Chapter 206: Overdrive And Overwhelmed
The mechanical manifold on Malik Vance’s shoulder screamed.
It was a piercing, violent shriek of strained titanium valves and boiling fluids. The luminescent tubes pulsing along his neck flared from crimson into an incandescent, blinding scarlet. Through the translucent catheter, the mutagen dumped into his subclavian artery in thick, pressurized surges.
The mutation did not simply swell; it violently erupted.
The obsidian chitin along Malik’s left arm thickened into jagged plates of armor, the bone spurs extending past his knuckles like serrated butcher’s blades. The veins across his left temple and cheek blackened, pulsing beneath pale skin with enough raw, synthetic torque to rupture human flesh.
The air around him warped under an unnatural thermal plume.
"You speak of contracts and rent, mercenary," Malik whispered, his voice vibrating with a monstrous, dual-toned resonance. "Let us see if your body can cash the check."
He vanished.
Nicholas’s single eye widened as the air in front of him displaced with the force of an artillery blast.
There was no telegraph, no windup, and no human deceleration. Malik crossed ten yards in the space between heartbeats, reappearing directly in Nicholas’s guard. The ceremonial blade sliced downward in a blinding arc, backed by hundreds of pounds of mutated, hydraulic force.
Nicholas brought his carbon blade up in a two-handed cross-block.
CRACK.
The sheer kinetic impact did not just ring out; it shattered the floorboards beneath Nicholas’s boots. The shockwave tore through his wrists, radiating up his forearms and slamming into his shoulder joints. The hardened carbon steel groaned, micro-fractures spider-webbing across the dark metal.
Nicholas didn’t try to hold the weight. He pivoted his left foot, rolling the blade to slip the killing blow off to his flank.
The ceremonial steel tore through the stage, cleaving a two-inch-wide trench through solid oak and iron framing as if it were parchment.
Before Nicholas could counter with a point-blank thrust, Malik’s mutated left backhand slammed into his ribs.
THUD.
The blunt, armored knuckles struck with the force of a speeding truck. The sound of two lower ribs snapping echoed sickeningly over the broadcast feed.
Nicholas was launched fifteen feet across the platform, his boots skidding through splinters and dried blood before he caught his balance with a hand planted flat against the floor. Blood welled in the back of his throat, coppery and warm, dripping past his clenched teeth onto the timber.
He spat a crimson glob to the side, his breath hitching as the sharp, stabbing fire in his left side flared with every shallow inhale.
"Technique," Malik said, taking a slow, heavy step forward. Each footfall cracked the planks beneath him. "Footwork. Angles. The sad, desperate parlor tricks of baseline humans who refuse to admit their obsolescence."
Malik lunged again.
What followed was not a duel; it was an execution in fast-forward.
Nicholas fought like a man trapped in a cage with a berserk engine. He ducked beneath a horizontal slash that decapitated a decorative stone lion behind him. He parried a vertical chop, the impact sending searing agony through his cracked ribs. He drove his secondary combat knife upward into the exposed armpit of the Master’s mutated limb, but the sharpened steel skidded uselessly off the dense, ossified chitin, leaving only a shallow white scratch.
Malik countered with a lightning-fast elbow to Nicholas’s jaw.
The blow spun Nicholas around, blood spraying from a deep laceration across his cheekbone. Before he could recover his footing, Malik’s ceremonial blade flashed three times in brutal succession, carving deep, bloody gashes across Nicholas’s chest, forearm, and shoulder.
Nicholas retreated step by bloody step, his blades chipped, his breath coming in ragged, wheezing gasps, surviving solely on instinct, anticipation, and the ruthless muscle memory of a thousand past assassinations.
A few yards away, inside the iron pavilion, the situation was spiraling into equal horror.
Selena leaned over the open manuscript, her fingers trembling as she pressed the tactical stylus against the ancient parchment. Beside her, Dana gripped Joan’s frail shoulders, trying desperately to break the child’s rigid posture.
"Joan, stop! Listen to my voice!" Dana pleaded, shaking the girl gently. "The fight is over! You don’t have to obey him anymore!"
The child did not blink. Her glazed, violet eyes stared straight ahead into the empty air, completely detached from the physical world.
The ink Selena was trying to write onto the yellowed page seemed to bead up and roll off like water on hot iron. The manuscript refused the correction. Worse, as Nicholas’s blood splattered across the boards outside the pavilion, the young girl’s lips moved faster, her voice rising in volume until it echoed across the entire dome like a funeral toll.
The verse she spoke had darkened into something chillingly prophetic.
[And the false shadow bled upon the wood...]
Joan’s small, trembling voice resonated inside every mind in the state, cold and absolute.
[His blades shattered. His breath grew thin. The mercenary fell before the master of the storm, his life drained into the dust, leaving only cold steel and broken promises.]
"No!" Selena shouted, frantically trying to scratch the stylus into the fibers of the paper. "Stop reading! Joan, snap out of it!"
Outside, the words of the script seemed to physically weigh down on Nicholas’s limbs.
Malik exploded forward with a feral roar, the crimson fluid in his manifold boiling in the glass tubes. He swung his ceremonial blade with enough velocity to produce a vacuum hiss.
Nicholas raised his main carbon-steel blade for one desperate, final parry.
SNAP.
The ceremonial steel severed the weakened carbon blade in half. The broken tip spun end over end through the air, embedding itself deeply into the wooden scaffolding above.
Before Nicholas could draw a sidearm or shift his weight, Malik’s massive, mutated left claw shot forward like a steel trap.
The obsidian talons clamped around Nicholas’s throat with suffocating, bone-crushing pressure.
Malik lifted Nicholas off his feet with a single arm, the hitman’s boots dangling inches off the splintered floor. With a brutal downward slam, Malik drove Nicholas’s back hard into the stage floor, shattering the boards beneath him and pinning him flat on his back.
Nicholas gasped, his hands clawing at the thick, armored wrist crushing his windpipe. His lone eye stared upward through a veil of his own blood, his chest struggling for oxygen against the weight of Malik’s mutated knee pressing down directly onto his fractured ribs.
The live cameras mounted around the plaza captured every single agonizing second, beaming the grim reality to billions of paralyzed viewers outside the barrier.
Malik Vance stood over him, breathing heavily, the crimson veins across his face glowing like hot embers. He raised his ceremonial blade high into the air, the dark steel glinting under the pale purple light of the dome, aimed straight at the center of Nicholas’s chest.
"Look at you," Malik sneered, his lips curling into a triumphant, mocking grin. "The great Phantom. Reduced to choking in the dirt for a handful of coins. Your technique was flawless, mercenary. But against absolute, engineered evolution, you are nothing more than meat waiting for the grave."
Malik tightened his grip on the hilt, ready to drive the dark steel down to end it.
"Any last words for the audience?" Malik hissed.
Beneath the suffocating grip, pinned and bleeding out onto the splintered wood, Nicholas did not beg. He did not close his eye.
Instead, through blood-stained lips, the hitman’s mouth curled into a faint, chilling smirk.