Chapter 144: Phantom Is Down
’An ability similar to the Void...?!’
The realization sat in Nicholas’ chest for one long second.
And then, slowly, in full view of two hundred million people, the Phantom smiled.
It was not the camera smile. It was not the flat curve he rented out to press conferences. It was small and genuine and openly amazed, the smile of a collector finding a twin of the rarest thing he owned in a stranger’s hands.
’Incredible. All this time I thought the Void was one of one. A sealing art that swallows abilities whole... no wonder the monk said our sicknesses were related.’
He flexed his fingers and reached inward, the way a man pats his pockets after a fall. The gravity didn’t answer. Neither did the space beside it, nor the Third Eye. Even the Charm’s warm background hum was gone, and the quiet where it used to sit was strangely loud.
’If I’m being honest with myself... this might be the perfect counter to me.’ The smile didn’t fade. ’Ninety-nine fighters out of a hundred would build their whole game on powers, and this formation turns them into ordinary men in one footstep. If I were still the man who arrived at the association a year ago, this match would already be over.’
But.
He rolled his neck, and under his skin, one hundred and seventy points of Strength woke up and stretched.
The seal had taken his abilities. Every granted phenomenon, every borrowed power, every gift that acted upon the world. What it had not taken, what it seemingly could not take, was the world’s slowest, least glamorous miracle: the body itself. The stats the system had paid into his flesh, point by point, mission by mission, were not spells hovering around him.
They were him. Muscle density. Bone architecture. Nerve conduction. Bought and built and earned into meat.
’You sealed my powers, Ten Thousand Locks,’ Nicholas thought, settling into no stance at all. ’Unfortunately for you, I was superhuman before breakfast.’
Across the golden formation, Fengyin’s severe face registered its first flicker of doubt.
He had watched hundreds of ability users stand inside his seal. He knew the look: the sudden smallness, the naked shoulders, the eyes of a man realizing he had been wearing his entire worth like a coat. The Phantom was supposed to have that look.
The Phantom was smiling and cracking his knuckles.
"...You should be an ordinary man right now," Fengyin said quietly. "Why are you not an ordinary man?"
"Bad diet," Nicholas said.
He moved.
The stage rang like a struck anvil under his first step, and he crossed the formation in a black blur that dragged a wall of wind behind it. Fengyin’s forearms rose, iron chains and all, and the first exchange of the match detonated between them, a flat crack of pressure that rolled the golden light of the seal outward in shivering ripples.
The disciple slid back three meters through his own script.
His eyes went wide.
"IMPOSSIBLE!" Julie was on her feet in the commentary platform. "Our analysts are telling me Phantom’s abilities should be COMPLETELY sealed inside that formation, and he’s... folks, he’s trading PHYSICALS with a Wudang body-cultivator! WHAT is that man made OF?!"
[Opalion: the seal removed his powers and he said "okay. hands then."]
[Decato: bro’s plan B is just being built different. literally]
[Marshall_prat_4819: imagine deleting someone’s entire kit and they SMILE at you]
[infinite_shadows_2972: Fengyin’s face 😭 he’s never had the seal NOT work]
[TruMagi: so we’re telling me the ability cancel guy and the ability thief are about to have a FIST FIGHT? peak. this is peak]
Because that was the fight now, and everyone in the colosseum understood it at once.
Fengyin’s formation sealed everything that was not the body: every projection, every element, every phenomenon. It was why the disciple himself carried no visible power, why his art was bone and breath and iron chain. Inside the Ten Thousand Locks, only physical combat survived.
Two superhumans. Zero abilities. One language left.
Mano a mano.
They crashed together at the heart of the golden script, and the day’s fifth match became its most primal.
There were no dragons here. No echoes, no blood-forged blades, no leviathans. There was strength meeting strength, weight meeting weight, two men settling things the way men settled things before abilities ever existed, at a volume that cracked the rebuilt stage along its fresh seams. Nicholas fought like the assassin he was, every blow short, vicious, and thrown to end the fight outright. Fengyin answered with temple discipline, rooted stances that drank impact into the earth, palm strikes that landed like falling gates, iron chains turning his forearms into rolling shields.
A hook to the ribs. A palm to the sternum. An elbow, a knee, a headbutt traded for a headbutt, and the formation’s golden light strobed madly under their feet with every impact, script scattering and reforming like startled fish.
Nicholas hit him with a straight right that would have folded a truck. Fengyin took it on crossed chains, skidded, held, and answered with a double-palm blast that caught Nicholas square and drove him backward through a stone ridge, shattering it to gravel.
Nicholas came out of the gravel already sprinting.
They did not pause. They did not breathe theatrically or trade wisdom between exchanges. They simply worked, two engines of muscle and will grinding against each other, and the sound of it rolled around the colosseum bowl like continuous thunder.
In the American alcove, Selena’s knuckles were white again. "No abilities. He’s really doing this on body alone."
"Look at Tianzun," Dana murmured.
Selena looked. Across the arena, the monk had not sat back down. He stood at his rail with the beads motionless in his fist, and he was smiling, but it was no longer the calm forecast smile that had irritated Mercury all morning.
It was wider. Warmer. Hungrier.
’The master gets to watch his counter fight my counter,’ Nicholas thought, slipping a palm strike close enough to feel it part his hair. ’Everything I show his student, I show him. Every exchange here is a page he reads for free.’
His fist buried itself in Fengyin’s guard and sent the disciple grinding backward through his own script again.
’Can’t be helped. The alternative is losing.’
For four full minutes, the brawl held the world by the throat. And slowly, exchange by exchange, a truth began to surface that sixty thousand people could see and one temple disciple could feel in his aching bones.
Nicholas was winning.
Not by power. Their strength was a coin’s toss. By mileage. Every feint the Phantom sold cost Fengyin half a step. Every clinch ended with the assassin at the better angle. Thirty years of endings, compressed into flesh that could finally keep up with all of it, and the gap widened by one polished inch per exchange.
Blood ran from the corner of the disciple’s mouth. His breath had turned to bellows-work. He gave ground, and gave ground, and then, at the western edge of his own formation, Fengyin stopped giving ground.
He straightened out of his stance entirely.
"My master told me one more thing," he said, breathing hard, and pressed his fists together in that same temple courtesy. "He said: if the Phantom is still standing after the seal... do not insult him with locked hands."
He extended his right arm.
And Nicholas watched, instincts howling up out of two lifetimes, as the iron prayer-chain wrapped around that forearm began, link by link, to unwind.
"The Ten Thousand Locks seal the world," Fengyin said. The chain slid free and hit the stage with a sound far, far too heavy for its size, cratering the stone beneath it. "But the first ten..."
His presence erupted.
It came off him like a physical flood, pressure slamming outward through the formation, golden script screaming, dust blasting flat, and the arm he had unbound swelled, muscle coiling over muscle, veins standing like cables, the limb of something that had been kept in a cage its entire life out of mercy for everyone else.
"...seal me."
He vanished.
Nicholas’ arms came up on pure instinct, crossed, braced...
The blow landed like the end of an era.
The sound reached the top row of the colosseum as pain. Nicholas left the ground, left the formation’s heart, left the entire conversation of the fight, a black comet blasted backward across the arena to detonate through the boundary ridge in an eruption of stone and golden light, burying him at the foot of the barrier trench under ten tons of rubble.
Silence. Total, ringing, sixty-thousand-soul silence.
Julie’s whisper barely survived her throat.
"Phantom is... down."
At the center of his golden world, Fengyin lowered the monstrous arm, nine chains still coiled and waiting along his body, and spoke into the hush with the quiet regret of a doctor delivering a diagnosis.
"Nine locks remain."