Chapter 158: Vixen Vs Tianzun
"AMERICA... VERSUS... CHINA!"
The colosseum rose as one body. This was it. The pairing the entire planet had been waiting for since morning, the undefeated monk against the four-win champion, and sixty thousand voices began the chant before Julie could draw breath.
"PHAN-TOM! PHAN-TOM! PHAN..."
The chant collapsed mid-syllable.
Because the figure dropping from the American alcove onto the bridge was not the man in black.
She was tall and composed, dark hair pulled back, moving with an unhurried, gliding step, and the confusion that rolled through the stands was loud enough to register on the broadcast microphones.
"AMERICA HAS ANSWERED, AND IT’S... IT’S VIXEN!" Julie’s voice pitched up in open disbelief. "NOT PHANTOM! After four straight matches, after refusing to rotate ALL DAY, America finally sends someone else, and they choose THIS fight to do it?! The biggest fight?! WHY?!"
[Opalion: WHAT. WHAT IS HAPPENING]
[Decato: they ran ONE man through the whole world and they’re benching him against the FINAL BOSS??]
[ThePathOfTheHunt: no wait. wait. think about it. think about WHY]
[TruMagi: 1,200 points on Tianzun. whoever beats him wins everything. they’re not benching Phantom. they’re SETTING THE TABLE]
In the American alcove, Selena’s eyes were fixed on the woman crossing the bridge, and her voice came out low.
"So this is really the plan."
"This was always the plan," Dana said quietly. "He fights everyone... except the monk’s first two matches."
At the rail, Nicholas said nothing. His arms were folded, his taped ribs aching, his one good eye locked on the stage, and behind that flat expression, the machine that had been running since his birthday night finally engaged its last gears.
’Every fight before this was mine, so their strength would never be spent, never be shown, never be studied. Two fresh blades, saved all day for one man.’ His gaze settled on the monk waiting calmly at the center of the ruined stage. ’Grind him, Vixen. Make him spend. Make him show. And whatever’s left of him when it’s my turn... belongs to the Void.’
Vixen reached the center of the stage, and as she walked, she remembered.
The hotel room, eight nights ago. Nectron’s uncertain face. And Nicholas, calm as a man reading a menu, laying out the most arrogant strategy she had ever heard.
"I take every match until Tianzun. When China finally calls us, you go first, Vixen. And I need you to understand what first means." His eye had found hers, flat and serious. "Don’t probe him. Don’t test him. Don’t save your best for a better moment, because against him there is no better moment. From the first second of the first trial, hit him with the strongest thing you own. I don’t need you to beat him." A pause. "But if you do everything right... you might. And if you don’t, every second he spends against your best is a second I get to watch."
She had thought it was madness then.
Standing here now, across from the smiling mystery of the age with the entire world silent around her, she understood it was the only plan that had ever made sense.
"Vixen of America," Tianzun said.
His voice carried without effort. Up close, his calm was a physical thing, like standing at the base of a mountain.
Then he did the thing the whole world had heard about and almost no one had ever seen live.
He raised one hand, and unfolded three fingers.
"Three trials," he said. "As always."
The colosseum shivered. There it was. The famous ritual, the mercy no one understood, the mystery inside the mystery. Three chances, offered to every opponent, the only door through which anyone, even Mercury, had ever beaten him. And every year, the door got narrower.
"Why?" Vixen asked. It came out before she could stop it. "Why give anyone chances at all?"
Tianzun’s smile deepened, and he lowered his hand.
"Everything I am was built on conditions," he said. "Even mercy."
’Conditions.’ In the American alcove, Selena’s breath caught. ’I knew it. The trials aren’t a courtesy. They’re a REQUIREMENT. Something about his ability needs them.’
"FIGHT!!"
Vixen did not probe. She did not test. She kept the promise.
Her hands came together, and space screamed.
The air between her and Tianzun folded like paper in a fist, and out of the fold came her opening masterpiece, the technique that had ended impure outbreaks in single strokes: a lattice of silver seams slicing across the entire stage, dozens of them, each one a place where space had been cut and offset a hand’s width, so that the world around the monk became a shattered mirror, every path through it edged with dislocated planes that would shear steel like wet paper.
The lattice closed on him from every direction at once.
"HER FIRST MOVE IS THE SPATIAL LATTICE!" Julie screamed. "THE TECHNIQUE THAT ENDED THE HARBOR OUTBREAK! NO WARMUP, NO MERCY, TRIAL ONE AT FULL POWER!"
The silver seams converged on the man in saffron, a hundred edges of broken space collapsing to a single point.
And they closed on nothing.
Not because he dodged. The seams themselves bent, every one of them, curving around a sphere of quiet air two meters wide with Tianzun at its center, the way stream water bends around a stone. Her cuts, her folds, her offsets, all of her authority over space simply ended at that invisible boundary, deflected, redirected, refused.
Vixen’s eyes went wide.
’Space won’t hold him. Space won’t even TOUCH him. It’s not that he’s countering my ability.’ Cold crawled through her chest. ’It’s that space itself treats him like he’s... exempt.’
In the American alcove, Nicholas’ knuckles tightened on the rail, and the memory of fractured rings revolving in impossible directions rose behind his eye.
’The thing behind him bends space around its own head,’ he thought grimly. ’Of course her seams slide off. She’s arguing with reality about the one man reality has already made an exception for.’
On the stage, Tianzun folded his hands into his sleeves.
"One," he said gently.
Vixen exhaled, long and slow, and let the shattered lattice dissolve.
’Fine. Then we skip to the end.’
She reached up and pulled the pin from her hair, and her power changed key. The pressure that rolled off her went from sharp to vast, and everyone in the arena felt the ground drop half a step beneath their stomachs, though nothing had moved.
"Trial two," she said.
Her arms spread wide, and above the entire stage, the sky itself began to open.
Not a portal. A removal. A great oval seam unzipped across the air above Tianzun, fifty meters wide, and behind it was not darkness or light but simple, patient absence, a pocket outside the world, and it began to descend over the monk like a bell jar over a candle, its edges cutting the evening air with a sound like a held breath.
Her most powerful skill. The one the association had classified rather than named. The technique that did not defeat opponents but filed them elsewhere, sealed in a fold of nowhere until she chose to open it, and if that fold happened to close outside the tournament boundary, then the rules would do the rest.
"SHE’S GOING TO EXILE HIM!" Julie’s voice broke. "VIXEN’S FORBIDDEN TECHNIQUE, THE ONE FROM THE CLASSIFIED FILES, SHE’S CUTTING HIM OUT OF THE WORLD ITSELF!!"
The bell jar of absence came down over Tianzun completely, and sealed.
For one full second, the stage stood empty. No monk. No smile. Nothing but ruined stone and a silent oval of nowhere, and sixty thousand people began, disbelieving, to hope.
Then, from inside the sealed absence, from a fold of space with no doors and no sky, a calm voice reached every microphone in the arena.
"Two."
[A/N: Hey guys, it’s been a long month, but the month is finally coming to an end. It was rough since I had to write through headaches and my writing hasn’t been the best lately. But we made it! And I want to say thank you all for sticking with me! Let’s continue strong for next month as we near the end of this arc and enter into the next arc]