Chapter 184: Who’s Going To Pay Me?
"We... we are receiving reports now. The dome over the state has not lifted. I repeat, the dome has not lifted."
The news anchor’s voice cracked halfway through her sentence, and she didn’t even bother to hide her panic.
Across the entire world, on every screen in every home, the exact same horrifying footage played on a continuous loop. A vast, translucent dome—curving from horizon to horizon—sealed an entire state beneath it like a specimen trapped under glass. And beneath that dome, where the strongest heroes on the planet had gathered to answer a crisis, there was now only total silence.
"The heroes sent to respond to the prison outbreak have gone dark," the anchor continued, reading frantically from a script that kept shaking in her hands. "All of them. Every hero who entered the affected zone has stopped transmitting signals. We have lost contact with the emergency response team. We have lost contact with the local heroes. We have lost contact with... with everyone inside."
The screen cut to a shaking aerial shot, filmed from a news helicopter that dared not fly any closer to the boundary. The dome shimmered in the night sky—beautiful, strange, and terrible. Around its massive base, the city burned.
"Authorities are urging all citizens in neighboring regions to evacuate immediately and shelter in secured locations," the anchor read, her voice trembling. "Do not approach the affected zone. Do not attempt to enter. We are being told that anything, or anyone, currently inside that dome is..."
She stopped suddenly. She swallowed hard, staring at the teleprompter, and forced out the next words.
"...not coming out."
The panic hit humanity the way panic always hits—all at once, and everywhere.
In major cities that had never once feared for their safety because the heroes had always been there to save them, terrified people poured out into the streets. They emptied grocery store shelves in minutes. They filled the highways with bumper-to-bumper traffic until the roads stopped moving entirely. Parents pulled their children out of school in the middle of the day, driving blindly without knowing where they were going, only that they needed to be far away. Emergency sirens wailed in a hundred cities. Prayers rose in a hundred different languages.
Because for several decades, the world had answered one fundamental question the exact same way every single time: Who will protect us?
The heroes. The heroes will protect us. The heroes always protect us.
And now, for the first time in living memory, that answer had gone completely quiet.
The strongest elite fighters of a dozen nations—the winners and losers of a tournament the entire world had watched just hours ago, the names children wore on their backpacks and adults bet fortunes on—had all walked into a dome, and not a single one had walked back out. Mercury. Nectron. Vixen. The undefeated monk, Tianzun. Names that had felt eternal that morning had become names spoken in the past tense by nightfall.
"Who will protect us now?"
The desperate question rippled out across the mourning planet—from screen to screen, street to street—and found no answer anywhere.
Almost anywhere.
Inside the dome, there was no panic at all.
There was only a ruined, ash-filled street lit by burning buildings, and the strongest people on Earth standing on it with absolutely nothing left in their hands.
They had felt the shift the exact moment the dome had closed over them. They felt their power drain straight out of their bodies like water through a broken dam, leaving them hollow, ordinary, and afraid. Nectron flexed his trembling fingers and felt no gravity answer his command. Mercury stood with her feet planted on cracked asphalt she could no longer leap away from. Vixen reached desperately, over and over, for a spatial fold that simply would not open. Walküre’s burning wings were completely gone, her spear suddenly reduced to just a heavy piece of metal in ordinary hands.
And across from them, unbothered and unhurried, stood the six villains who had done this.
The Master stood in the direct center, with the small, pale girl named Joan seated on a fallen concrete slab beside him, a blank manuscript open in her lap. Hexi rocked on his heels, giggling softly to himself. Shadow sat half-melted into the darkness at the Master’s feet. Zayx stood with his arms crossed, watching the powerless heroes with open contempt. And somewhere high above, unseen on a broken ledge with a sniper rifle resting across his knees, Sniper kept watch over the entire street.
Six of them. Standing against the fallen might of the entire world.
"What do you want?"
It was Dana who spoke up first. She stepped to the front of the powerless heroes, her voice surprisingly steady even though her hands were visibly shaking at her sides.
"You’ve made your point. You have us trapped. Whatever this is, and whatever you’re trying to achieve, just say it."
The Master turned to regard her, offering a warm, patient smile.
"An excellent question," he said politely. "And one that certainly deserves a proper answer. But not just for you." He tilted his head slightly. "No, I think it’s best if the whole world hears this. It would be rude to keep them waiting, don’t you think? They’re all watching, after all."
He raised one hand, signaling down to the shadow beneath his boots. "Shadow, if you would."
The girl in the dark sighed, reaching her hand out through the shadows. Somewhere far beyond the dome, a secure broadcast signal she had secretly threaded into the outside world hours ago went live.
The Master drew a small transmission device from his coat and lifted it before his face.
And across the entire planet, every single screen instantly changed.
The weeping news anchor vanished. The looping footage of the shimmering dome vanished. In their place, on every television, phone, and digital billboard in every city on Earth, appeared the calm, smiling face of a man no one recognized.
"Good evening, world," the Master said.
In emergency shelters, crowded homes, and jammed cars on frozen highways, two billion people went dead silent.
"You are frightened. That is completely understandable. You’ve been told your heroes are gone, that no one is coming to protect you, and you are asking the question your kind has always asked in the dark." His calm smile did not waver for a second. "Who will protect us now?"
He paused, looking directly into the screen. "I am here to give you a different question to ask."
He stepped aside slightly. The hidden camera shifted to show the heroes trapped behind him—powerless, cornered, and terrified. The absolute strongest people alive, reduced to ordinary men and women standing on a burning street.
"For decades, you have called these people your protectors," the Master said clearly. "I call them what they truly are: a disease. A plague that fell upon humanity and never left. Every impure, every hero, every so-called saviour is the exact same sickness wearing a brighter costume. They did not cure the plague. They are the plague." His voice remained gentle and reasonable—the voice of a patient teacher explaining an obvious fact to a child. "And a disease must be purged. That is not cruelty. That is medicine."
The powerless heroes stiffened in anger and dread.
"I have taken that heavy task upon myself," the Master continued. "Tonight, within this dome, I am going to purge every last one of them. These heroes you have wept for? I am going to kill them, one by one. And I am going to do it while the entire world watches, so that you finally understand that they were never what stood between you and the dark."
He let those terrifying words settle over the global audience.
"And to any hero still out there," he added softly, his tone almost inviting, "any saviour watching this broadcast and clenching your fists—any of you who genuinely thinks you can stop me: Please. Come. The dome is open to you. Walk right in and try to save them." His smile widened by a fraction. "I would love the company."
On the ruined street, something freezing cold moved through Dana’s chest. Her face twisted with fury as she suddenly understood his true goal.
"It’s a trap," she whispered under her breath to the heroes standing beside her. "Don’t you see it? He’s not challenging the remaining heroes. He’s baiting them. The dome doesn’t care whose side you’re on. Anyone who walks in here loses their power the exact second they cross the boundary, just like we did." Her hands curled into useless fists. "He’s not asking for a rescue mission. He’s asking the rest of the world’s heroes to walk directly into the exact same grave and disarm themselves at the door."
Across from her, the Master lowered his device, though the broadcast remained live, his face still displayed on two billion screens worldwide.
Behind Dana, a few of the local heroes completely broke under the pressure.
It was instinct more than calculated courage. A handful of lower-tier heroes, unable to simply stand there and wait to be executed, threw themselves forward at the villains with nothing but their bare fists and their desperation.
They didn’t even make it three steps.
Shadow rose silently out of the ground beneath the first hero, driving a blade into his chest before he could finish his charge. Hexi’s thick, invisible mental miasma reached out and caught two more mid-stride, gently turning them around to face their own comrades with hollow, mindless eyes. Zayx simply stepped forward and met the last one head-on, the violent sound of bones breaking making the remaining heroes flinch and freeze in place.
It was over in a matter of seconds. A clean, brutal demonstration. A reminder written in the only language that mattered: tonight, the powerless did not get to fight back.
The Master hadn’t even bother turning his head to watch the quick slaughter.
"You see?" he said pleasantly to the world, to the heroes, and to the small girl reading quietly at his side. "There is no protecting anyone. Not anymore." He gestured loosely at the fallen, the cornered, and the disarmed heroes. "This is what your saviours look like without their costumes. This is all they ever were."
He turned back to his crew, his voice dropping low and content, meant only for them to hear.
"Let the rest of them come," the Master said softly. "Every hero this world has left. Let them all come running to save these few, and lose everything the moment they step through the door." He looked down at Joan, at the manuscript open in her small hands, and at the next page waiting to be read. "The more of them that gather, the better the ending of this story will be."
An ocean away, in a quiet, high-altitude viewing alcove above a massive stadium that had not yet realized the world was ending, a battered man with one good eye sat staring up at the giant screens.
Nicholas watched the Master’s live broadcast play out across the arena monitors, his expression growing colder by the second.
Beside him, the young analyst who had been left behind with the support team looked at the screen in pure horror. He swallowed hard, turned his pale face toward the medic standing nearby, and asked the one question on his mind:
"Supervisor, I have a question... If he kills Sir Eric and Miss Dana down there, who is going to pay me my salary?"