Chapter 156: Phantom Vs Veloce
Nicholas moved. Calculating where the speedster was going to appear next, he placed himself there and readied himself.
The boy’s full-power strike screamed in from the left, the whole arena’s momentum packed into one small fist, aimed at the space where a kneeling, broken champion should have been.
The space was empty.
And Nicholas was standing in the boy’s landing zone, one step ahead of him, his fist already thrown.
Veloce’s eyes went wide. Too fast to stop. That was the cruelty of his own gift; at the speed he moved, there was no braking, no swerving, only the line he’d committed to, and the line ran straight through a waiting fist. He tried to twist. He was far, far too fast to twist.
The blow caught him clean across the collarbone.
CRACK!
The sound cut through the arena’s roar like a whip, and the fastest boy in the southern hemisphere left his own straight line for the first time all match, spinning off it in a tumbling green blur that skipped twice across the broken stage before he caught himself on all fours, sliding, wide-eyed, ten meters from where physics said he should have been.
Silence rolled across the colosseum.
Veloce stared at the man in black through the settling dust, chest heaving.
"...How," he breathed. "You can’t even see me. Nobody sees me. How did you know where..."
"I didn’t see you." Nicholas lowered his fist, blood dripping from his reopened cheek, his one good eye flat and calm. "I watched where you’d already been."
He took a step forward, and it was Veloce, unhurt speedster, fresh and whole against a champion held together with tape, who took a step back.
"Six times," Nicholas said. "You circle left before you strike high. You cross behind before you go low. You’ve never once broken the pattern, because your speed made you lazy. Why hide a tell when nobody can catch it?" Another step. "I don’t need to catch it. I just need to be standing where it ends."
’Fast things run on rails,’ he thought, watching the boy’s breathing quicken. ’A bullet is faster than any man alive and it still only goes where it’s pointed. He pointed himself at me a dozen times. I finally read the barrel.’
Veloce’s grin came back, but it was shakier now, and underneath it his eyes had gone bright and desperate.
"Okay," he said. "Okay! So you read the old pattern. So I make a new one!"
He vanished.
And this time he was faster.
The green ring returned around the stage, but wilder now, no rhythm to it, the boy scrambling his own timing on purpose, striking high then high then low, crossing left then left again, tearing up his own habits by the root and throwing them away. Blows rained on Nicholas from angles that refused to repeat, and the champion’s rising guard could no longer predict a thing.
"HE’S CHANGED HIS GAME!" Julie screamed. "VELOCE THREW OUT THE PATTERN! PHANTOM’S READING NOTHING NOW!"
[Startrame: he adapted MID FIGHT. the kid’s a genius]
[Marypaz13: no no no phantom just figured him out, don’t let him lose it now]
[yanko_abreu: BRASIL. this is the boy Raoi believed in. LOOK AT HIM GO]
Nicholas took a hit to the temple, another to the kidney, a third across the already-broken rib, and his knee touched the stone again.
And something almost like a smile touched his split lip.
’Good. Now you’re thinking. Now you’re improvising.’ Blood ran into his eye and he let it. ’And a boy improvising at the edge of his own speed makes twice the mistakes he did on rails. You didn’t erase the pattern, Veloce. You just traded a slow, clean one for a fast, sloppy one.’
The blows kept raining. Nicholas knelt in the storm, breathing slow, one eye closed, and stopped trying to see the boy at all.
He listened.
The scrape of a foot planting to change direction. The hiss of air closing before a strike. The half-beat of silence, always the same half-beat, in the instant before Veloce committed to a new line, because even a genius improvising at supersonic speed needed one fraction of a heartbeat to decide.
’There it is. The new tell. The pause before the choice.’
His hand curled against the stone.
{Charm Points: 4,220}
’You can outrun my eyes. You can outrun the whole world’s eyes.’ The hitman’s breathing went to nothing, the way it used to behind a scope, in the last still second before a contract closed. ’You cannot outrun the moment you make up your mind.’
Veloce wound up for the finishing blow, scrambled and new and unpredictable, screaming in from an angle he had never used.
And in the half-beat where the boy decided, in the fraction of silence before his feet committed to the line, Nicholas moved into it.
Not fast. He didn’t need to be fast. He only needed to already be there.
His hand closed around Veloce’s wrist mid-flight.
The boy’s own velocity did the rest. A speedster at full sprint is a thing of terrible momentum and no brakes, and Nicholas simply became the fixed point that momentum turned around, pivoting on his heel, redirecting all that unstoppable speed up and over and down, the way he’d flipped a temple disciple an age ago, and drove the fastest boy in the world into the center of the stage with the full weight of his own headlong charge.
BOOM.
The stone cratered. Dust erupted. And when it cleared, Veloce lay in the pit, gasping, pinned under a grip he could not out-accelerate, his speed useless the instant his feet left the ground.
He looked up at the man in black, and past the pain, incredibly, he was laughing.
"...Raoi said," he wheezed, "he said you’d probably win no matter who we sent. I told him no way. I told him I was faster than anything alive." His head fell back against the stone. "I hate it when he’s right."
His palm slapped the ground twice.
BWOOOOOM.
"VELOCE YIELDS!!" Julie’s voice tore loose. "MATCH NINE GOES TO PHANTOM! AMERICA’S CHAMPION STANDS ON FOUR STRAIGHT, FOLKS, FOUR! HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED? HAS ANYONE EVER DONE THIS?!"
The screens flashed their private verdict to a man who read it alone.
{VICTORY: PHANTOM. AMERICA}
{Ding!}
{Four battles. Four legends. The world has never seen your like.}
{+2,900 Charm points}
Nicholas released the boy’s wrist, and then, because the kid was eighteen and had fought his heart out, he reached down and pulled Veloce up onto his feet the same way he’d pulled up Mercury and Hunter and Fengyin before him.
Veloce swayed, clutching his collarbone, and looked at the champion with open, aching wonder.
"What are you?" he asked, quiet enough that only Nicholas heard it. "Really. What are you?"
Nicholas looked down at the exhausted, grinning boy, and for once he gave something close to an honest answer.
"Someone who’s been doing this a very long time," he said. "Longer than you’d believe."
He turned toward the American alcove and raised one bloody, shaking hand, and sixty thousand people gave him back a wall of sound that shook the last loose stones from the barrier rim.
Across the arena, in the Brazilian alcove, Veloce’s teammates were already climbing down to carry their last son home. In the German alcove, Walküre watched the champion with cool, measuring eyes. In the Australian alcove, a small bandaged girl clapped with both hands.
And at the front of the Chinese alcove, alone, Tianzun rose fully to his feet.
The monk set down his prayer beads on the rail. For the first time all day, his hands were empty.
He looked across the ruined arena at the swaying, bleeding, victorious man who had carved through the strongest fighters of every nation on this single endless day, and the calm, bottomless smile he had worn since dawn finally, slowly, widened into something else.
Anticipation.
The wheel above the stage began to turn again, and every soul in the colosseum knew, without being told, whose name was coming.