Chapter 192: Training
The training ran late into the night.
Nicholas was not a gentle instructor, but he was an extraordinarily efficient one. Once Selena’s flushed face had returned to a normal color, he placed a handgun back into her hands and drilled her without a shred of mercy. Stance. Grip. Sight alignment. Reloading smoothly under high pressure. How to move and keep her balance while firing, how to retain her weapon if an attacker grabbed for her wrists, and how to fall hard onto concrete and still come up shooting. He corrected her form a hundred times in clipped, flat sentences, never once praising her efforts—which somehow drove her harder than praise ever could have.
Then he swapped the handgun for a combat knife.
That part went worse at first, and then, slowly, it began to go better. He demonstrated the specific grip that wouldn’t slip when a handle got slick with sweat or blood, the strike angles that ended a fight in seconds, and the fundamental difference between a blade held merely to threaten someone and a blade held to kill. Selena had spent her entire career studying how to break people on paper. Now, for the very first time, she was learning how to do it with her own hands. To her own quiet surprise, that analytical eye of hers—the one trained to spot every weakness—translated directly into combat. She saw the structural openings in a stance long before he pointed them out.
"...You’re not terrible," Nicholas admitted hours into the session, watching her disarm a weighted mannequin arm with a smooth motion he had shown her exactly twice. "The reading ability translates well. You already knew where to hit. You just never had to do it yourself."
"Was that a compliment?" Selena wiped sweat from her forehead, breathing heavily. "From you? Should I write down the exact date and time?"
"Don’t get used to it."
By the time he finally called an end to the session, her arms ached down to the bone, her shirt was soaked through with sweat, and she could hold a weapon like it actually belonged in her hands. It wasn’t total mastery—nobody mastered lethal combat in a single night. But it was enough. It was enough to give her a fighting chance to survive in a place where no one had supernatural powers and everyone had cold steel.
They climbed the narrow stairs, secured the biometric lock on the hidden level behind them, and emerged back into the warm light and appetizing food smells of the ordinary apartment above. Marina was waiting for them in the hallway with her arms tightly folded and a very specific, terrifying expression on her face.
Julie and Katie had both fallen asleep on the living room couch. Katie was curled tightly against the streamer’s side, while Julie’s smartphone was still clutched loosely in her sleeping hand.
Marina kept her voice down for their sake, but she looked at Nicholas, and then past him down the dark hallway toward the plain door that was definitely not a storage closet. Her jaw was set completely tight.
"So," Marina said quietly, her tone laced with ice. "You want to explain that to me?"
Nicholas opened his mouth to offer an excuse.
"A whole secret armory, Nicholas." She kept her voice low and even, which was somehow ten times worse than shouting. "A shooting range. Directly under our house. Directly under the floor where Katie takes her afternoon naps. How long has that been down there? How long have I been cooking dinner and helping her practice her letters right above a subterranean room full of guns without knowing?"
"...Since before we officially moved in," Nicholas admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. "I had it built. Quietly."
"You had it built." Marina pressed her fingers hard against her temple—a stressed gesture Selena recognized instantly, because she made the exact same one whenever Nicholas drove her insane. "Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? What if Katie had somehow found it? What if someone broke into the building and found it? What if the Hero Association found it?" Her voice wavered slightly. "You told me the hero work was the risky part of your life. You never said you were keeping... keeping that within the same walls as your family."
And here, in front of his older sister, something happened that Selena had never once witnessed in all her time supervising him.
Nicholas completely wilted.
The man who had stared down a god, who calmly walked into doomsday domes for a paycheck, and who never once flinched at anything, dropped his gaze to the floor like a scolded schoolboy, his shoulders drawing inward.
"...It’s fully locked," he offered weakly, his voice small. "Biometric scanner. Triple-sealed steel door. Katie couldn’t get in if she—"
"That is not the point, Nicholas, and you know it."
"...No," he admitted softly, staring at his boots. "It isn’t."
"Look at me when I’m talking to you."
He looked up immediately.
Marina reached out and knocked him firmly on the top of his head with her knuckles—a light, playful, but entirely un-gentle bonk. It was the exact kind of physical discipline only an older sister could deliver to a grown man who had fought his way through the strongest elite heroes on Earth just hours prior.
"Idiot," she said, though the sharp anger in her voice had already softened into something much more exhausted and fond. "You keep this whole dark life boxed up inside the walls, carrying the entire weight of it all by yourself, and you never tell me anything because you genuinely think that’s protecting me." She let out a long sigh. "It doesn’t protect me, Nick. It just means I end up worrying about dangerous things I can’t even see."
"...I’m sorry, Marina."
"Get rid of it. After tonight, all of it." She held his gaze with total seriousness. "I mean it, Nicholas. Whatever tonight is, and whatever you have to do down there with those weapons, when it’s over, that hidden room is gone forever. We agreed to build a normal life here. A normal life does not include a private shooting range beneath the baby’s nap spot."
"...After tonight," Nicholas agreed quietly, giving her his word.
He didn’t mention that he had told himself the exact same thing when they first moved in, and hadn’t managed to pull it off back then. He simply took the scolding with his head bowed, fully intending to keep the promise to the absolute best of his ability.
Selena watched the entire exchange from the hallway doorway, her mouth hanging very slightly open in utter shock.
Because this—this exact dynamic—was something no one at the Hero Association would have ever believed if she reported it. Phantom. The global tournament champion. The cold, unbothered, money-obsessed hitman who called murder "the work" and casually negotiated rescue fees over people’s lives. Standing right there in his own cozy kitchen, head hanging low, taking a hard knuckle to the skull from a woman half his fighting weight, and quietly going "I’m sorry, Marina" like a young boy who had just tracked mud across a freshly cleaned carpet.
’He really does have exactly two ultimate weaknesses,’ Selena thought, an unexpectedly warm and amused feeling unfurling in her chest despite herself. ’Money. And his family.’
She mentally filed the revelation away. She wasn’t entirely sure what she would ever do with the knowledge, but a professional supervisor never stopped analyzing their subject, and some details were simply too golden not to appreciate.
Marina caught Selena staring at them, and the last remnants of her stern expression melted into a small, wry smile.
"He’s a real handful, isn’t he?" Marina said warmly.
"You have absolutely no idea," Selena replied with deep, heartfelt feeling.
"HEY."
"Go on, wake those other two up." Marina gestured with her dish towel toward the living room couch, where Julie and Katie were still tangled together in sleep. "Not Katie—let her sleep. But if you three are really going to go out and do whatever terrifying thing you’re planning to do tonight, you’re doing it on a full stomach. I didn’t cook all this food for nothing."
Nicholas, still looking faintly deflated, crossed over to the couch and gently shook Julie by the shoulder to wake her.
The pink-haired streamer jolted straight upright, blinking rapidly and immediately fumbling with her hands for her smartphone. "Wha—is it time?! Are we going?! Is it content o’clock?!"
"It’s dinner o’clock," Nicholas corrected flatly. "Then we move out."
Selena rolled her sore shoulders, feeling the new, unfamiliar physical competence settling into her aching arms—the lethal weight of a real tactical plan finally coming together. Julie’s unique ability to get eyes on the inside. Her own newly trained hands. Nicholas’s lethal arsenal, laid out and prepared. The tactical pieces were finally all in place.
The physical training was complete. The weapons were packed. The enemy trap was mapped out as well as it could possibly be from the outside.
Now, at last, the real work was about to begin.
"Alright," Nicholas said, his tone instantly shifting. The gentle softness of the family kitchen completely fell away, and the cold, sharp focus of the professional hitman slid effortlessly back into place behind his eye. He looked at Selena and Julie, and then past them toward the distant, shimmering dome and the dozens of helpless heroes trapped beneath it.
"Eat fast. Then we go get our people back."
[A/N: Pardon me, second Chapter will be delayed]