A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

The digital paperwork went through without a single automated flag.

Sitting in the driver’s seat of his nondescript sedan three blocks away from the Hero Association’s regional office, Nicholas watched the confirmation bar slide from amber to a solid, bureaucratic emerald on his encrypted tablet.

Leave of Absence: Granted. Duration: Indefinite. Status: Non-Deployable Contractor.

He closed the terminal, tossed the tablet onto the passenger seat, and exhaled a quiet breath that barely rattled his healing ribs.

The city around him was a powder keg waiting for a stray match, choked with riot police, chanting crowds, and broadcast vans whose satellite dishes tracked the sky like hungry vultures.

Nicholas didn’t care. His contract for St. Jude’s Plaza was closed, the funds were secured in an untouchable offshore trust, and for the next three weeks, his only operational priority was getting his sisters out of this miserable concrete war zone.

He already had the coordinates mapped: an isolated, private villa on the southern coast of the Azure Archipelago. No media relays. No hero association branch offices.

Just clear ocean water, fresh seafood, and seventy-two hours of uninterrupted sleep.

He shifted into drive and steered the sedan toward the eastern district, pulling up alongside the wrought-iron gates of the Hero Academy just as the afternoon bell rang.

The sidewalk quickly filled with uniformed students carrying heavy leather satchels.

Nicholas leaned his forearms against the steering wheel, his lone visible eye scanning the crowd with subconscious scrutiny—mapping exit vectors, noting anomalous walking patterns, and calculating line-of-sight angles from the surrounding rooftops.

Old habits were hard to kill, especially when the city was on edge.

Then he spotted Katie.

She was marching down the paved courtyard path, her school blazer slightly rumpled, her ponytail bobbing with every indignant stomp.

Walking half a pace beside her was a boy with neatly parted brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and an oversized academic blazer with three distinct academic achievement pins fastened to the lapel.

Nicholas’s posture shifted slightly. His shoulders dropped into a relaxed slope, but his eyes narrowed to pinpoint focus.

"Katie thinks that kinetic energy is purely vector-based!" Katie was saying, waving a half-eaten chocolate pastry in the air for emphasis. "Because if Katie throws a rock, the force goes straight where Katie aims it!"

"First of all," the boy replied, his tone infuriatingly calm, articulate, and completely devoid of childhood hesitation, "it’s not ’Katie thinks,’ it’s ’I think.’ You’re describing a first-person observation, not a third-party phenomenon."

Katie puffed her cheeks out, glaring at him sideways. "I... I know what I meant, Leo! Don’t be annoying!"

"I’m not being annoying; I’m maintaining grammatical integrity," Leo said smoothly, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses with a single index finger without breaking stride.

"And secondly, your premise is fundamentally flawed. Kinetic transfer is a scalar quantity derived from mass and the square of velocity, which means direction only dictates the vector of momentum, not the total energy yield. Here."

With an absurdly fluid, practiced motion, the boy unzipped his sleek leather satchel, produced a spiral-bound notebook with color-coded sticky tabs, and handed it to her.

"I summarized the third-quarter thermodynamic principles and simplified the calculus equations," Leo continued, his hands tucked neatly behind his back. "If you review sections two through four before tomorrow’s seminar, you won’t embarrass yourself during the board presentation."

Katie snatched the notebook, her cheeks flushing a faint, embarrassed pink. She looked at the meticulously hand-drawn diagrams, her pout softening into an expression of genuine, reluctant awe. "Did you... did you color-code the friction coefficients?"

"Blue for static, red for dynamic," Leo said with a modest, confident shrug. "It reduces cognitive load during rapid recall."

From behind the windshield of his sedan, Nicholas felt a sudden, cold tick in his jaw.

’Who’s that?’

Target Profile: Male. Approximately eleven years old. Height: 4’9". Weight: 85 lbs. Posture: Open, centered, balanced. Threat Level: Unknown.

Anomalies detected:

* Unnatural verbal fluency for his demographic.

* Complete absence of social anxiety or deference to peer pressure.

* Highly sophisticated document organization indicating premeditation.

The X glasses chimed, he’d gotten a newly upgraded pair from Dana after the event and it seemed to have gotten a few extra features.

Nicholas killed the engine, pushed the driver-side door open, and stepped out onto the pavement.

His tall, lean frame cast a long shadow across the sidewalk as he walked up to the iron gate. Despite his casual civilian jacket, there was a measured, soundless rhythm to his stride that instantly caught the boy’s attention.

Katie looked up, her face lighting up with instant delight. "Big brother!"

She jogged over, clutching the notebook against her chest. "Look! Kat... I got full marks on the preliminary logic quiz! Well... almost full marks. Leo says my syntax was a disaster, but I didn’t fail!"

Nicholas reached out, resting a large, calloused hand lightly on top of her head.

"Good job. Let’s get your bag in the trunk."

His lone eye drifted past Katie, locking onto Leo, who had stopped three paces away.

The boy didn’t flinch, look at the ground, or fidget with his sleeves. Instead, Leo extended a right hand with crisp, polite formality.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Phantom," Leo said, his voice level and steady. "I am Leonard Vance. Katie speaks of you often, although her descriptions frequently suffer from hyperbolic narrative inflation."

Nicholas looked down at the small hand, then at the boy’s calm, unblinking eyes behind the wire rims.

’Vance.’

Nicholas’s arm clenched even before he recognized the commonality of the surname. There was no connection to Malik—no bio-mechanical catheter scars, no mutated genetic markers.

Just an obnoxiously smart kid who looked like he spent eight hours a day memorizing encyclopedias for fun.

Nicholas accepted the handshake with a firm, measured grip that applied exactly four pounds of testing pressure.

"Leonard."

"Just Leo is acceptable," the boy said, effortlessly matching the grip before releasing his hand cleanly.

"I was assisting Katie with her linguistics and classical mechanics. Her intellectual capacity is surprisingly adequate, though her discipline requires consistent external calibration."

"Hey!" Katie protested, kicking lightly at the dirt. "Kati... I have discipline!"

"You tried to solve a kinetic equilibrium equation using an analogy about a runaway horse," Leo pointed out flatly.

"The horse made sense!" Katie shot back, turning to Nicholas with wide, pleading eyes.

"Tell him, Big brother! You’ve fought monsters bigger than trucks! Kinetic force is just hitting things really hard, right?!"

Nicholas opened his mouth to deliver a standard, pragmatic tactical explanation, but before he could speak, Katie was already turning back to the boy, her eyes shining with starry-eyed admiration.

"Leo figured out how the city’s old subway air-filtration grid works just by looking at the municipal blueprints in the library," Katie boasted, puffing her chest out as if she had drawn the blueprints herself. "He said that if someone tried to collapse the southern tunnels with high-grade explosives, the secondary pressure valves would automatically vent the shockwave into the storm drains! Isn’t that so much cooler than just punching walls?!"

’Why are they teaching these kids things like these?’ Nicholas stood completely frozen on the sidewalk.

But he wasn’t just puzzled with that.

A strange, sharp sensation twisted in his chest—a feeling entirely foreign to a man who calculated life in bullet trajectories and mercenary contracts.

It was jealousy.

Pure, unadulterated, brotherly jealousy.

’I survived an execution dais with three fractured ribs and a broken knife,’ Nicholas thought coldly, his single eye staring down at the pint-sized academic. ’I dismantled a biological doomsday cult while unpowered on live global television. And she’s impressed by municipal plumbing schematics?’

"Ventilation physics are standard civic engineering," Nicholas said, his voice dropping an octave into dry, deadpan dismissiveness. "In a real breach, structural debris blocks the primary flues eighty percent of the time. The pressure wave bounces back and turns everyone inside the shaft into soup."

Leo tilted his head, his brow furrowing slightly in genuine intellectual consideration.

"Only if the flues utilize passive gravity dampeners, Sir. Phantom. But the southern grid was retrofitted with active hydraulic louvers in Year 42. Assuming the maintenance logs are accurate, the clearance rate is ninety-four percent."

The boy looked Nicholas dead in the eye, adjusted his glasses again, and gave a crisp, respectful nod.

"Though I concede that real-world variables often introduce catastrophic entropy. An interesting counter-point."

Katie looked between them, her eyes wide, before grinning and grabbing Nicholas’s sleeve.

"See? Leo knows everything!"

Nicholas stared at the boy for two long seconds.

"Time to go, Katie," Nicholas said, turning her gently toward the passenger side of the car.

"Marina is waiting at home."

"Goodbye, Leonard," Katie called out, remembering her grammar just in time.

"I’ll read Chapter four tonight!"

"Ensure you complete the practice problems on page seventy-two," Leo replied, offering a polite wave as he turned to walk toward the school’s private shuttle lane.

Nicholas opened the car door for Katie, his mind already calculating the logistics of the upcoming vacation.

Two weeks in the Azure Archipelago wasn’t just a break from the Hero Association’s media circus anymore. It was a mandatory quarantine to sever all contact with eleven-year-old calculus prodigies before his little sister started applying thermodynamic theory to her morning cereal.

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