A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

Tianzun moved, and Nectron braced for the end.

He had watched the monk unmake everything the tournament threw at him. He had seen space slide off the man, seen a shredder of collapsing reality part around him like water. Whatever came next, Nectron expected it to be over before he understood it had begun, the same way it had ended for everyone else.

The monk’s palm came at him, unhurried and almost gentle, and the air behind it screamed.

Nectron’s arms came up on instinct.

And he caught it.

The impact drove him back three meters, boots plowing the fresh stone, his forearms singing under a force that should have gone straight through them. But they held. He was still standing. Still whole. The blow that had folded gods of every nation had landed on him, and he had turned it aside.

For a moment, Nectron simply stared at his own braced arms in disbelief.

’...I blocked it.’

Tianzun paused, and that flicker of quiet interest crossed his face again.

"Oh?" the monk murmured.

Then they were fighting.

For the first time all day, for the first time in three undefeated years, Star Dragon Tianzun was in an actual brawl. Nectron surged forward, and the giant’s fists met the monk’s palms in the center of the stage, and the exchange did not end in a single strike. It continued. Blow answered blow. Nectron gave ground and took it back, and the stone cracked beneath them from the honest weight of two bodies trading real force.

The colosseum, which had spent the whole match confused and mournful, came roaring back to life.

"HE’S FIGHTING HIM!" Julie shrieked, half out of her chair. "NECTRON IS ACTUALLY TRADING BLOWS WITH TIANZUN! NOBODY TRADES BLOWS WITH TIANZUN!"

And then Nectron did the thing that made even him doubt his own eyes.

He opened the gravity.

It poured down over the monk, the full crushing weight of his ability, the power that pressed mountains flat, and this time, Tianzun’s step faltered. Not much. A hitch. A single knee dipping under a load that, until this exact moment, the god had walked through like a summer breeze. The monk’s robes pressed against his frame. His next step landed heavier than the last.

The gravity was working.

Not enough to crush him. Not close. But working, biting into a man that nothing had been able to touch all day, and Nectron felt the shock of it roll through his own chest.

’It’s... affecting him?’ His mind reeled even as his body kept fighting. ’My gravity. It’s actually pulling on him now. It didn’t do anything to the others he faced, it should have slid right off, so why...’

His eyes flicked, just for a fraction of a second, up to the American alcove. To the man in black leaning on the rail, watching with that cold, unsurprised calm.

’Was this why?’ The realization crawled up the back of Nectron’s mind. ’Was this why he told me to hold back through the trials? To throw away three chances doing nothing? Does it have something to do with why Tianzun can’t just erase me the way he erased everyone else? Why my power suddenly bites when it never should have?’

He didn’t have the answer. He didn’t have time for the answer. But the shape of it was there, and it told him one thing with total certainty: Phantom had known this would happen. Somehow, the man had known.

Above, Nicholas watched the monk’s faltering step, and behind his flat expression, something settled into place at last.

’There it is,’ he thought, cold and certain. ’The rule. The price. I was right.’

He filed it away, the final piece clicking into the puzzle he had been assembling all day, and said nothing.

Down on the stage, the two of them fought on, and for a few glorious minutes, it was a real fight. Nectron’s gravity dragged at the monk, and Nectron’s fists found openings that had existed for no one else, and the giant pressed forward with the wild hope of a man who had just discovered his impossible opponent was not, after all, completely untouchable.

But not completely untouchable was not the same as beatable.

Because even hindered, even with a mountain’s weight pressing on his shoulders, Tianzun was still Tianzun. His palms moved a shade faster than Nectron’s fists. His footwork answered every angle the giant tried to open. Where Nectron pressed, the monk was already sliding aside; where Nectron swung, the monk’s palm was already there to turn it. The gravity slowed him, but it could not slow him enough, and slowly, exchange by exchange, the balance tilted back toward the god.

A palm slipped through Nectron’s guard and cracked against his sternum. The giant staggered. Another found his ribs, and the breath left him in a rush. Tianzun flowed forward, calm and relentless, and the brief, beautiful equality of the fight began to crumble under the simple truth that one of them was a man, and the other only wore the shape of one.

Nectron threw everything into one final gravity-weighted haymaker, the best blow he had, and Tianzun caught it in a single open palm.

The monk held the giant’s fist there for a moment, the two of them locked, and looked at Nectron with something that was almost kindness.

"You did well," Tianzun said quietly. "Better than any of them. Someone taught you to do exactly the right thing." His gaze flicked, briefly, up toward the American alcove, then back. "But this is where it ends."

His free hand pressed forward, palm to Nectron’s chest.

There was a sound like a bell struck underwater, and the full weight of the god came through all at once. Nectron left the stage in a streak, crossed the arena, and slammed into the boundary barrier hard enough to crack it, sliding down into the trench in a heap.

He did not get up.

The gravity pinning the stage lifted. The stone settled.

BWOOOOOM.

"NECTRON IS DOWN!" Julie’s voice cracked over the roar. "He, he FOUGHT him, folks, he actually fought him, but Tianzun advances! The final barrier between China and the crown is broken, and now... now there’s only ONE man left!"

{VICTORY: TIANZUN. CHINA}

{POINT TRANSFER IN PROGRESS...}

{NECTRON: 200 PTS. TIANZUN}

The screens flared, and every eye in the colosseum, sixty thousand in the stands and two hundred million behind their screens, turned as one toward the American alcove.

Toward the last man standing between the monk and the end of the greatest day the sport had ever seen.

Tianzun straightened at the center of the stage, robes settling, that bottomless smile turning upward to find the man in black at the rail.

And for the first time, he beckoned.