Chapter 172: Sun Wukong 1
Up in the American alcove, Selena rubbed her forehead in disappointment.
"Why did he have to go farm aura now of all times?!" she yelled, throwing a hand toward the stage. "He just wasted his entire three trials! What the heck is he thinking?"
She dragged the hand down her face, and then, slowly, her frustration cooled into something else.
’Then again... he might’ve figured out something and just didn’t tell us.’ She looked back down at the field, and despite herself, a small grin tugged at her mouth. ’Phantom isn’t dumb. He’s never once done something for no reason. Whatever this is, he already knows how it ends.’
"So you’re finally growing used to his absurd behavior?" Dana asked beside her, a knowing smile on her lips as she watched the stage.
"...Tsk."
"You’re not wrong, though." Dana’s eyes glittered. "It seems we’re about to watch something fun."
And just as they said.
Down on the field, Tianzun’s smile faded.
Nicholas felt it instantly.
Every hair on his body stood on end, an animal alarm older than thought screaming up his spine, and he did not question it for even a fraction of a second. He moved, space folding him a dozen meters clear of where he’d been standing.
An instant later, the world where he had stood ceased to exist.
A massive staff, longer than the stage was wide, slammed down out of nowhere and smashed into the earth with a sound like a mountain splitting. The impact carved a crater into the fresh stone, dust and debris geysering into the night, and the shockwave rolled across the entire arena in a single flattening wave.
Then, impossibly, the enormous staff shrank. It drew in on itself, contracting from something that could level a district down to the size of a walking stick, and settled neatly into Tianzun’s waiting hand.
A wave of aura exploded off the monk.
It came off him in a golden torrent, so vast and so heavy that the stone beneath his bare feet cracked and spiderwebbed from the sheer pressure of his presence, and Nicholas had to raise an arm and shield his eye against the glare of it.
And in that torrent, Nicholas felt something he had not felt from the monk once all day. Not during Mercury’s fall. Not during Vixen’s collapse of reality. Every time before, Tianzun had radiated a calm, bottomless stillness, a mountain that did not need to move. This was different. This was loud. Wild, gleeful, straining at the edges, an energy that wanted to run and leap and break things for the joy of breaking them. Whatever had answered his empty trials was not a serene god. It was something with an appetite.
Tianzun smiled at him through the storm of his own power, and there was something different in it now. Something wilder.
"You’re smart," the monk said. "But you underestimate my ability a little too much."
He rolled the shrunken staff between his fingers.
"Yes, the god I embody is judged by the strength of my opponent’s attacks. You worked that out, and I’ll admit, no one ever has before. But did you truly believe there would be no safeguard? No answer for the man clever enough to attack with no intention at all?" The smile widened. "Mischief must be met with mischief. When an opponent tries to trick the wheel, the wheel offers the one being the gods themselves named the most cunning that ever lived. A creature that clawed its way to the very edge of godhood on trickery alone."
A band of gold flickered into being and settled around Tianzun’s brow, a simple circlet resting against his skin.
Nicholas recognized it instantly.
The golden headband. The staff that grew and shrank at its wielder’s will. The aura of a being that had stormed heaven itself.
The Monkey King.
Of every god on that endless wheel, the trickster had come to answer a trickster, and the avatar now standing across from Nicholas was Sun Wukong himself.
A mischievous, toothy grin spread across Tianzun’s face, and his whole demeanor shifted. The serene monk was gone. What stood in his place moved with a loose, restless, playful menace, head tilting, shoulders rolling, something ancient and gleeful looking out through his eyes. Even the air around him felt wrong, charged and skittering, like the moment before lightning.
"Hmph." Tianzun, or the thing wearing him now, twirled the staff in one hand, and the mere wave of air off the motion shattered the platform beneath his feet into a spreading web of cracks. "To think you thought you could fool us."
The word landed like a stone in Nicholas’ chest.
Us.
Not I. Not the monk. Us.
’There it is again,’ Nicholas thought, cold flooding him even as he held his ground. ’The thing behind the wheel. It’s not just lending its power, it’s here, looking out at me. And I handed it the one form built to out-scheme me.’
Across the arena, the colosseum had gone from wild disbelief to stunned silence, sixty thousand people staring at the transformed monk and the golden band on his brow, feeling in their bones that they were watching something that should not be possible.
"MY WORD, folks, WHAT is happening down there?!" Julie’s voice shook. "Tianzun’s whole presence just... changed! The staff! The headband! I don’t have words for what I’m looking at!"
[Marypaz13: is that... no. NO WAY. is that who I think it is]
[Zerox4575: the staff that grows and shrinks. the golden crown. that’s the MONKEY KING]
[Will_1631: phantom tried to cheese the god and the god pulled out the ULTIMATE cheater to answer him 💀]
[SirAnime_lord: "mischief must be met with mischief" I have chills. CHILLS]
[MarcoTiebosch: so the weak-god plan just backfired into the trickster king?? phantom what have you DONE]
In the American alcove, the grin had frozen on Selena’s face.
"...That’s not a weak god," she said slowly, dread creeping into her voice. "Dana. Whatever he was planning, that’s not a weak god."
Dana said nothing. Her knuckles had gone white on her clipboard.
Down on the stage, Nicholas stood before the grinning avatar of the Monkey King, his mind racing through everything he thought he’d known and finding the one variable he had never accounted for.
’A safeguard for empty intention,’ he thought grimly. ’Try to feed it nothing, and it feeds you a trickster instead. I didn’t force a weak god onto the wheel. I invited the one god who plays my own game better than I do.’
But even as the cold of it settled over him, another part of his mind, the older part, the part that had kept him alive across two lifetimes, was already turning the problem over. He had walked in expecting a frail god ripe for the Void. That plan was dead. But a plan dying was not the same as a fight being lost, and the thing across from him, however powerful, was still a shape drawn off the wheel. Still a specific being, with specific rules, and specific weaknesses.
’Every god on that wheel is a trade,’ he reminded himself. ’Overwhelming power in exchange for every other defense collapsing. He’s strong now. Terrifyingly strong. But he’s also, for the first time all day, something that can actually be hit.’ His fingers curled slowly at his side, the Void still coiled and waiting. ’I just have to survive long enough to find where.’
The Monkey King’s grin stretched wider, and he leveled the staff at Nicholas across the ruined stage.
"Come on then, clever little man," the trickster purred through Tianzun’s mouth. "Let’s play."