A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

The sedan had barely rolled two blocks past the wrought-iron gates of the Hero Academy when the rear passenger-side window vibrated with a sharp, rhythmic tapping.

Nicholas didn’t slam the brakes.

His eyes flicked to the side mirror, tracking the oversized, pastel-pink sunglasses and voluminous bucket hat ducking beneath the window frame.

With a sigh that carried the weight of an exhausted parent dealing with a recurring nuisance, he tapped the child-lock release and unlocked the doors.

The door flew open. A blur of neon streetwear, expensive perfume, and frantic energy tumbled into the back seat beside Katie.

"Drive! Drive, drive, drive! Go before the paparazzi drone swarm me, I’m popular now!" Julie shrieked, slamming the door shut and immediately pulling down the privacy blinds. She collapsed against the leather seat, panting dramatically as if she had just outrun a firing squad rather than a pair of freelance entertainment bloggers with telephoto lenses.

"Katie thinks Julie is being very loud," Katie murmured, not looking up from Leo’s spiral-bound notebook. Then, pausing with a small frown, she hastily corrected herself, "I... I think Julie is being very loud."

"Oh, sweetie, when you’re the undisputed queen of global content distribution, noise is just the sound of ad revenue accumulating," Julie said, peeling off her sunglasses to reveal eyes glowing with manic, sleep-deprived euphoria.

She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on the back of Nicholas’s headrest, completely ignoring the subtle, dangerous twitch of his left eyebrow.

"Do you have any idea what happened while you were brooding in the suburbs, Mr. Grumpy Mercenary?" Julie practically purred, waving a sleek, rose-gold data tablet inches from his nose.

"You violated three municipal traffic bylaws by boarding a moving vehicle," Nicholas replied, his hands steady on the steering wheel as he navigated the busy afternoon traffic. "Get your elbows off my seat."

"One point two billion," Julie declared, dropping the tablet flat onto the center console between them.

The screen lit up with a blinding array of cascading neon charts, international financial settlement logs, and a digital ticker that was refreshing so rapidly the digits blurred into a solid streak of gold.

"The St. Jude’s broadcast didn’t just break records, Nicholas," Julie whispered, her voice dropping into a tone of quasi-religious awe. "It broke the entire continental data grid. We had twenty-two mirror relays across three continents. Premium pay-per-view access, syndication rights sold to four global news conglomerates, micro-transactions, commemorative merchandise pre-orders, and a retrospective documentary package picked up by the Royal Broadcast Syndicate."

She tapped a glowing emerald icon at the center of the display.

"After taxes, platform hosting fees, server maintenance overhead, and my very reasonable thirty percent executive producer cut... that is your net distribution."

Nicholas glanced down at the terminal for a fraction of a second.

A clean, unadorned integer stared back at him: $70,420,000.00.

Nicholas blinked once, ’For once, decent earnings’

"The wire cleared?" he asked, his tone as flat and even as if he were inquiring about the price of a gallon of milk.

Julie threw her hands up, letting out an exasperated groan that rattled the car’s interior. "You are completely broken inside! You just became a multi-millionaire off a single afternoon of getting thrown into wooden scaffolding, and your pulse didn’t even jump two beats! Where is the joy?! Where is the tears of gratitude?! At least offer to buy me a smoothie!"

"You already took thirty percent," Nicholas said, turning the sedan down a quiet, tree-lined residential avenue. "You can buy a franchise."

"I might!" Julie snapped, crossing her legs and leaning back.

Her gaze drifted to the rear-view mirror, where Katie was diligently highlighting a physics formula in Leo’s notebook with a bright blue marker, her lips moving silently as she memorized definitions.

"So," Julie said, propping her chin on her hand, a mischievous glint dancing in her hazel eyes. "Katie has a little nerd prince color-coding her entire life, Marina is spending every weekend at the botanical gardens with that sweet, boring architecture student from her university... and then there’s you."

Nicholas didn’t take the bait. "What about me?"

"You’re the only dateless, romance-deprived relic left in this entire household," Julie teased, poking the side of his shoulder with a manicured pink fingernail. "Seriously, Phantom. You have the emotional spectrum of a concrete barricade. Have you ever considered what happens after you retire? You’re going to be seventy years old, sitting in an empty mansion with eighty guns and a pet rock."

"A pet rock doesn’t ask for emotional validation or talk during movies," Nicholas said.

"See?! Completely hopeless!" Julie gasped. She leaned forward again, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "What about Selena? She’s smart, she’s lethal, she wears those sharp suits, and she didn’t file an immediate association complaint when you hijacked her tactical deployment. I saw the way she looked at you on the stage after the dome shattered. There was definitely a spark there."

Nicholas scoffed, the corner of his mouth curling into a dry, cynical line. "If Selena and I lived under the same roof for forty-eight hours, the local bomb squad would have to declare the neighborhood a biological hazard. Within the first ten minutes, she’d attempt to audit my personal inventory for unregistered ordnance, and by day two, I would have to lace her morning coffee with mild tranquilizers just to get five minutes of silence."

"That sounds like healthy communication with extra steps," Julie quipped.

"That sounds like double homicide," Nicholas corrected.

Julie snapped her fingers, her eyes widening as a brand-new, terrifyingly profitable scheme materialized behind her forehead.

Her expression shifted from playful teasing into the sharp, predatory grin of an elite content mogul sniffing an eight-figure windfall.

"Wait. Forget Selena. I have a much, much bigger idea."

Nicholas immediately felt a cold chill run down the back of his neck. "No."

"You haven’t even heard the pitch!"

"The answer is no."

"Listen to me!" Julie pleaded, scrambling up until she was practically hanging over the gearshift, tapping her tablet to pull up a folder overflowing with millions of direct messages, fan art, and high-resolution edits of Nicholas’s unmasked face on the execution dais. "Do you know what the internet is calling you right now? ’The Phantom Prince.’ ’The Cold-Steel Savior.’ My inbox is receiving forty thousand messages an hour from wealthy heiresses, rogue mercenaries, corporate executives, and college students who want to know your relationship status!"

She swiped the screen, projecting a holographic mock-up of a high-production title card: HEARTS & HITMEN: 30 DAYS WITH THE PHANTOM.

"Here’s the layout," Julie explained with breathless, rapid-fire intensity.

"A twelve-episode unscripted reality dating show. We select twenty of your highest-bidding, most obsessed fans from around the world. We put them in a luxury mountain compound. Each week, three of them are chosen to act as your ’temporary girlfriend’ during simulated civilian scenarios—grocery shopping, dinner dates, evading paparazzi, assembling furniture! The audience votes on who handles your emotionally stunted personality the best, and the winner gets a five-million-dollar grand prize and a ceremonial contract renewal!"

In the back seat, Katie paused her studying, tilting her head with genuine curiosity. "Is Nicholas going to date twenty people on television? Leo says polygamy requires complex legal dispensations in most jurisdictions."

"Leo needs to mind his own business," Nicholas growled under his breath.

He reached over with one hand, grabbed Julie by the collar of her neon jacket, and shoved her firmly back into the rear passenger seat until she hit the cushions with a muffled squeak.

"I am not doing a dating show," Nicholas said, his voice dropping into absolute, glacial certainty. "I am not taking twenty screaming strangers to a mountain compound. And if you put a camera within fifty feet of my kitchen, I will dismantle your drone fleet and use the lithium batteries to heat my tea."

"It’s a guaranteed sixty-million-dollar backend split!" Julie yelled, adjusting her rumpled collar with an indignant huff. "Think of the merchandising! Custom Phantom aprons! Heart-shaped carbon blades! We could sell scented candles that smell like gunpowder and emotional unavailability!"

"We’re going on vacation," Nicholas said, turning the car onto their street and pulling into the apartment building’s driveway. "Real vacation. Off-grid. No cameras, no live streams, and no reality television executives."

"You have no vision," Julie grumbled, though she smoothly transferred the $70 million payout confirmation directly to his encrypted drive before closing her tablet. "No romantic soul. Just an unrepentant capitalist with a sniper rifle."

Nicholas parked the car, killed the ignition, and looked back at her with a deadpan stare.

"Seventy million dollars says my vision is just fine," Nicholas said, popping the trunk locks. "Get your bags out of my car, Julie. The ride is over."

...

’There goes my chance for another Phantom blockbuster’ Julie sniffled as the car drove away. ’Just you wait’

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