A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

The twin blades in Hexi’s hands descended with the shrieking velocity of a guillotine.

Pinned beneath Zayx’s crushing boot, his fractured ribs grinding against his lungs, Nicholas did not close his eyes. In that microsecond between life and execution, he drove his left elbow into the slick floorboards, twisting his torso sideways with every ounce of kinetic leverage his battered frame had left.

The blades struck.

THWACK.

One dagger sheared clean through the reinforced shoulder pad of Nicholas’s tactical vest, gouging a shallow trench of fire across his collarbone before biting four inches deep into the oak stage. The second blade plunged straight through the meat of Nicholas’s left bicep, pinning his arm to the platform in a spray of dark blood.

Nicholas didn’t scream. He clamped his teeth shut until his gums bled, his free right hand snapping upward like an iron clamp around Hexi’s throat, arresting the lieutenant’s forward momentum before he could wrench the daggers free for a second strike.

"You die with him!" Hexi wept, spitting blood directly into Nicholas’s face, his fingers clawing at the hitman’s wrist with manic frenzy. "You all die with him!"

Zayx raised his heavy boot to stomp Nicholas’s skull into pulverized bone.

Behind them, Eric surged forward on pure adrenaline. His dislocated shoulder hung useless at his side, but the titan hurled his entire three-hundred-pound body into Zayx’s uninjured knee like a human missile.

CRUNCH.

Zayx bellowed in agony as his joint buckled backward. The colossal brute stumbled, his footing tearing through the weakened stage planks. As he fell, Zayx wildly swung the jagged slab of iron rebar in a desperate, blind arc to clear the space around him.

The heavy iron beam missed Eric by inches, missed Nicholas by a hair, and struck the primary load-bearing foundation pillar of the rear pavilion with the concussive force of an unpowered artillery shell.

BOOM!

The ornamental iron column groaned. Structural rivets sheared off like gunshots, spinning into the dark. The entire pavilion shifted violently, tilting six inches to the left as hairline fractures raced up the arched roof.

Inside the trembling enclosure, the air had turned into a suffocating vortex of static and black-violet light.

With Malik Vance dead on the stage, the neural frequency transmitter embedded in his corpse had severed its connection. The complex neuro-chemical tether that had harmonized Joan’s consciousness with the ancient manuscript was thrown into a violent, uncontrolled feedback loop.

The book resting on the child’s lap was no longer just glowing. It was convulsing.

The yellowed parchment pages fluttered frantically, flipping back and forth on their own accord with the sound of snapping dry leaves. Deep crimson veins of light bled through the fiber of the paper, mirroring the broken capillaries in Joan’s eyes.

"Joan! Look at me!" Selena screamed.

Pinned to the floor near the entrance by Shadow’s knee, Selena drove the heel of her free boot backward into Shadow’s groin with brutal force. Shadow let out a strangled gasp, his grip on her collar slipping. Selena twisted out of the hold, ignoring the trench knife that grazed her ribs, and scrambled on her hands and knees into the shattered pavilion.

Dana was already there, holding Joan’s trembling head between her palms.

"Her vitals are crashing!" Dana shouted over the deafening hum of the barrier. "Her pulse is over two hundred! The manuscript is feeding back into her frontal lobe! It’s consuming her!"

Blood was pouring freely from Joan’s nose, dripping down her pale chin onto the open pages. Her small hands were clawed, fingernails dug so deep into the yellowed paper that she was tearing the ancient fibers. Her mouth moved with horrifying speed, the words no longer forming coherent sentences, but a fractured, overlapping chorus of whispering voices that echoed from the very air around them.

[And the walls... they burn... they break... they swallow the sky... and the ink turns to ash... and no one leaves... no one breathes...]

"She’s trapped in a resonance cascade," Selena said, her voice shaking as she unscrewed the tactical stylus. She slapped her hand down flat onto the vibrating page, trying to pin it still against Joan’s thrashing knees. "Malik didn’t just hypnotize her—he made her mind the biological battery for the entire spatial lock! If the story eats itself, her brain will liquefy!"

Selena pressed the diamond-tipped stylus against the parchment.

Write the counter-passage.

Break the parameters.

With frantic, desperate strokes, Selena began carving new words directly over the glowing crimson verses:

[And the barrier parted. The chains shattered. The captive souls walked into the light, free and whole—]

The instant the ink touched the page, a violent jolt of pure psychic electricity arced up the metal shaft of the stylus.

Selena gasped as the shock blew the tool from her fingers, blackening the skin of her palm and hurling her backward against the iron balustrade. The manuscript rejected the foreign script with terrifying hostility. The blood on the paper began to sizzle and boil, releasing plumes of acrid, purple-black smoke that smelled of burning hair and ozone.

Joan let out an unearthly, high-pitched wail.

Her spine arched backward at an impossible angle, her neck rigid, her glassy violet eyes rolling back until only the bloodshot whites were visible. The cognitive pressure radiating from the manuscript was tearing through her fragile nervous system. Micro-vessels in her eyes burst, turning her sclera a terrifying, solid crimson.

"Joan!" Dana wept, wrapping her arms around the child’s convulsing torso, trying to physically absorb the violent tremors wracking the girl’s body. "Hold on, baby! Please, just close your eyes! Stop reading! You don’t have to read anymore!"

"Dana, look out!" Selena screamed, looking up.

The concussive shockwave from Zayx’s earlier wild swing had finished eating through the compromised masonry.

Above their heads, the central iron archway of the pavilion finally gave way. Two tons of ornamental ironwork, shattered granite slabs, and solid concrete roofing tore free from the main ceiling joists.

It fell in a single, catastrophic avalanche of stone and steel.

Dana had less than half a second to react. With the instincts of a veteran vanguard, she pushed Selena violently out of the pavilion’s perimeter with her good arm, throwing the supervisor clear onto the wooden stage below.

"DANA!" Selena screamed, hitting the stage boards hard and rolling onto her side.

Dana turned back to shield the convulsing child with her own body, but she was too late.

CRASH.

The massive slab of granite and twisted iron slammed down across the rear of the pavilion with apocalyptic force.

The impact crushed the carved wooden chair, pulverized the stone pedestal into white dust, and obliterated the elevated dais. A thick cloud of chalk, pulverized mortar, and splintered iron billowed outward, enveloping the entire rear stage in a blinding gray shroud.

The deafening rumble died down, replaced by a sudden, sickening silence.

On the front platform, Nicholas, Eric, Hexi, and Shadow froze.

The struggle ceased for one suspended, breathless heartbeat.

Hexi lowered his hands, his eyes wide in sudden terror. Zayx pushed himself up from the splintered boards, his jaw slack as the dust settled over the rubble.

Through the clearing haze, beneath a three-ton block of cracked granite, Dana lay pinned to her waist, coughing up thick, dark blood as she struggled weakly against the stone.

And beside her... half-buried beneath the twisted iron frame of the canopy... lay Joan.

The young girl’s small, frail body was completely crushed beneath the fallen masonry. Her oversized white frock was soaked in dark crimson, her ribcage collapsed under the sheer mass of the ironwork.

Her right hand, pale, trembling, and covered in gray concrete dust, lay outstretched on the splintered floorboards.

Clutched loosely in her tiny, blood-stained fingers was the manuscript.

The ancient book was dying with her.

A crackling, brilliant violet flame—cold as ice and bright as a dying star—erupted from the center of the open pages. The yellowed parchment curled, turning to glowing embers, dissolving into floating flakes of purple ash that drifted upward into the stagnant air.

Joan’s lips parted one last time.

A single, quiet breath escaped her lungs, carrying no words, no script, and no commands. Just the faint, tragic sigh of a child finally freed from a nightmare.

Her crimson eyes dimmed, losing their light.

Her hand fell limp against the wood, the burning ashes of the manuscript scattering across her cooling fingers.

High above St. Jude’s Plaza, five miles up in the dead sky, the vast, shimmering purple dome groaned.

A sound like the cracking of an entire ocean of ice echoed from horizon to horizon. Across the translucent ceiling of the sky, a massive, jagged fissure tore open, glowing with blinding, raw white light.

The script was broken.

The barrier was collapsing.

And as the fractures raced across the heavens, a terrifying, suffocating pressure began to build in the air—the sudden, violent return of every godlike, apocalyptic power that had been locked away in the dark.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!