Chapter 145: Phantom Is Dead?
Chapter 145
Under ten tons of rubble, in the dark, Nicholas took stock of himself the way he always did after surviving something he shouldn’t have.
’Forearms took the worst of it. Bruised down to the bone, but nothing’s broken. Two of my ribs don’t feel right, and my head won’t stop ringing.’ He flexed his fingers slowly in the blackness, feeling everything answer. ’Still... I’m alive. Partly because I got my guard up in time. Mostly because that hit was meant to make a point, not a corpse.’
Dust sifted through the black around him. Distantly, filtered through stone, he could hear sixty thousand people not breathing, and Julie’s cracked whisper riding above them.
Any other fighter in this tournament would already be bursting free. Roaring. Standing tall for the cameras to prove the hit hadn’t mattered.
Nicholas lay perfectly still, and watched.
Through a fist-sized gap between broken slabs, his eye tracked the golden figure at the heart of the formation. Fengyin had not moved from where he’d landed the blow. And his monstrous unbound arm...
...was trembling.
’There.’
Fine tremors, wrist to shoulder. Steam rising off the swollen limb like heat off summer asphalt. And the disciple’s breathing, which four minutes of brawling had turned to bellows-work, was now something worse: a furnace being fed.
’The locks don’t store power. They store permission. That arm is devouring him alive, right now, by the second.’ Nicholas’ mind went cold and steady, the same way it always did in the seconds before he accepted a job. ’He can’t wait. Every silent second, that arm eats his reserves and returns nothing. The formation is already a running cost. The lock is a second mortgage.’
So the smart play was the oldest one in his ledger.
’Make him come collect.’
He closed his eyes to slits, slowed his breathing to nothing, and did the thing that had ended eleven careers in his previous life.
He played dead.
Ten seconds crawled by. Twenty.
"Phantom is not moving," Julie said, and her voice wobbled on the last word. "Folks, he’s... medics are on standby, we, we may be looking at a knockout..."
[Marypaz13: no. no no no get up. GET UP]
[SirAnime_lord: he’s fine. he’s phantom. he’s fine. right? someone tell me he’s fine]
[Ybbev: that arm hit him through a RIDGE. even superhumans have limits...]
[ThePathOfTheHunt: wait. watch Fengyin’s arm. zoom in. WATCH THE ARM]
In the American alcove, Selena had one leg over the rail before Dana’s hand closed on her shoulder.
"Wait," Dana said quietly.
"He’s DOWN, Dana..."
"He’s hunting." Dana’s eyes hadn’t left the rubble, and her voice was velvet over wire. "Nobody falls that conveniently behind cover. Watch."
At the heart of the golden script, Fengyin watched too. The severity in his face had rebuilt itself, but underneath it, the furnace roared, and the trembling of his unbound arm climbed from fine to visible.
He could not wait. He knew he could not wait.
He crossed the ruined stage toward the rubble with measured temple steps, chains chiming on his sealed arm, and stopped three meters from the fallen slabs. He pressed his fists together and bowed, shallow and respectful.
"Phantom. If you are conscious, yield. There is no dishonor beneath nine locks." A pause. "If you are not conscious..."
The rubble was empty.
The understanding arrived in Fengyin’s spine before his eyes finished reporting it, that ancient animal alarm older than every temple. In the long silent seconds while the world watched a burial, a buried man with superhuman strength had shifted broken stone the way other men shift blankets, and the fist-sized gap his eye had used was the only part of him that had stayed.
Nicholas came out of the ground behind him.
Not from the rubble pile. From the trench-side shadow four meters left of it, low and silent and already inside every polite distance, and his first strike since resurrection was aimed with an accountant’s malice: not at Fengyin’s head, not at his body.
At the sealed shoulder. The locked side. The arm still wearing its chains.
CRACK!
The blow drove chain-links into flesh and spun the disciple half around, and the colosseum came apart at every seam.
"HE’S UP! HE’S UP, HE WAS NEVER DOWN, PHANTOM IS UP!!"
[Opalion: HE TUNNELED. HE ACTUALLY TUNNELED OUT LIKE A HORROR MOVIE]
[Decato: attacking the SEALED arm?? why the sealed... OH. OHHHH he’s making the strong arm do ALL the work]
[Daniel_Hoeving: playing dead to force the drain. this man fights like a bill collector]
[reinstate: Dana knew. look at her face. SHE KNEW]
Because that was the shape of the endgame, and Fengyin felt it closing around him like his own formation.
His sealed side was compromised. Which left the unbound arm, the devouring, magnificent, expensive arm, to answer everything. And the Phantom made it answer everything. He flowed around the disciple like smoke with a grudge, striking from the locked side again and again, forcing pivot after pivot, forcing the monstrous limb to swing, and swing, and swing, each miss costing furnace-fuel that no temple breathing could replace.
Fengyin understood. Of course he understood; he was a genius of his art. Which was why, grinding his heels into the golden script, he made the genius decision.
He reached for the second chain.
"LOCK TWO..."
Nicholas hit him in the throat.
Not lethally. Surgically. A half-force blade of the hand across the windpipe that turned the sacred syllable into a cough, and in the broken second that followed, the assassin swept the disciple’s root leg and rode him down toward the stone.
It should have ended there.
It nearly ended the other way.
Because Fengyin, falling, choking, spent his furnace all at once. The unbound arm blurred, and Nicholas’ world became a wall of oncoming knuckles with no time in it, nowhere to block, nowhere enough to dodge, only the assassin’s oldest reflex wrenching his skull sideways as far as anatomy allowed.
The fist passed his ear.
It took skin. It took blood. It took a line of scalp and a piece of his hearing on that side, replaced with a high pure whine, and it buried itself in the stage with a detonation that threw them both apart in a geyser of golden light and stone.
The colosseum screamed. Selena screamed something with his name in it.
Nicholas rolled through the debris, came up on one knee at the boundary’s very edge, blood sheeting down his neck, and had exactly enough time to see Fengyin already airborne, already committed, the monstrous arm cocked back behind a face that had finally, completely run out of patience. The disciple fell toward him like a temple bell dropped from heaven, and there was no surviving a clean hit, and both of them knew it.
’Close,’ Nicholas admitted.
And he stopped retreating.
He watched the arm come, the arm he had studied from inside a pile of rubble, the arm whose timing he had bought at the price of half his hearing, the beautiful predictable fully spent arm, and at the last transferable instant he was not under it anymore. He was inside its arc, hip to hip with a hundred kilos of committed momentum, one hand closing on the thick wrist, the other seizing chain-wrapped shoulder cloth, pivoting on the boundary stone like a gate swinging on its hinge.
’You paid for all this force,’ the hitman thought. ’Waste not.’
He redirected the temple bell.
Fengyin’s own power carried him past the pivot, over the boundary line, out beyond the golden edge of his own formation, and the disciple had one heartbeat of open air to meet Nicholas’ eyes, and to bow his head, before he crashed down into the trench netting in an eruption of dust.
BWOOOOOM.
The horn’s blast hit the stunned colosseum like a defibrillator.
"RING OUT!!" Julie’s voice shattered somewhere in the middle of it. "FENGYIN IS OUT OF BOUNDS! BY A MARGIN OF CENTIMETERS AND SHEER MADNESS... MATCH FIVE GOES TO AMERICAAAA!!"
The golden script across the stage flickered once, twice, and dissolved like sunlight leaving water. And the world came flooding back into Nicholas, space and gravity and sight and the warm returning hum of two hundred million screaming believers.
{Ding!}
{The world witnesses the impossible!}
{+800 Charm points}
{VICTORY: PHANTOM. AMERICA}
{POINT TRANSFER IN PROGRESS...}
{FENGYIN: 150 PTS. PHANTOM}
Nicholas knelt at the boundary stone, bleeding freely, half-deaf, breathing like a man who had recently been buried, and let the roar wash over him.
Down in the netting, Fengyin lay staring at the sky. Then, slowly, he pressed his fists together above his chest, toward the man at the edge.
"My master was right," he called up, voice wrecked and wondering. "Our sickness truly is related." A ragged breath. "But yours, Phantom... yours is much further along."
Nicholas huffed something that was almost a laugh, and raised one bloody hand off the rail in acknowledgment.
Then he lifted his eyes across the arena, past the medics already running, past sixty thousand losing minds, to the Chinese alcove, where a mountain in saffron stood at the rail with prayer beads circling his fingers once more.
Tianzun was smiling.
And for the first time all day, the monk moved his lips, slow and deliberate, a single silent word across the roaring distance, shaped precisely enough for a hitman to read.
"Soon."