Chapter 208: Grief Of An Impure
The lingering smoke of phosphorus and burning timber drifted across the ruins of St. Jude’s Plaza, but the atmosphere felt far heavier than simple ash.
On the grand execution stage, the dead body of Malik Vance lay limp, unmoving, and rapidly cooling against the blood-stained boards. The mutagen in his veins had ceased its mechanical cycle. The terrifying figure who had brought the entire Hero Association to its knees had been reduced to an empty shell, his heart severed by a jagged fragment of carbon steel.
At the foot of the eastern stairs, Hexi pressed both hands against his temples, violently blinking away the remaining white static that burned behind his retinas. His vision flickered back into focus, swimming through gray mist, until the silhouette atop the platform resolved into absolute clarity.
He saw the broken blade. He saw the pooling crimson fluid. He saw the still, lifeless eyes of Malik Vance staring blankly at the pale sky.
The world seemed to stop spinning.
Hexi’s knees trembled. A breath caught in his throat, tight and razor-sharp, before escaping in a quiet, ragged gasp that sounded like tearing silk.
"No," Hexi breathed, his voice small, fragile, and utterly shattered. "No, no, no... Master..."
He took a stumbling step forward, his boot catching on the edge of a shattered stone balustrade. He fell to his hands and knees in the grit, his fingernails digging deep into the cracked asphalt until the skin beneath the cuticles split and bled. He stared upward in sheer, unadulterated disbelief, desperately waiting for Malik to push himself off the planks, to reveal another contingency, to smile his cold, superior smile and declare that everything was proceeding according to design.
Nothing moved on the stage except the slow, heavy rise and fall of Nicholas’s bruised chest.
A profound, suffocating reality crashed down on Hexi. The man who had given him purpose, the architect who had plucked him from the gutter of the underworld and built an empire of revenge around him, was gone. Dead. Murdered by a filthy mercenary who fought for pocket change.
The grief did not stay sorrow for long. It curdled, boiling in an instant into a blinding, hysterical madness that consumed every shred of rationality in Hexi’s mind.
"MASTER!"
The shriek tore from Hexi’s throat with such feral, ear-splitting agony that it distorted the audio pickups on Julie’s hidden camera pods. The veins in Hexi’s neck bulged purple against his pale skin. Tears cut furious, muddy tracks through the grime on his face, but his eyes burned with an unhinged, apocalyptic bloodlust.
"You killed him!" Hexi screamed, clawing at his own chest as he scrambled back to his feet. "You filthy, coin-chasing vermin! You butcher! You broke the only thing in this world that mattered!"
Hexi reached down to the heavy tactical harness strapped across his torso and thighs. He did not bother setting delivery nozzles, calibrating dispersion rates, or checking wind vectors. With frantic, violent tugs, he ripped the safety pins from all six of his reserved heavy chemical cylinders.
These were the forbidden stocks. The unrefined, concentrated bio-corrosive agents and neuro-liquefying compounds that Malik had ordered him to keep strictly in reserve for city-wide scorched-earth protocols.
Hexi smashed the pressure valves against the stone steps.
"DIE!" Hexi howled, spraying the boiling, iridescent green and black chemical sludge across the stairs and into the air. "I will melt your flesh from your bones! I will dissolve your eyes! I will boil every single one of you until there is nothing left to bury!"
Thick, hissing clouds of pressurized, acidic vapors erupted violently, churning upward in thick, churning billows. The stone steps beneath the chemical flow began to sizzle and dissolve into frothing foam, releasing a foul, choking stench of sulfur, acid, and melting calcium. Hexi drew twin jagged daggers coated in virulent toxin, sprinting up the corroding steps through his own lethal vapors, completely uncaring if the splashback dissolved his own skin.
He had entirely lost his mind, and in that madness, he was far more dangerous than he had ever been under Malik’s calculated orders.
From the northern rubble, a mountain of concrete shifted with a low, grinding roar.
Zayx pulled himself up from the collapsed maintenance pit. His massive frame was drenched in black engine grease and his own crimson blood. His collarbone hung at an unnatural, broken angle, his left hamstring was deeply lacerated, and a severe concussion clouded his vision with double images.
Yet, as the sound of Hexi’s hysterical screams reached him, Zayx’s eyes locked onto the stage. He saw Malik’s corpse. The realization hit the wounded giant like a shot of adrenaline directly into his heart.
Zayx did not care about the tactical retreat, nor did he care that his bones were ground to splinters. A primal, monstrous fury overtook him. Roaring like a mortally wounded beast, Zayx grabbed a six-foot slab of reinforced iron rebar from the collapsed colonnade, using it as a brutal two-handed club as he charged up the western ramp at full tilt.
From the dark undercarriage of the wooden platform, Shadow tore himself free from the debris. His right arm was limp, his wrist still dislocated from Nicholas’s brutal lock, but his left hand held a serrated trench knife. His eyes were wide with terrified rage.
The Master’s death had broken the leash. There was no strategy left. There was no coordination. The remaining lieutenants had devolved into a pack of rabid wolves, throwing their entire physical existence into a suicidal frenzy to tear apart the heroes before the dome could ever fall.
On the main platform, behind Nicholas, the situation was utterly dire.
Eric was kneeling, his hands pressing against the wooden floorboards as he tried desperately to stand. His wrists were raw meat from the kinetic collars, his massive muscles trembling with exhaustion. Without his impure strength, his immense body weight was an agonizing anchor. Beside him, Dana was supporting her fractured ribs, barely able to keep her balance, while Walküre and Mercury lay half-conscious against the stage railings.
They were titans of the Hero Association, champions who had leveled cities, yet right now, stripped bare by Joan’s script, they were nothing more than bruised, defenseless civilians waiting for the slaughter.
"Nicholas..." Eric grunted through clenched teeth, his voice thick with blood. "Move... you can’t take all three of them like this... get out of here..."
Nicholas did not move.
He stood squarely at the center of the stage’s upper landing, directly between the raging lieutenants and the helpless heroes.
His black hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and dark blood. The left side of his tactical vest was shredded, soaked through with crimson from the fractured ribs that stabbed into his lungs with every shallow, agonizing breath. His left eye was swollen half-shut from Malik’s earlier strikes, leaving only his right eye, cold, steady, and unblinking, to gauge the three converging vectors of death.
Nicholas raised his right hand, lifting his suppressed nine-millimeter sidearm.
He aimed down the barrel at the charging Hexi, squeezing the trigger with mechanical rhythm.
Click.
The slide locked back. The chamber was empty.
Nicholas did not curse. He did not drop the weapon in panic. With smooth, practiced efficiency, his thumb hit the magazine release, letting the empty clip clatter onto the wood. His left hand dropped to his utility belt, sweeping across the tactical pouches.
Every magazine slot was empty. The ammunition was entirely spent.
Nicholas calmly tossed the useless sidearm aside. It clattered against the stage and bounced into the dust below.
He reached behind his back, drawing his only remaining weapon: the broken half of his carbon-steel combat blade. The dark metal was jagged, chipped along the fuller, and less than six inches long, stained with the Master’s arterial blood.
A single broken knife against three blood-crazed killers.
Down in the ventilation shaft, watching through the auxiliary camera display, Julie covered her mouth with trembling hands, tears spilling over her eyelids. "Nicholas... please... run..."
Across the globe, billions of people watched the lone, broken figure stand his ground. There was no backup arriving. There were no supernatural miracles coming from the heavens. There was only a battered hitman refusing to step aside.
Selena broke away from the pavilion stairs, her face pale as she raised her empty sidearm before realizing she too had fired her last round during the breach. "Nicholas! Fall back to the pavilion!"
"There is no falling back," Nicholas said.
His voice was quiet, raspy, and completely devoid of fear. It did not carry the booming theatricality of a hero’s final stand, but the absolute, immovable resolve of a man who had made a contract with his own life.
"I took the money," Nicholas murmured, adjusting his grip on the jagged hilt of the broken steel. "I finish the job."
Hexi reached the top of the stairs first, his daggers flashing in a frenzied, downward cross-slash, trailing acidic green droplets. Behind him, Zayx leaped into the air with a deafening roar, bringing the iron rebar down like an executioner’s hammer, while Shadow lunged from the blind flank with a low, disemboweling thrust.
Nicholas lowered his center of gravity, took half a breath against the blinding fire in his cracked ribs, and stepped directly into the storm.