A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

The deafening roar of three converging killers collided against the stage like a tidal wave of blood and iron.

Nicholas met Hexi’s descending daggers head-on.

The hitman didn’t flinch from the virulent, green-slicked steel. He hooked his left forearm beneath Hexi’s wrists, deflecting the dual thrust upward so violently that the acidic blades cleaved through the air an inch above his black hair. With his right hand, Nicholas drove the jagged pommel of his chipped carbon blade straight into the bridge of Hexi’s nose.

Cartilage shattered with a wet crunch. Blood erupted from Hexi’s face, but the grief-stricken lieutenant didn’t even blink. He hissed, spitting red foam, and snapped his forehead forward in a savage headbutt that collided with Nicholas’s swollen cheekbone.

Nicholas staggered back half a step, the world spinning in double vision as the fire in his broken ribs flared into an agonizing blaze.

Before he could reset his footing, the six-foot iron rebar wielded by Zayx came whistling through the smoke from his blind left flank.

The attack would have pulverized Nicholas’s skull into paste.

CLANG!

A massive, rusted steel blast panel, torn from the execution stage’s structural footing, was shoved violently into the path of the descending iron rod.

Eric planted both bare feet into the splintered floorboards, veins bulging like thick ropes across his neck and forearms. Without his impure strength, the sheer kinetic shockwave of the impact rattled through his collarbones, tearing open the raw, bloody wounds left by the suppression cuffs. The steel panel groaned, bowing inward, but the titan of the Hero Association did not yield an inch.

"You don’t fight alone, mercenary!" Eric bellowed through gritted teeth, blood spraying from his split lip as he pushed back against the giant with all the raw, unpowered mass in his towering body.

Beside him, Dana stepped into the breach. She wielded a heavy, jagged length of shattered timber like a combat staff, her eyes blazing with fierce, desperate resolve.

When Shadow attempted to slip beneath Eric’s guard with his serrated trench knife, Dana thrust the wooden beam forward like a spear. The blunt tip struck Shadow square in his bruised sternum, knocking the wind from his lungs and driving him back toward the stage stairs.

"Form the line!" Dana shouted, her voice cutting through the ringing chaos. "Hold the platform!"

Selena fell in beside her, her tactical knife held in a low, lethal reverse grip. Her face was pale, streaked with dark soot and sweat, but her supervisor’s analytical eyes mapped the chaotic battlefield with icy precision.

For the first time in the history of the Hero Association, there were no glowing energy shields, no seismic shockwaves, and no elemental torrents. Four bruised, bleeding individuals—a hitman, an unpowered titan, a bruised veteran, and an analytical supervisor—stood shoulder to shoulder with broken wood, rusted iron, and bare fists, forming a desperate, makeshift shield wall against a horde of frenzied executioners.

"Die! You all die here!" Hexi shrieked, his voice climbing into an octave of sheer, psychotic delirium.

Hexi hurled two shattered pressurized vials directly at their feet. The corrosive green fluid exploded upon contact with the wood, hissing violently as it began eating through the planks and rising in thick, blinding, skin-melting fumes.

"Cover your breath!" Selena yelled, reaching into the small pouch at the back of her tactical belt.

She pulled her final high-intensity phosphorus round, struck the primer against the steel plate Eric was holding, and tossed it into the boiling pool of acid.

FZZZZ-BOOM!

The blinding, white-hot flash ignited the chemical vapors in an instantaneous backdraft of golden flame. The thermal explosion singed Hexi’s eyebrows and forced him to stagger backward down the steps, hacking violently as the heat consumed the toxic oxygen.

It was a brilliant counter, but it was their absolute last trick.

Selena looked down at her empty pouch. Her sidearm was dry. Her flares were gone. Her hands were trembling with severe muscular fatigue.

From the northern flank, Zayx let out a monstrous, guttural roar that rattled the loose gravel across the plaza.

The wounded behemoth didn’t care about the fire. He didn’t care about his fractured collarbone, his severed hamstring, or the concussion scrambling his brain. The sight of his fallen master lying dead behind the heroes had snapped the final tether of his sanity.

Zayx discarded the iron rebar. He lowered his massive, blood-soaked shoulders and charged like a berserk battering ram, tearing through the wooden stage railings and smashing his entire body weight directly into the makeshift steel shield.

CRACK-CRUNCH.

The sheer biological momentum of a three-hundred-pound monster moving at full tilt was too much for ordinary human bones to withstand.

The rusted steel plate buckled in half. Eric’s footing tore clean through the wooden floorboards. The titan was violently hurled backward, crashing into the center pavilion’s iron pillar with a sickening thud, his left shoulder visibly dislocated.

"Eric!" Dana cried, lunging forward with her wooden beam.

Zayx didn’t even look at her. He swept his massive, tree-trunk arm outward, snapping the thick wooden beam in half like a dry twig and catching Dana with a brutal backhand that tossed her ten feet across the platform, sending her rolling motionless into the dust.

The defensive line was shattered in less than three seconds.

High in the ventilation shaft, watching through the auxiliary camera display, Julie was sobbing silently, tears streaming down her pale cheeks as her trembling fingers gripped the transmission console.

Across the entire globe, two billion people watched the broadcast in absolute, paralyzing horror.

In crowded shelters, public squares, and living rooms across the world, people covered their mouths, some falling to their knees in tears. The chat feeds that had once raged with debate, anger, and skepticism were now completely frozen under a wave of suffocating dread.

They were watching their saviors get systematically dismantled and butchered in real time.

There was no trick left. No hidden backup. No miracle coming over the horizon. The stark, brutal reality of human vulnerability was being laid bare before the eyes of humanity.

Kestrel_Actual: Someone help them... please, god, someone help them...

Vanguard_Fan_09: They’re going to die. They’re all going to die right on screen.

TruthSeeker_99: Get up... please, just get up...

On the stage, Zayx turned his bloodshot, feral eyes toward Nicholas.

"You killed him," Zayx wheezed, black blood and foam dripping from his teeth. "I’m going to rip your arms off and beat you to death with them."

Zayx lunged, his massive hands reaching out to wrap around Nicholas’s throat.

Nicholas tried to pivot. He tried to execute the textbook evasion he had drilled ten thousand times in his life. But his body betrayed him. His cracked ribs seized in a spasm of white-hot agony, locking his diaphragm and stealing his breath. His lead foot slipped on a patch of slick, acidic chemical residue.

The evasion failed.

Zayx’s massive left hand caught Nicholas by the chest, lifting him effortlessly off the floor and slamming him hard against the stage floor. The impact drove the remaining air out of Nicholas’s lungs in a choked gasp, the jagged carbon blade slipping from his numb fingers and clattering away into the dark.

"Nicholas!" Selena screamed, lunging forward with her combat knife.

Before she could close the distance, Shadow materialized from the smoke behind her, driving his knee into the small of her back and pinning her face-down against the splintered planks, pressing his trench knife against the side of her throat.

"Stay down, little girl," Shadow spat through gritted teeth, his dislocated wrist throbbing as he held her down.

Hexi climbed back onto the stage, his daggers dripping with virulent green toxin, his face a grotesque mask of hysterical, weeping fury. He walked directly toward Nicholas, his eyes wide and vacant of anything resembling humanity.

Zayx pressed his massive boot directly onto Nicholas’s shattered ribs, grinding downward until the bone audibly groaned, pinning the hitman completely flat.

Nicholas stared upward through a veil of his own warm blood, his lone eye struggling to focus against the encroaching darkness. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. His weapons were gone. His allies were broken and pinned around him.

Hexi stood directly over Nicholas, raising both poison-slicked daggers high above his head, aiming them straight down at Nicholas’s throat and heart.

"For the Master," Hexi wept, a terrifying, unhinged smile spreading across his bloody face.

Behind them, inside the shattered iron pavilion, the young girl Joan sat completely motionless. Her glassy violet eyes flickered as the open manuscript on her lap suddenly flared with a blinding, terrifying black light, her small lips parting to whisper a brand new, final verse.

[And in the end, no one was saved. The story closed, and darkness took them all.]

Hexi brought the daggers plunging downward at Nicholas’s chest with all the murderous strength left in his body.

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