Chapter 177: Paying The Price
Opening his Third Eye completely changed how Nicholas perceived the battlefield.
The circle of forty smiling Monkey King clones suddenly lost their solid appearance.
They dissolved into hollow outlines made of flickering smoke and borrowed light. They were like empty suits standing in a ring, with nothing actually inside them.
Empty. Empty. Empty.
Nicholas swept his gaze across the circle, checking them one by one. Every single one came up as a fake—nothing more than painted figures standing on painted feet.
Except for one.
Off to his right, at his four o’clock position, a single figure burned solid against the sea of illusions. It carried actual weight while the rest had none. It was a real physical body standing in a crowd of holographic pictures.
’There.’
In that exact same second, the terrifying entity behind the wheel turned its attention directly onto him.
Nicholas felt the reaction instantly. It was the same overwhelming sensation he had experienced before—a massive, crushing weight sliding down his line of sight, reaching back toward his mind through the very Third Eye.
Tianzuns warning echoed in his mind, if he held his gaze for even a second too long, this force would pour into him and completely drain his consciousness out like water from a tipped cup. Every single nerve in his body screamed at him to break eye contact.
He shut his Third Eye immediately and looked away.
Despite the panic, he held onto the coordinate.
Four o’clock. The solid one. The price for that quick glimpse was a severe, blinding pain behind his eye and a warm line of blood that began trickling down his forehead the moment his eyelid closed.
’Found you. Now I just have to reach you.’
Nicholas pushed himself up off his knee and lunged forward, but the ring of copies closed in around him immediately.
What followed was the most brutal thirty seconds of the entire fight. The clones did not fight like reckless copies. They moved together like forty arms attached to a single mind.
There was no hesitation between their movements, no delay, and no moment where one copy had to wait for another to strike.
Every empty lane Nicholas tried to teleport into already had a heavy golden staff swinging through it before he even materialized.
Desperate to clear a path, he fired a spatial bullet straight through the skull of a clone to his left. The hit was clean; the clone burst into a cloud of dark smoke. But before that smoke could even drift away into the air, two more clones stepped into the gap to replace it.
Nicholas tried to fold space toward the solid target at four o’clock, but three clones instantly threw their bodies directly into his path.
He lost his line of movement, lost his angle, and got completely disoriented in a wild forest of spinning golden rods and laughing faces. Within seconds, he had been spun around so many times that he could no longer tell which direction four o’clock even was anymore.
A heavy golden staff slammed across his right shoulder, spinning him off his feet. Before he could recover, another staff cracked into his left thigh, dropping him to a knee with a sharp gasp. He folded space on pure instinct to escape the follow-up strike, reappearing several meters away, but a third staff was already swinging for his head the moment he arrived.
They were always waiting for him. The forty clones effectively owned every single square meter of the arena floor, while Nicholas only owned the tiny patch of ground his feet were currently standing on.
’I can’t reach him,’ Nicholas realized, breathing heavily as sweat and blood ran into his eyes. ’Every time I try to push toward the real one, he buries me in a wave of fakes and I lose my sense of direction. And the moment I open the Third Eye again to relocate him, that massive entity is going to flood into my mind and destroy me.’
The math of the battle was cold, cruel, and simple. He had enough energy left for one Void attack. That meant one shot at one target.
He could not afford to throw it away blindly at a shadow, and he could not afford to keep using the Third Eye to look for his target. He was actively bleeding from his forehead, his mouth, and somewhere deep inside his chest where a cracked rib had stopped being just a painful injury and had turned into a ticking countdown timer.
Meanwhile, the actual Monkey King was standing in the crowd without even breathing hard.
Up in the viewing alcove high above the arena stage, Selena’s confident grin had completely disappeared.
"He can’t get to him," she said softly. Her voice sounded thin, stripped of all its usual confidence. "Dana, whatever the strategy was supposed to be, he can’t close the distance. Every single time he tries to make a move, ten more of those copies show up out of nowhere."
Dana did not offer a reply. She remained staring down at the arena floor with an intense, unblinking focus. She had gambled everything on Phantom winning this match, and now she was forced to watch that bet fall apart right in front of her eyes.
There was no emotion on her cold face to soften the reality of what was happening down below.
Down on the main arena field, the clones suddenly backed off in unison. They flowed smoothly into a loose, wide circle around the bleeding, swaying man trapped in the middle. Then, the real voice of the trickster came echoing out of all forty mouths at the exact same time, creating a terrifying wall of sound.
"You’re not having fun anymore," the chorus said, their voice vibrating through the cracked concrete floor of the stage. "That’s a real shame. You were so much fun to fight just a minute ago."
All forty clones raised their golden staffs into the air at the same time.
"Let me show you a big one."
The clones leapt.
Every single one of them launched into the air at once. Forty golden rods came descending toward Nicholas from every possible angle of the compass, forming a tight, closing cage of blunt force. There was no gap in the attack, no safe lane left to teleport into, and no square meter of space left uncovered. It was clearly the end of the fight. Nicholas could see the reality of it as plainly as he could see anything else.
There was literally nowhere left for him to run.
’A spatial fold doesn’t actually block a staff,’ the thought flashed cold and fast through his mind as the circle of weapons descended toward his head. ’The tip of the staff just slices right through the portal. It refuses to let its path be altered.’
He decided not to fold himself this time.
Instead, he folded the space between everyone else.
With a surge of effort, Nicholas activated a hundred tiny spatial warps across the arena at once. He didn’t aim them at any specific clone, nor did he target any particular weapon. He simply scattered them into the empty air like a dense minefield of collapsing spatial pockets, filling every single trajectory the falling staffs were using.
When the golden weapons hit the warps, they did exactly what they always did.
They tore right through them. Every heavy rod that made contact with a distortion instantly snapped the warp flat, forcing the space to smooth back out to its normal state. But clearing those spatial obstructions took effort and time. For one brief instant—one single split second—forty staffs were busy forcing their way through a hundred spatial warps instead of falling onto Nicholas’ skull. Their clean arcs stuttered, their flawless combat rhythm broke, and the whole closing cage of attacks hitched in mid-air as it tried to clear out the spatial debris he had thrown into its path.
That single split second was all the gap Nicholas needed.
As the smoke from the dying portals hung across the stage like a thick grey curtain, Nicholas opened his streaming Third Eye for a fraction of a second. Through the haze, he spotted the one figure on the entire stage that hadn’t flinched from the trick. It was the only figure that hadn’t needed to clear a path for its weapon—the solid, real shape standing perfectly calm at the four o’clock position while thirty-nine fakes scrambled to recover their momentum.
It was the real Monkey King.
Nicholas moved before the intense pain behind his forehead could stop him.
He dumped every remaining scrap of energy he had left into a single, desperate teleport. He vanished from the center of the cage and reappeared in the tiny half-meter of open air right beside that solid, smiling shape. He materialized low to the ground and fast, slipping well inside the broad striking range of the god’s staff. He was closer now than he had been during the entire fight—close enough to actually feel the strange, heavy energy radiating off the god’s skin.
Nicholas pulled his right fist back.
He didn’t hesitate for a second. The Void power uncoiled completely inside his body for the first time since his birthday night. It roared straight up his arm, screaming to be released onto the one target it had always been meant for. His fist pulled back through the hanging grey smoke, aiming directly for the wide, surprised eyes of the trickster god who had finally run out of clones to hide behind.
Every power he had built up, every single fight he had survived, and every point he had bled to earn was gathered into this one closing hand.
’Got you.’
And Nicholas threw the punch.