A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

Fourteen days after the skies over St. Jude’s Plaza shattered, the world was still choking on the dust.

The physical debris—the pulverized granite, the scorched timber of the execution dais, the shattered carcasses of Overseer hounds—had been hauled away in armored convoys under the cloak of night. But the ideological fallout refused to be swept into municipal landfills. It hung over the continent like an acrid, unbreathable smog, poisoning every television network, radio frequency, and digital forum across the globe.

Malik Vance was dead, but his ghost was systematically dismantling the Hero Association from beyond the grave.

The automated data dead-man switches Malik had primed before the tournament had executed with horrifying precision. Every twenty-four hours at precisely noon, a fresh partition of encrypted archives unspooled across public decentralized servers. The leaks were comprehensive, ruthless, and impossible to scrub: unredacted financial ledgers detailing kickbacks from defense contractors; classified mission logs documenting "acceptable civilian collateral" figures that had been scrubbed from official press releases; and worst of all, the raw, unedited footage of the covert black-ops raid that had incinerated the Vance estate twelve years ago.

The myth of the noble protector had collapsed into ash.

Outside the gleaming glass monolith of the Association Regional Headquarters in District 1, the streets had become a permanent riot zone.

Thousands of protestors choked the four-lane boulevard, waving black placards painted with bleeding scales and Malik Vance’s final transcribed words. Heavy anti-riot barricades bowed under the surging mass of furious citizens chanting unified slogans that rattled the reinforced windows of the executive suites thirty floors above.

"Who watches the guardians?!"

"Show us the real casualty reports!"

Whenever a registered cape stepped out to conduct routine perimeter patrols, they were not met with the breathless adoration of the past decade. When Ignis Prime attempted to lead a tactical escort down the avenue, a barrage of rotten fruit, crushed soda cans, and red paint balloons pelted his pristine ceramic armor. The hero’s hands had twitched, his internal heat coils flaring with instinctive indignation, but he could only clench his fists and lower his visor as the crowd jeered, mocking his gilded cape on live smartphone streams.

Inside the subterranean war room beneath the headquarters, the atmosphere was as frigid as a morgue.

Dana leaned over an illuminated holographic tactical table, her sharp eyes rimmed with dark, sleepless bruises. Her cracked ribs had barely knitted under bio-accelerant therapy, but she wore a plain combat harness over her black association uniform, having entirely discarded the ornamental insignia that now felt like a target on her back.

Beside her, Eric stood with his arms crossed over his massive chest. The towering titan was out of his kinetic steel transformation, but his human frame still radiated an imposing, coiled tension. The skin along his forearms bore the faint, silvery traces where the kinetic collars had chewed through his flesh, permanent scars from the stage where they had nearly lost everything.

Between them, the holographic map displayed a three-dimensional wireframe model of the city’s vast, rotting underbelly: four thousand square miles of abandoned stormwater drains, Cold War fallout shelters, decommissioned subway lines, and forgotten industrial aqueducts.

"Give me something, Raymond," Dana said, her voice dry and gravelly from endless cups of black coffee. "Anything. A localized power spike, a discarded ration pack, an unlogged water siphon."

Raymond, the chief intelligence analyst assigned to the classified task force, adjusted his glasses with trembling fingers. He tapped a command into the terminal, bringing up three rotating red profiles: Hexi, Shadow, and Sniper.

"There’s nothing, Director," Raymond replied, his voice strained. "We’ve deployed thirty deep-tunnel reconnaissance drones equipped with infrared, bio-spectral resonance, and impure radiation sniffers through Sectors Nine through Fourteen. Every sector is completely flat. No cellular pings, no encrypted satellite handshakes, no black-market currency transfers. It’s like they evaporated the moment they hit the ballast."

Eric’s jaw tightened, the muscle ticking against his jawbone. "Three high-priority hostiles don’t just vanish into thin air. Hexi took a heavy concussive sabot directly to the base of his cervical spine. Even with an impure constitution, he should be suffering from severe hydrostatic neuro-trauma, respiratory failure, and internal hemorrhaging. He needs medical-grade coagulants, IV electrolytes, and high-purity saline just to keep his heart beating."

"And Sniper knew that," Dana said, tapping the holo-table where the southern railway lines terminated into the coastal bedrock. "Which means Sniper raided their private cache networks long before the tournament even started. They aren’t using the city’s power grid. They aren’t tapping into the civic water lines. They are operating in absolute dark mode."

"We need them in containment, Dana," Eric said, slamming a heavy, scarred fist against the metal rim of the console. The hollow boom echoed across the quiet war room. "The public is calling for the association’s dissolution. If Vance’s surviving lieutenants regroup and hit another population center while our operational credibility is in the gutter, the entire structure falls. We won’t survive a second strike."

Dana stared at the empty, dark grid representing the deep underground. "We won’t find them with drones and satellite arrays. Sniper is a ghost, Shadow can slide through solid concrete fissures, and they know our tactical search doctrines better than our own recruits do. The only way we catch them is if they make a mistake."

"And if they don’t?" Eric asked, his glowing white eyes narrowing into hard slits.

Dana looked toward the heavy blast doors leading up to the surface, listening to the muffled, distant rumble of the protestors screaming outside the walls.

"Then we wait for the next body to drop."

Sixty meters beneath the vibrating foundations of the financial district, inside a forgotten, waterlogged concrete cistern built during the early industrial era, the air smelled of damp mold, stale iron, and burning paraffin wax.

There were no electric lights. There were no humming cooling fans or digital readouts. The only illumination came from a single kerosene lantern resting on a rusted metal drum, casting long, wavering shadows across the moss-slicked walls.

On a makeshift cot constructed from discarded wooden pallets and a damp wool blanket, Hexi lay motionless.

His breathing was shallow, a faint, rhythmic wheeze that barely lifted the thin cotton shirt draped over his chest. His skin was the color of curdled milk, glistening with a cold, feverish sweat. Along his neck, the horrific purple-black veins that had flared during his attempted suicide detonation had receded, but they left behind mottled, bruised tracks that ran down his shoulders like lightning scars.

At the base of his neck, a heavy compression bandage was taped tightly over the point where Sniper’s concussive sabot round had struck, holding a slow-drip pack of black-market neurological stabilizer against his bruised spinal column.

Sitting on a rusted steel crate beside the cot, Shadow—Maya—watched the slow rise and fall of his chest with dark, bloodshot eyes.

Her black tactical stealth suit was torn at the shoulder, patched roughly with coarse nylon thread. Her face was hollow, her cheekbones prominent beneath dirt and soot that she hadn’t bothered to wash away. In her lap, she held a clean, damp cloth, methodically wiping the fever-sweat from Hexi’s forehead with hands that still trembled with the phantom memory of the plasma cage closing around them.

The darkness near the cistern’s rusted iron sluice gate rippled silently.

Sniper stepped out of the gloom without a sound, a battered canvas duffel bag slung across his left shoulder. He had discarded his tactical rig, wearing an oversized, greasy mechanic’s jumpsuit and an oil-stained ballcap pulled low over his eyes.

He dropped the duffel bag onto the stone floor with a dull, metallic clatter.

Shadow didn’t jump. She merely looked up, her voice a hollow, raspy whisper. "Did anyone follow you?"

"Nobody follows me," Sniper said flatly.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a crushed pack of cigarettes, and lit one with the steady flick of a cheap plastic lighter. The orange tip flared, illuminating the sharp, unshaven angles of his face and the cold, unblinking gray of his eyes. He inhaled deeply, letting the thin blue smoke curl upward into the stagnant cistern dome.

He opened the duffel bag, pulling out three glass vials of pharmaceutical-grade atropine, a box of sterile IV needles, and a stack of vacuum-sealed military field rations.

"How is he?" Sniper asked, gesturing with his cigarette toward the cot.

"The spasms stopped around four in the morning," Shadow murmured, gently pulling the blanket tighter over Hexi’s shivering frame. "His pupils are finally reacting to the lantern light, but his core temperature is still burning up. The catalyst... it burned out nearly forty percent of his primary lung tissue before your shot disconnected the trigger."

She turned her gaze to the sniper, a flash of raw, defensive grief tightening her throat. "You almost broke his neck."

"I broke his posture," Sniper corrected coldly, setting a fresh IV line on the rusted barrel with mechanical precision. "If I had hit him an inch higher, his cerebellum would have turned to jelly. If I had fired a second later, Eric’s fist would have turned him into paste, or his own miasma would have dissolved you along with him. He’s breathing. That’s more than Zayx got."

At the mention of the fallen brute, Shadow’s eyes darkened, her fingers clenching into the damp cloth until her knuckles went white. "Zayx didn’t deserve to die like that. Ground into the dirt like an animal while those monsters smiled for the cameras."

"Zayx made his choice when he charged a twelve-foot kinetic battery with a broken bone," Sniper said, leaning against the cold concrete wall and crossing his ankles. "Malik is dead. The plan failed. The grand stage is over."

"It didn’t fail," Shadow whispered, her voice trembling as she looked at the dark ceiling, feeling the faint vibrations of the city traffic miles above their heads. "Listen to the radio relays. The people hate the association now. They’re tearing down the recruitment centers. Malik’s words are playing on every speaker from here to the coast."

"Words don’t buy ammunition, Maya," Sniper said, exhaling another cloud of gray smoke into the darkness. "And outrage doesn’t keep a manhunt from closing in. The association is bleeding, yes. But a wounded beast doesn’t roll over and die—it bites anything within reach. Eric and Dana are sweeping the secondary transit hubs as we speak."

"Let them sweep," Shadow spat, her eyes flashing with a dangerous, umbral glint as the living shadows around her boots began to writhe and sharpen. "We have the tunnels. We have the dark. When Hexi wakes up... when he’s strong enough to stand... we will finish what the Master started. We will make Nicholas bleed for every drop of Malik’s blood."

Sniper took a final, slow drag from his cigarette, then dropped the butt onto the wet concrete, grinding it out beneath the heel of his heavy combat boot.

He looked down at the unconscious boy on the cot, then at the girl whose eyes burned with the same poisonous, unquenchable vengeance that had driven Malik Vance to his grave.

"Nicholas isn’t looking for you in the sewers, Maya," Sniper said quietly, his voice dropping into a chilling, measured cadence. "And if you cross his path again while you’re running on blind fury... he won’t use a rubber bullet to put you to sleep."

He turned back toward the shadows of the sluice gate, blending into the gloom until only the faint outline of his rifle case remained visible.

"Rest while you can," Sniper murmured from the dark. "The storm outside is only getting worse."

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[A/N: I need an editor and proofreader, some might’ve noticed already but recently the Chapters might’ve not been as good as they used to.

Since webnovel demands that I post Chapters daily, keeping up with daily updates while maintaining peak quality becomes something that’s difficult to do.

Some days I’m exhausted and mentally drained, and simply speed write Chapters editing becomes a chore on days like that and I can skip Somethings. Also, remembering minor things along the story isn’t so easy. Having written over 300k words, keeping track of things become hard.

Been looking for an editor for a bit now, so I thought it best to ask my readers who have been following me up to this point. If you have the skills that can help me achieve this I’ll be greatly happy to have you join my creative journey. Also, thank you all for sticking with me all this time. I truly appreciate the love and support!]

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