapping for a woman who had lost without ever being allowed to truly fight, because they understood, on some level, that being handled that carefully by that man was its own kind of honor.
{VICTORY: PHANTOM. AMERICA}
{POINT TRANSFER IN PROGRESS...}
{WALKÜRE: 450 PTS. PHANTOM}
Nicholas rose off her, and then, because she was the last soldier of a nation that had fought its heart out all day, he reached down and pulled her to her feet the same way he had every worthy opponent before her. She swayed, took her spear back, and gave him a single, grudging nod before her countrymen’s hymn rose one last time to carry her home.
’Four hundred and fifty points,’ Nicholas thought, closing the private screen as the numbers settled into his ledger. ’And more importantly, I’m still standing.’
He turned his gaze across the arena, toward the Chinese alcove.
’Now. One last look at you.’
The screens wiped clean, and for once, the flags did not spin.
Because there was no one left to draw.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Julie said, and even she had gone quiet with the weight of it, "there are only two nations remaining. Which means the wheel doesn’t need to turn anymore. You already know. The whole world already knows."
She drew a breath.
"The final match of this year’s Combat Event. AMERICA... VERSUS... CHINA!"
The colosseum came apart.
"And China stands alone on one fighter, folks, but WHAT a fighter! Which means to take the crown, America must send TWO through him! Phantom AND Nectron, both of them, against the undefeated monk! It’s the only way the points fall right! This is it! This is the fight the entire day has been building toward!"
Before the last word had even finished leaving her mouth, a figure was already moving in the Chinese alcove.
Tianzun rose, stepped over the rail, and drifted down onto the stage without hurry, without ceremony, prayer beads left behind, hands empty, that same calm and bottomless smile resting on his face.
Ready.
In the American alcove, Nectron cracked his knuckles and turned toward the bridge. "I’ll soften him up. Just like we planned."
He took one step.
And Nicholas’ hand closed around his arm.
"Wait." Nicholas’ eye was fixed on the monk below, cold and calculating, the last piece of the puzzle turning slowly into place behind it. "I want you to do something in this fight."