A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

Four hundred meters away, elevated eighty feet above the cracked stone pavement on the upper balustrade of the municipal library, Sniper lay utterly still.

A fresh cigarette burned between his dry lips, the ash clinging to the tip in a fragile, gray cylinder. His bandaged right shoulder throbbed with a dull, rhythmic burn where Nicholas’s suppressed bullet had carved its shallow trench, but his breathing remained as measured and calm as the tick of a grandfather clock.

His impure ability had flooded back the moment Joan’s narrative shattered, yet he hadn’t fired a single shot.

Through the illuminated mil-dot reticle of his specialized optic, Sniper watched the battlefield with the cold, mathematical detachment of an actuary balancing an unpayable ledger.

He saw Eric, swollen into a twelve-foot monolith of kinetic war-steel, humming with stored shockwaves that could punch through bedrock. He saw Nectron, a hovering, godlike singularity bending the fabric of space and matter like pliable rubber. Walküre’s plasma wings bathed the plaza in incandescent, sun-bright fury, and Mercury’s quicksilver flowed with the predatory speed of living lightning.

’Hopeless,’ Sniper calculated, his mind running through three hundred distinct ballistic trajectories in a split second and discarding every single one. ’Eric’s steel is impervious to tungsten kinetic penetrators at this range. Nectron’s gravity well will swallow high-caliber rounds mid-air and redirect them into the dirt. Walküre’s thermal envelope will melt the lead before it touches her armor.’

Firing on the heroes wasn’t just useless; it was amateurish.

His crosshairs shifted lower, dropping past the golden bars of Walküre’s ionic cage.

He saw Shadow—little Maya—weeping on her knees in the dust, wrapping her battered body over Hexi in a desperate, futile bid to shield him from the wrath of four resurrected champions. He saw Hexi, completely lost to the madness of grief, the Apex Vector Catalyst glowing through his chest like an unstable star, his vocal cords tearing as he howled for Nicholas’s blood.

"Stupid kid," Sniper muttered around his cigarette, his voice dry and raspy. "You always were too loud."

Sniper didn’t hesitate. Emotion had no place behind a trigger.

His gloved fingers smoothly cycled the heavy bolt of his custom anti-material chassis, ejecting an armor-piercing round. With practiced, blind precision, he slipped a specialized, blue-tipped heavy sabot round into the open chamber, sliding the bolt forward and locking the steel lugs into battery with a solid, definitive CLACK.

It wasn’t lead. It wasn’t tungsten. It was a compressed, high-density kinetic shock-slug—a non-lethal concussive payload engineered to deliver three tons of blunt hydrostatic trauma over a two-inch surface area.

Sniper adjusted his elevation by two clicks to compensate for the localized gravitational distortion warping the air around Nectron’s perimeter. He activated his impure gift: Ballistic Trajectory & Kinetic Acceleration.

A faint, crimson geometric trace enveloped the rifle’s long barrel, weaving an impossible, needle-thin path straight through the microscopic gap between Walküre’s blazing plasma spears and Nectron’s shifting gravity vortex.

Sniper exhaled half a lung of blue smoke.

Squeeze.

BOOM.

The suppressed rifle didn’t produce an ordinary gunshot; it released a hollow, concussive THWIP-CRACK that tore through the sound barrier.

The crimson-sheathed slug streaked across the four-hundred-meter expanse, threading the needle between two rotating boulders caught in Nectron’s gravitational ring, piercing cleanly through the outer heat haze of the plasma barrier, and striking Hexi dead-center at the base of his cervical spine.

THWACK.

The hydrostatic shock severed the neural commands between Hexi’s brainstem and motor cortex in less than a millisecond.

The manic shriek died instantly in Hexi’s throat. His eyes rolled back into his head, the violent, pulsing violet light in his chest flickering and collapsing into inert darkness as his central nervous system shut down into an immediate, protective coma.

The biological suicide sequence halted dead in its tracks. Hexi slumped forward, entirely limp, his forehead hitting the dirt between Shadow’s knees.

Shadow gasped, her tear-stained face snapping up in absolute shock. She checked his pulse with trembling fingers—alive. Unconscious, but breathing.

From a pocket inside his tactical harness, Sniper produced a battered, analog military detonator with a heavy toggle switch.

"Curtain call," Sniper whispered, flicking the safety cap open and driving his thumb down.

Across a four-block perimeter encircling St. Jude’s Plaza, thirty-six concealed demolition charges detonated in flawless, microsecond synchronization.

KA-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

The night vanished.

It was not ordinary smoke. Sniper had rigged industrial-grade, ultra-dense white phosphorus mixed with thermal-masking particulate aerosol.

A blinding, deafening volcanic wall of searing white mist and chemical smoke billowed fifty feet into the air, rolling across the entire plaza in an unstoppable tidal wave. The intense thermal bloom instantly overloaded optical sensors, blinded night-vision suites, and created a chaotic thermal blizzard that completely masked the biological and impure heat signatures of everything inside the four-block grid.

"Evasive formation!" Eric’s metallic roar echoed through the blinding white fog.

Walküre swept her blazing wings forward to generate a gale-force wind, but the chemical aerosol was too dense, clinging to the ground like heavy mercury. Mercury’s quicksilver tendrils whipped frantically through the mist, striking only shattered stone and empty air. Nectron expanded his gravitational pulse, crushing hundreds of square feet of asphalt, but in the blinding whiteout, there was no target to lock onto.

Inside the epicenter of the smoke, Shadow didn’t waste the miracle.

She didn’t question where the shot came from. She wiped the blood from her eyes, hooked her uninjured left arm beneath Hexi’s limp shoulders, and activated her returned impure gift: Umbral Manipulation & Spatial Gliding.

The shadows cast by the blinding white phosphorus flares danced frantically across the ground. Shadow sank directly into the deepest tear in the darkness, her physical form dissolving into a liquid silhouette, dragging the unconscious Hexi deep beneath the surface and sliding away through the subterranean fault lines.

Four hundred meters away, on the municipal library terrace, Sniper had already broken down his weapon.

The heavy rifle collapsed into three sleek, modular components, locking into his matte-black hard-case in under four seconds. He slung the case across his back, stepped up onto the stone railing, and clipped an unpowered, high-speed ceramic descent pulley onto a pre-tensioned steel zipline he had anchored to the library roof hours before the battle began.

Sniper stepped off the edge into the abyss.

The pulley shrieked against the steel line, carrying him through the blinding white smoke at forty miles an hour, skimming twenty feet above the heads of the confused heroes before dropping him smoothly into the open mouth of a subterranean subway ventilation shaft on the southern perimeter.

He unclipped the harness mid-air, hit the concrete maintenance platform in a clean, rolling landing, and rose to his feet without losing a fraction of his momentum.

Sniper popped a fresh flare, casting an eerie amber glow down the damp, endless expanse of the abandoned subway tracks.

From the shadows along the tunnel wall, the darkness rippled. Shadow materialized, staggering under the dead weight of Hexi’s unconscious body, her breath coming in ragged, sobbing gasps as she collapsed against the rusted rail.

"He’s breathing," Shadow choked out through tears, looking up at the marksman. "Sniper... you saved him..."

Sniper didn’t smile. He exhaled a long trail of smoke, his face hard and unreadable in the amber flare-light.

"I didn’t save him for a reunion, Maya," Sniper said coldly, grabbing Hexi’s collar with one hand and hauling the limp lieutenant effortlessly onto his shoulder. "I saved him because the Master left a contingency. And we aren’t done yet."

Without waiting for her response, Sniper turned and vanished into the pitch-black labyrinth of the deep subterranean tunnels, with Shadow trailing close behind into the dark.

Back in the center of St. Jude’s Plaza, the roaring thermal winds gradually peeled the thick white phosphorus away, exposing the aftermath to the moonlit sky.

The heroes stood tall, radiant, and completely unharmed. Eric’s kinetic steel gleamed, Nectron drifted down to the earth, and Walküre’s spear rested at her side.

Yet the stage was empty.

The villains were gone.

Standing amidst the shattered ruins of the central pavilion, his cracked ribs throbbing with a dull, sickening ache, Nicholas stepped through the dissipating smoke.

His lone visible eye was not looking at the retreating avenues where the lieutenants had vanished. He was not looking at Eric or Dana, nor did he care about the cheers that were already beginning to erupt from the broadcast channels around the globe.

Nicholas’s gaze was locked entirely on the shattered concrete pedestal where the young girl, Joan, had drawn her last breath.

Beneath the fallen blocks of granite, where the manuscript had burned away into violet ash, the ground was not cold.

A faint, deep-crimson pulse—rhythmic, terrifying, and distinct from any impure ability they had ever cataloged—beat beneath the bedrock of the city like a buried, monstrous heart.

And on the blood-soaked stones where the manuscript’s ashes lay scattered, a single, glowing line of text was slowly etching itself into the stone, written in fresh, burning ink.

[The Plague will go and with it, all the dirty heroes that walk this world]

Nicholas gripped the jagged hilt of his broken blade, the realization settling deep in his gut. It wasn’t over, and more would be coming.

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