Chapter 162: Tianzun Attack (2)
"Don’t make the people panic. Just play it cool. We’re trying to figure out what’s happening."
The voice crackled into Julie’s ear through the little speaker clipped there, tight and urgent, the tone of a man watching a broadcast go somewhere no broadcast was supposed to go.
Julie straightened, plastered a smile across her face, and lifted the microphone with the confidence of a woman who had absolutely no idea what was happening either.
"Everything is perfectly under control!" she announced to two hundred million people, an awkward laugh escaping her. "Our two participants have simply... taken the fight somewhere else!" She glanced at the vast, empty crater of nothing where a stage used to be, and her smile wobbled at the edges. "...I guess."
In the production booth, the man who had told her to keep things calm slowly lowered his forehead into his palm.
’Who,’ he thought, letting out a long sigh, ’who in this entire building was the one who called her in as commentator?’
[Opalion: "somewhere else" 😭😭 JULIE the whole ARENA is gone]
[Marypaz13: she is the worst liar I have ever seen in my LIFE and I love her]
[Decato: "everything is under control" she says, staring into the literal void]
[TruMagi: give her a raise. give her whatever she wants. she’s the only thing holding this stream together and she’s TERRIBLE at it]
[ThePathOfTheHunt: not julie side-eyeing the abyss and going "i guess" I CANNOT]
Inside the dying spatial shredder, at the heart of a place that should not have permitted anything to stand, Tianzun slowly shifted his stance.
Across from him, Vixen could not move.
’How is this possible? How is he doing it?’ The thoughts spun uselessly through her mind, chasing themselves in circles. ’Who is he? What is he?’
She had watched a man stand in the center of her own apocalypse while a storm of spatial tears ripped at him from every side, and he had not so much as flinched. Not one thread of his robe had frayed. Not one hair had moved out of place.
She couldn’t believe her own eyes. Her mouth quivered, disbelief hanging on her lips, and somewhere in that endless moment the thing that left her was not her strength or her power but her will. The desire to fight the monster standing before her simply drained away, replaced by the cold, hollow understanding that she had given him everything, and everything had not been enough to make him raise a hand.
Until now.
Tianzun wore the same casual expression he had carried all day, as though none of this meant anything at all, as though a woman’s second awakening and the collapse of the world were a light breeze he’d decided to walk through. He slid one foot forward, pointing his weight in Vixen’s direction.
And a strange energy began to pour off him.
In the American alcove, Nicholas kept his one good eye fixed on the monk, the Third Eye still open behind it, burning through the veil the rest of the world couldn’t pierce.
’He’s going to use it,’ he thought, his chest tightening. ’His ability. His real one.’
Through the borrowed sight, Nicholas saw it begin to take shape.
Behind Tianzun, vast and silent, a great statue unfolded into being. It sat with one leg folded over the other, serene and enormous, and in its hands it held a wheel. And on that wheel, turning slowly in the dark behind the monk, were engravings. Thousands of them. No, millions. Countless images carved into the rim and the spokes and the hub, things and beings without number, every one of them etched in impossible detail, an entire world of forms spinning quietly behind a smiling man.
Some of the carvings were beasts. Some were men. Some were shapes Nicholas had no name for and did not want one, coiled and winged and many-limbed, and as the wheel turned, each engraving seemed to breathe, as though every single thing ever carved into it was, in some small and dreadful way, alive. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful and most wrong thing he had ever laid the Third Eye upon, and he could not look away from it.
Nicholas stared, transfixed, drinking in every line of it.
And then the being holding the wheel seemed to feel his gaze.
Slowly, with an attention vast enough to crush a mind, it began to turn toward him.
’Don’t look this way,’ Nicholas thought, ice flooding his veins. ’Don’t. Don’t.’
He tore his eye away.
He remembered what had happened the last time that thing had noticed him. The way it had reached back down the length of his own sight and nearly emptied him out through the Third Eye like water from a cup. He was not going to let that happen again. Not here. Not with his body already broken and his reserves already thin.
He clicked his tongue in distaste, his gaze dropping away, and the vision collapsed. In its place was only the empty arena floor once more, barren and ordinary, the veil sliding shut over the truth.
’Just when I was about to catch a real glimpse,’ he thought, frustration curling through him. Then, quieter, steadier: ’But at least I saw something. The wheel. The statue. Whatever’s carved into that thing... that’s the heart of it.’
"Did you see anything?"
Selena’s voice cut in from beside him. She was watching him closely, suspicion narrowing her eyes. He had been too calm since the moment the arena vanished, too still, his gaze fixed on empty air for far too long for a man looking at nothing. She had supervised him long enough to know the difference between Nicholas seeing nothing and Nicholas choosing not to say what he saw.
Nicholas was quiet for a moment.
He could have told her. Could have described the statue, the folded leg, the wheel and its million carvings, the way it had begun to turn its terrible attention toward him. But the words would have meant nothing to her without the sight to carry them, and worse, they would have meant something to Dana, who missed nothing, and the last thing this exhausted, injured moment needed was the association learning that Phantom could see the shape of a god.
"I could see the two of them," he said at last, his voice low. "She’s used up all three of her trials." His expression turned grim, the exhaustion and the cold understanding settling over his features together. "Tianzun’s attacking now."
Selena’s breath caught. "Attacking? What does that even look like? Nicholas, what is he going to..."
She didn’t finish.
Because just then, in the center of the empty arena, space tore open, and every soul in the colosseum turned to look.