Chapter 152: Mercury Vs Phantom
"FIGHT!!"
Mercury was polite enough to let the word finish.
Then she hit him.
Nicholas never saw her cross the distance. One instant she stood ten meters away with her hands loose at her sides, and the next, the world folded around a fist arriving at his sternum, and the only reason he lived through the opening second of the match was that Vixen’s ability was already firing, space folding him three meters sideways on pure reflex.
Her punch met the place he had been.
The stage did not crack. The stage left. A cone of stone forty meters long simply ceased to be solid matter, blasted into a fan of gravel and dust that struck the far barrier like buckshot, and the shockwave that followed knocked the front six rows back into their seats and rolled on beyond the colosseum, out over the city, rattling ten thousand windows in their frames.
Silence. Total, arena-wide, deafening silence.
Mercury straightened out of the punch and rolled her shoulder, wearing the mildly satisfied expression of a woman who had just watered a plant.
"Good reflexes," she said.
Nicholas stood in the settling dust with his heart doing something it had not done in two lifetimes.
’...That was a real punch. She threw a real punch at a fellow hero on a stage in front of children.’ His eyes tracked the forty-meter wound in the stage. ’That wasn’t ability-assisted. No element, no technique, no glow. That was just her arm.’
Flight came next. She didn’t leap; the ground simply lost its claim on her, boots drifting free of the stone, and she rose into the air with her arms crossed, unhurried, inevitable, the afternoon sun catching her like she’d been designed for exactly that lighting.
Somewhere in the stands, a child said what two hundred million people were thinking, into one of the few microphones still working.
"She’s a superhero."
That was the whole of it. Not an ability user. Not a fighter with a trick. The thing every comic had promised and every generation had waited for: a human being to whom physics was a suggestion. Strength without ceiling. Speed without process. A body the world could not argue with.
And all of it was currently looking down at Nicholas.
"You solved Hunter with patience and Fengyin with geometry," Mercury said from the sky. "I’ve been thinking all day about what you’d try on me. I genuinely couldn’t forecast it." She uncrossed her arms. "So show me."
She fell on him like the end of the world.
The next ten seconds nearly killed him five times. He folded through space, and her fist erased the coordinates behind him. He folded again, and she was already turning, reading the fold, learning the rhythm of it with obscene speed, her second punch grazing close enough to shred his sleeve and take the skin beneath. He borrowed Nectron’s gravity, slamming twenty times weight onto her shoulders mid-flight.
She noticed it. The way a swimmer notices a current. Her flight dipped a hand’s width, she frowned faintly upward, and then she accelerated through his gravity as though it were an opinion she disagreed with, and her third punch caught his crossed forearms.
Nicholas left the stage. He tore through a rubble ridge, through the wreck of a second, and buried himself in the barrier trench wall with his vision white and both arms screaming and one thought arriving with the cold clarity of a bill.
’I cannot fight this with what I own.’
The stats that had bullied Hunter and matched a temple’s discipline were furniture to this woman. His copied tricks bought seconds, and she was learning each trick faster than he could spend it. And the Void, the one lock that fit every door, sat exactly where he had chained it, beneath his promise, reserved for a monk who was watching this fight very, very closely.
’The Void stays buried. Which leaves the emergency fund.’
He pulled up the one screen he had never opened mid-combat.
{Charm Points: 5,840}
A day of miracles in front of the whole planet, priced and banked. Every cheer, every scream of his name, every one of two hundred million believers, converted into the only currency the system respected.
Mercury landed at the trench’s edge and looked down at him, curious, giving him the moment the way a duelist returns a dropped sword.
’Thank you kindly,’ Nicholas thought grimly. ’You’re funding your own problem.’
{Purchase: Strength}
{Purchase: Strength}
{Purchase: Agility. Stamina. Strength}
He spent the way he had never allowed himself to spend, and the system took his fortune and paid him back in flesh. It felt like swallowing lightning. Muscle fiber wove denser under his skin. Bone thickened along every load-bearing line. His heart found a deeper gear, and the arena’s sounds sharpened, and the ache in his taped ribs receded under the flood of a body being rebuilt at auction speed.
{Charm Points: 3,220}
He climbed out of the trench wall, rolled his neck, and met her hovering gaze.
"There it is," Mercury said softly. "There’s the thing I couldn’t forecast."
They met at the center of the ruined stage, and the tournament stopped being a tournament.
His first upgraded punch caught her descending cross, fist against fist, and the collision detonated in a ring of white that flattened every flag on the colosseum’s rim. She blinked, looked at her own knuckles with open interest, and answered, and he answered that, and the stage floor began to fail in whole sections beneath a rhythm of impacts that registered, faintly, on seismographs across the harbor.
But she was still winning. He could feel it in his bones, literally, each block driving hairline fractures deeper. Matching one punch in three was not matching her.
{Purchase: Strength. Strength. Agility}
{Charm Points: 1,750}
Better. Two in three. Her elbow still lifted him off the earth. His counter still folded her sideways through a stone ridge, the first time all day the crowd had seen Mercury moved, and she came out of the ridge with dust in her hair and delight climbing openly into her face.
{Purchase: Strength. Stamina}
{Charm Points: 820}
They stopped touching the ground. She fought in the air because the air was hers, and he followed her into it on stolen space-folds and gravity’s leash, flickering from angle to angle around a woman who flew like a thrown spear, and the sky over the colosseum turned into a war of detonations, flat cracks of thunder stacking one on another, two blurred shapes writing destruction between the clouds while sixty thousand necks craned as one.
[Opalion: the AIR is exploding. just the AIR]
[Marypaz13: he’s getting STRONGER mid fight. explain it. SOMEBODY EXPLAIN IT]
[TruMagi: analysts are in shambles. every model of Phantom’s limits just died in real time]
[Sunny22: this isn’t a hero match anymore. this is the fights my grandad’s comics promised me]
In the American alcove, nobody was speaking. Selena had Dana’s wrist in a white grip and did not appear to know it. Across the arena, Tianzun stood at the very front of the Chinese alcove, beads hanging forgotten from his fist, watching the sky with an expression his own nation had never seen him wear.
High above the stands, the two of them crashed together, broke apart, and hung in the air thirty meters from one another, both bleeding.
That was the detail the cameras found and held: a thin line of red at the corner of Mercury’s mouth. The stream chat went white with disbelief. Mercury, bleeding. There was no footage of Mercury’s ability because there had never needed to be; nothing had ever pushed her past strolling.
She touched the blood with one knuckle and looked at it for a long moment.
"Three years," she said, and her voice carried in the stunned quiet. "Three years since anyone made me bleed. I’d forgotten what it costs to smile this hard."
Nicholas hung opposite her on a folded knot of gravity, chest heaving, one eye swelling, arms carrying fractures like cargo, and beneath his flat expression the last screen glowed its quiet warning.
{Charm Points: 87}
The fortune of a worldwide legend, spent to the lint in one fight, and the purchase had bought him exactly this: parity. Even. Level. Matching, punch for punch, the definition of a superhero.
’Eighty-seven points,’ he thought. ’No fund left. No Void allowed. Whatever happens next, I settle it with what I’ve already bought.’
Mercury wiped her mouth, and smiled at him with genuine, terrible warmth.
"You’ve matched me," she said. "So let’s find out what’s above matching."
She turned her face upward.
And she rose, wings of nothing, engines of nothing, just a woman climbing the sky in a straight and accelerating line, up past the clouds’ torn ceiling, up until she was a glinting point in the blue, a coin of light at the top of the world directly above the colosseum.
The coin paused.
Then it began to fall.