Chapter 135: The Combat Event 4 [Bonus]
"AMERICA... VERSUS... BRAZIL!"
While the colosseum thundered with the Phantom chant, the Brazilian alcove was silent.
Their team huddled at the back wall, and the debate lasted exactly eleven seconds.
"Not Raoi." Their coach’s voice left no room for argument. "The whole world watched what Phantom did to the Nigerian team. He erased a god’s blessing like chalk off a board. Raoi’s storm is seven abilities stacked on one man — against a power-canceller, that’s not an army. That’s seven eggs in one basket, and four hundred stolen points in the same basket beside them."
Raoi clicked his tongue but didn’t argue. He’d watched that broadcast too. Everyone had.
The coach turned to the man sitting quietly on the bench in the corner, wrapping his knuckles in worn cloth strips.
"Hunter. You’re up."
The man looked up.
"Take away abilities," the coach said, "and what’s left is the body and the art. Nobody on this planet beats you there."
Hunter finished the wrap, flexed his fingers once, and stood.
"Understood."
"BRAZIL HAS MADE THEIR CHOICE!" Julie announced as the giant screens shifted. "And it’s NOT Raoi! Representing Brazil in the second match... the S-Rank hero... HUNTER!"
A murmur rolled through the crowd as the man walked the connecting bridge onto the ruined stage.
He was... unremarkable.
Average height. A plain build under a sleeveless brown gi. Short-cropped hair, a face you would forget in a crowd of three, and cloth-wrapped fists hanging loose at his sides. He carried no weapon, wore no armor, and walked with the unhurried gait of a man strolling to buy bread.
[Blntz_2: ...who?]
[Demiurge666: THE Hunter?? oh Brazil isn’t playing]
[Marypaz13: he looks like someone’s uncle. why are Brazilian fans crying]
[Will_1631: you sweet summer children have never seen him fight. pray for Phantom]
"AND REPRESENTING AMERICA—" Julie didn’t even finish.
"PHAN-TOM! PHAN-TOM! PHAN-TOM!"
Nicholas dropped from the American alcove onto the stage, coat settling around him, the matte black watch on his wrist catching no light at all.
The chant hit a volume that made the stone tiers hum.
{Ding!}
{+180 Charm points}
He dismissed the screen and studied the man across from him.
’No stance. No tension. Weight perfectly centered.’ His eyes traveled from the wrapped knuckles to the bare feet. ’Calluses on the first two knuckles, the blade of the foot, the elbow. A striker. Old-school. But beyond that...’
Nothing.
No presence. No aura. No killing intent. Just a plain man on a broken stage.
’Nothing particularly interesting about him.’
In his mind, the plan sat as cold and settled as it had since last night.
’The Void doesn’t come out today. Not for Brazil. Not for anyone. It has exactly one target in this tournament, and he’s sitting in that alcove rolling prayer beads. Everything before Tianzun, I finish with my own hands.’
The Brazilians had counter-picked against an ability he’d already benched.
"FIGHTERS, READY!" Julie raised her hand. "THREE! TWO! ONE—"
"FIGHT!!"
Hunter bowed.
A full, formal bow, hands at his sides — in the opening second of a tournament match, in front of a hitman.
Then he raised his head, and the plain man was gone.
Nicholas would remember it, later, as the moment the temperature of the world changed. Nothing visible moved. No energy flared. But the unremarkable figure across the stage settled into a stance Nicholas had never seen in thirty years of violence — weight coiled, spine drawn like a bow, one wrapped fist floating before his heart — and every survival instinct carved into two lifetimes began ringing at once.
’...I take it back.’
Hunter vanished.
The stage did not crack where he had stood. It detonated, stone erupting in a geyser as the ground surrendered the man it could no longer hold, and the first fist arrived carrying the sound of the air dying around it.
Nicholas moved.
Palm meeting wrist, redirecting a strike that plowed past his ear and blew a trench through the stage behind him — forty meters of stone unzipped by wind pressure alone. He countered in the same breath, a knife-hand toward the throat with the full weight of the Assassination Arts behind it.
Hunter’s head tilted two centimeters. The strike touched nothing but the ghost of his afterimage.
And then the world became fists.
They tore into one another with a fury that made the first match look like a rehearsal. Blow answered blow. Counter devoured counter. Nicholas fought the way he killed — no wasted motion, every strike a verdict aimed at eyes, throat, heart, temple — and Hunter met every verdict with an appeal, slipping, deflecting, returning fire with strikes that individually carried enough force to cave in a bank vault.
Their feet carved the stage. Their fists rewrote it. Shockwaves rolled off each collision in visible rings, chasing each other across the arena and slamming into the barrier walls hard enough to make sixty thousand people flinch in rhythm.
Then Hunter changed.
Mid-exchange, between one heartbeat and the next, his footwork shifted — the boxing rhythm dissolving into a circular, flowing art that turned Nicholas’ straight-line pressure into empty air. Nicholas adjusted. Hunter changed again. Crane to mantis. Mantis to something with the swaying, drunken looseness of a man who had never lost a fight he could remember starting. Each style was not studied. Not practiced.
Perfected.
Flawless, complete, mastered to the final decimal — as though a grandmaster with fifty years in each art had been folded into his limbs.
’Martial God,’ Nicholas realized, weaving through a palm strike that sheared the top off a stone pillar behind him. ’That’s his ability. He doesn’t learn the arts. He arrives at them. Every style, instantly perfected.’
Hunter’s stance sank low, both hands drawing back to his hip as though gripping the hilt of a sword that did not exist.
’And apparently,’ Nicholas thought, eyes narrowing, ’reality isn’t a requirement.’
Hunter drew.
There was no sword. There had never been a sword. But the technique was perfect, and the world — obedient to perfection — provided the rest. A crescent of compressed air screamed off his empty hands and split the stage from edge to edge, a canyon opening in solid stone as though the earth had been slashed by the blade of a god.
Nicholas was already airborne, coat snapping, the pressure wave passing beneath his boots close enough to shave leather.
Hunter was above him.
’When did he—’
An axe kick fell out of the sun. Nicholas’ forearms crossed against it and the impact fired him into the stage like a meteor, stone geysering around the crater of his landing — and he was moving before the debris finished rising, rolling out of the smoke as Hunter’s follow-up erased the crater entirely.
The exchange that followed stopped being something the audience could watch.
They blurred into streaks — one black, one brown — flickering across the broken stage at speeds that mocked the space between positions. Sixty exchanges compressed into seconds. The air convulsed, tore, and gave up trying to contain them; sonic detonations rolled one atop another until the colosseum stood inside a single unending thunderclap. Craters bloomed across the stage like the footprints of warring giants. The great stone pillars of the arena wall trembled in their sockets.
They did not slow.
They did not blink.
They did not spare a single thought for the sixty thousand souls watching — because in the world that mattered, the world between their fists, no one else existed.
Up in the commentary platform, Julie’s microphone hung forgotten at her side, her professional obligations lying somewhere in the same grave as her composure.
"They..." she tried. "The... folks, I..."
[Boddlly: JULIE HAS LEFT THE CHAT AND SHE’S STILL ON SCREEN]
[Kamzy_1234: I’ve rewound four times. My eyes don’t have the frame rate for this]
[GodOfDegenerates: the STAGE has lost more health than either fighter]
[Marypaz13: someone’s uncle is fighting the grim reaper and it’s EVEN]
And through it all, something strange happened to the colosseum.
The chants died.
Not into boredom — into awe. The Phantom chant faltered first, then the Brazilian drums, then the songs, until sixty thousand people simply stood in silence and watched two human beings dismantle the arena and the laws of physics in the same breath. Because for the first time since Phantom’s name had conquered the world, the question hanging over the stage had no obvious answer.
Who wins?
In the Chinese alcove, Tianzun’s prayer beads had gone still between his fingers. His eyes were open.
In the Australian alcove, Mercury’s teacup sat abandoned, going cold.
And in the eye of the storm, as another exchange flung them apart to opposite ends of the ravaged stage, Hunter straightened out of a style older than nations and looked at Nicholas with quiet, burning joy.
"Thirty-one masters live inside my hands," he said, voice carrying through the settling dust. "Every art on Earth, and several that Earth has only dreamed of. And yet you’re still standing." He bowed his head slightly. "Tell me your style’s name, Phantom. I wish to know what I’m about to perfect."
Nicholas rolled his shoulder, coat torn at one sleeve, eyes flat and cold.
"It doesn’t have a name," he said. "The people who see it don’t leave reviews."
Hunter smiled.
The stage screamed as both of them vanished.