Chapter 164: The God’s Avatar
"You figured it out?!"
The whole alcove turned on him at once, eyes wide, and in an instant they had closed around him in a tight circle. Selena, Nectron, Light, even Dana, all of them leaning in with the same hungry curiosity, because for the first time all day someone was claiming to understand the mystery the entire planet had failed to solve for three years.
"Not quite," Nicholas said, raising a hand to cool them down. "There are still some things I’m not sure of yet."
"But what do you know?" Selena pressed, her voice dropping low so it wouldn’t carry past the alcove walls.
Nicholas was quiet for a moment, gathering it.
"The first time I saw it, back during the race, it knocked me out before I could make sense of any of it. All I got was a shape and a headache." He kept his voice even, clinical, the way he laid out a job. "But I saw it again just now. Longer, this time. And with the wheel, I think I finally have the shape of it."
He glanced across the arena, to where a mountain in saffron sat calmly at the Chinese rail.
"Tianzun isn’t a hero with an ability. Not the way the rest of us are." His eye settled back on his own team. "He’s an avatar. A vessel. The thing standing behind him, the one holding that wheel, that’s what’s actually fighting. He’s just the part of it that we’re allowed to see."
The circle went still.
"The wheel," he continued, "is covered in carvings. Thousands of them. Millions. Every one of them a different being, a different form, and I don’t think they’re decorations." His jaw tightened. "I think each one is a god. And I think Tianzun can reach up to that wheel and take whichever one he needs, whenever he chooses to fight."
Silence.
"That’s why space slid off him. That’s why the shredder couldn’t touch him. That’s why the animals wouldn’t go near him, and why nothing in three years has left a mark. He isn’t strong for a human." Nicholas exhaled slowly. "He isn’t a human at all, in that moment. He’s whatever he pulled off the wheel."
"And the word," Dana said quietly, following the thread. "’They.’"
"That’s what confirmed it." Nicholas nodded. "He didn’t say be careful of it, or of me. He said they. Because it was never one thing standing behind him. It’s all of them. Every god on that wheel, embodied at once in the thing that holds it." His voice lowered. "That’s why looking at it does what it does. The human eye was never meant to see the embodiment of every god that exists stacked into one shape. If I’d held my gaze a second longer, I don’t think I’d have simply fainted this time." He paused. "I think I’d have lost my mind."
Nobody spoke.
Selena’s hand had drifted to her mouth. She had spent years building files on heroes, cataloguing triggers and breaking points, learning the exact shape of every power she was assigned to watch, all so that if the worst came, someone would know how to stop it. And now she was looking at a thing that had no file, no breaking point, no shape a human mind was built to hold. Something a supervisor could never supervise.
"How do you write a countermeasure," she said, almost to herself, "for a god?"
Dana was the first to find real words, and even she struggled with them.
"Such an ability actually exists?" she murmured, disbelief thick in her voice. "Something that makes a man the incarnation of an actual god?"
It sounded insane said aloud. It sounded like a fever dream, like a story told to frighten children. But it was also, standing here now, the only explanation any of them had that fit. Nothing else could account for the inhuman physique, the untouchable body, the casual walk through a collapse of reality, the smile that had never once wavered no matter what the strongest fighters of every nation threw at him.
Nothing else could explain Tianzun.
"That’s ridiculous." Nectron’s deep voice broke the quiet, and his fists had curled at his sides. "If that’s true, then how in the world are we supposed to beat him? You’re not describing a fight. You’re describing us picking a brawl with a literal god."
No one had an answer for that.
And in the awful silence that followed, the reason for Tianzun’s endless, bottomless calm finally made sense to all of them. Why would a god ever stop smiling? Why would he ever hurry, or strain, or fear? He had spent three years letting mortals test themselves against him, offering three trials of mercy every time, because from where he stood, the outcome was never once in doubt.
The whole alcove was left at a loss, the weight of it settling over them one by one.
Only Nicholas stayed quiet.
His thoughts moved beneath his still expression, turning the shape of it over and over, examining every edge. He had the what. He was close to the how. But there was a gap in it still, one piece that hadn’t clicked, one thing he had glimpsed in that half-second before he tore his eye away and could not yet be certain of.
’An avatar draws its power from what it channels,’ he thought. ’And anything with a source has a rule. Hunter had one. Fengyin had one. Even that wheel turns for a reason.’ His eye drifted, half-lidded, toward the Chinese alcove. ’The trials. The mercy. The conditions he keeps admitting to without ever explaining. There’s a law under all of this. There’s a price he pays to hold a god in his hands, and if I can find it...’
He didn’t finish the thought.
’There’s just one more thing I need to confirm.’
Just then, before the thought could close, a familiar voice tore through the arena, bright and enormous and back to full strength.
Down below, the abyss was gone. In its place stretched a fresh, unbroken expanse of stone, raised whole out of nothing by a quiet, unremarkable man in the terrain division named Tor, who was already being ushered back off the floor. The stage was new. The barrier hummed. The colosseum roared its readiness.
And in the commentary platform, Julie threw both hands into the air.
"WE ARE BACK, EVERYONE! The arena is whole, the fighters are ready, and we are DOWN to the wire! The wheel is turning, and after everything you have witnessed today..."
The great screens lit, the ring of national flags spinning across them one more time.
"...THE NEXT MATCH WILL BE...!"