Chapter 160: Vixen’s Second Awakening
The miasma poured off Vixen in slow, heavy ribbons, and in the American alcove, the mood changed all at once.
Selena was on her feet before she realized she’d stood. Beside her, Nectron’s easy confidence drained out of his face, replaced by a deep, worried frown, and even Dana had gone rigid, her clipboard forgotten against her chest.
Nicholas’ brows furrowed as he watched the dark mist seep from Vixen’s shoulders. It was strange, unlike anything he’d seen from her, but stranger still was the reaction of the people around him. These were heroes who had watched a megalodon and a blood-forged god and a superhuman fall out of the sky today without flinching.
They were not looking at Vixen with awe.
They were looking at her with fear.
"What’s happening?" Nicholas asked, his gaze cutting between them.
"This is bad." Selena’s voice was tight. "She’s undergoing a second awakening."
"After the Ronald incident, I thought a second infection could only be forced, only induced from the outside." Dana’s frown deepened, her knuckles pale on the clipboard. "But it seems a second awakening really is possible on its own."
The alcove tipped into quiet panic. Nectron’s hands curled into fists. Light had gone pale at the rail. Even Thinker had come to the edge of his seat.
And behind Nicholas’ flat expression, a single cold memory surfaced.
’A second infection.’ His eye narrowed on the dark mist twisting off Vixen’s arms. ’The plague coming back for the ones who already conquered it. That’s what Ronald’s dart was. Plague X.’
He had held that memory at a distance for months. The office. The concealed launcher. The dart he had torn out of the air and driven back into Ronald’s own neck, and the thing Ronald became a few minutes later. A councilman, an ordinary human, turned into a hulking impure that pressed a thousand meters of city flat as paper. Thousands dead in a single breath, red imprints where people had been standing.
’The desire you beat to earn an ability never really dies. It just goes quiet.’ His jaw tightened. ’And when it wakes up a second time, it doesn’t just come back. It amplifies everything. The strength. The power. The capacity for slaughter. That’s what took Dr. Bane. That’s what took Ronald.’
From the little he understood of it, a second infection was the single thing the entire association was built to fear. It was why supervisors existed at all: to know a hero completely, so that if the plague ever returned through them, someone would be standing there who knew how to end it.
And Ronald had started as nothing more than a man.
Vixen was already a hero.
"We have to stop her." Nectron pushed off the rail, his whole frame shifting toward the bridge, ready to leap down and drag his teammate out of her own power before it consumed her the way it had consumed every host before her.
A hand caught his arm.
Nicholas, who had said almost nothing since the trials began, who had watched every second of this fight with the stillness of a man reading a page, held him in place.
"Look at her," Nicholas said quietly.
Nectron stopped.
"She has everything in control."
They looked.
And it was just as he said.
Through the miasma pouring off her, through the space warping and screaming around her raised hands, Vixen was smiling. Her eyes were clear. Sane. There was none of the crazed, empty stare Nicholas had watched crawl across Ronald’s face in that office, no saliva, no growls, no vacancy where a person used to be. The plague that had swallowed Dr. Bane and Ronald whole had wrapped itself around Vixen, and Vixen was still, unmistakably, there.
’She conquered it,’ Nicholas thought, and let his grip on Nectron’s arm loosen. ’Whatever desire she beat to become a hero in the first place, she beat it again just now, in front of the whole world, with the second infection already in her hands. Ronald was force-fed his and it ate him alive. Hers came from the inside, and she’s the one holding the leash.’
He filed the deeper questions away for later. There would be time to wonder what this meant, what it might mean for a man who had once had that same dart pressed toward his own throat. Later. Not now.
For now, there was only a teammate finding a door in her own house she’d never known was there, and welcoming what stood behind it like an old friend.
Her desire to win, her refusal to lose in front of the entire planet, in front of the man who had trusted her to go first, had pushed her ability past a wall she hadn’t known existed and evolved it into something entirely new.
Below, Vixen lowered her chin, and her bright, clear eyes fixed on the smiling monk who had torn her greatest secret open with his bare hands.
"Now let’s see if you’ll survive this," she said.
She spread her hands wide, and the miasma surged.
’Spatial Collapse.’
She named the skill only to herself, in the quiet of her own mind, the first person ever to speak it.
And then the world ended.
Everyone in the stadium watched as the entire arena simply disappeared.
The ground faded as though it had never been laid. The ruined stage, the craters carved by a full day of legends, the stone tiers, the barrier, the trench, all of it, gone, not shattered, not blasted, not consumed. Erased. As though space had quietly agreed that none of it had ever existed at all.
Sixty thousand people did not scream, because there was nothing left to scream about. They stood frozen at their rails, staring down into a vast, seamless, endless darkness where a stadium had been a heartbeat before, an emptiness with no floor and no walls and no far side, a nothing so complete that the mind refused to accept it was looking at anything at all.
There was no sound in it. That was the part that reached into people’s chests and squeezed. Sixty thousand of them, and the arena had gone so silent they could hear their own blood, because sound itself needed a world to travel through, and for this one impossible moment, there was no world. Only the dark, and the two figures inside it.
A woman wreathed in dark miasma.
And a monk in saffron, standing on nothing, smiling into the dark.
The broadcast feed flickered, struggled, and held, transmitting a rectangle of pure black to two hundred million homes.
For a few seconds, the stream chat, that endless river that had run all day, simply stopped. Then it came back all at once, a flood of the same disbelief in a thousand languages.
[Opalion: the stadium is GONE. where did the stadium GO]
[Marypaz13: is my stream broken? is everyone’s stream broken? WHY IS IT BLACK]
[ThePathOfTheHunt: she didn’t attack him. she deleted the ARENA. she deleted the WORLD around him]
[TruMagi: second awakening on live tv. we are watching history and I can’t see any of it]
In the commentary platform, floating in a booth that now hovered over an abyss, Julie gripped her microphone with both hands and gave voice to the single thought echoing through every mind on the planet.
"WHAT... WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!"