"Surrender now Phan—ahh!" Before the hero could complete her words, an intense pressure suddenly bore down on her, forcing her knees to buckle beneath her as she dropped to the ground.
It wasn’t just her. Every hero surrounding Nicholas felt the same crushing force descend upon them, their bodies suddenly becoming unbearably heavy as the asphalt beneath their feet cracked under the pressure. One after another, they were forced down onto their knees, struggling just to keep their heads raised, while Zero was the only one who managed to remain standing, although even he was struggling beneath the weight, the veins along his neck bulging as he fought against the force.
Nicholas casually released himself from the rope and looked around at the heroes struggling beneath the pressure. Whenever one of them attempted to move, he simply increased the gravity around them, forcing their bodies back down before shifting even more of the pressure toward Zero. Yet despite deliberately concentrating most of the force on him, Zero was still standing, his body trembling slightly as he fought against the crushing weight.
With his Third Eye, Nicholas could see exactly what was happening. Zero wasn’t simply enduring the gravity with physical strength; he was using his Qi to absorb part of the pressure and reinforce his body against it.
’He’s truly impressive, and far too dangerous.’ Nicholas thought, letting out a quiet sigh. ’At least now that I have all of them here, I can make my position clear.’
"I have no intention of fighting any one of you" Nicholas said calmly.
"And you think we’ll believe that when you have us pinned like this?" Zero threw back at him as the grip on his hands sword tightened, "You can save your words for later. I believe all of us here have one goal right now and it’s to Kill you"
Zero slowly straightened himself as he spoke, and Nicholas immediately noticed something changing around him. The faint threads of Qi that had been surrounding the other heroes were beginning to move, slowly at first, before flowing toward Zero and disappearing into his body. With every passing second, the energy surrounding him became denser, his own Qi overflowing like water from a tap that had been left running too long.
’Why did I have to encounter him now of all times?’ Nicholas gritted his teeth.
Zero bolted forward with terrifying speed, the sheer force of his movement sending a violent pressure wave through the street and carving cracks across the walls of the houses on either side.
"Fuck" Nicholas muttered under his breath as he saw the incoming attack.
He quickly dived out of the way manipulating Qi to protect himself from the remnants of Zeros Qi attack.
"Now you’re running? You should’ve done that the first time" Zero taunted as he looked at Nicholas.
A powerful bolt of lightning shot down from the sky, Nicholas’ senses immediately screaming danger as he threw himself out of its path.
He rolled across the wet asphalt and came up on one knee, only to immediately dive sideways again as another lance of lightning scorched the exact spot where he’d been moments earlier.
The ring of heroes had not loosened once since it closed around him. If anything it had tightened, each new arrival folding into the formation like they’d rehearsed it a hundred times, cutting his angles down one by one until there weren’t any left worth calling angles at all.
A gauntleted fist caught him across the jaw before he’d finished rising, and the world tilted sideways. He hit a parked car hard enough to fold the frame around him, and before the ringing in his skull had a chance to fade, the rope girl’s cords were already snapping tight around his ankle, dragging him flat across broken asphalt while a second hero closed to finish what the first had started.
{Charm points: 673}
He caught the number in the corner of his vision and felt something in his chest sink.
’Three digits.’ The thought came flat and cold, the way bad news always did once he’d stopped having the energy to be surprised by it. ’I’ve burned through almost ten thousand points in one fight. There’s barely anything left to buy my way out of this.’
He tried to fold behind the nearest hero anyway, muscle memory outrunning arithmetic, and the space refused to bend more than a few centimeters before the cost simply wasn’t there to pay. He staggered instead of teleporting, and a fist the size of a boulder caught him across the ribs and sent him skidding through a collapsed wall.
Blood ran freely down both his hands, dripping from his knuckles onto the wet ground and mixing with the rain. His coat hung in shreds from one shoulder, shallow cuts covered his arms and chest, and a deeper wound along his thigh made every step increasingly painful. Still, Nicholas forced himself back onto his feet, because staying down was the one option that guaranteed an ending he hadn’t chosen.
Above the wreckage, the stream chat scrolled faster than any human eye could fully read.
[StandleyE: he’s not even fighting back properly anymore. is he actually going to die here]
[Airman1991: wait wait wait. hold on. has Phantom EVER killed anyone. like actually killed]
[DreyEA: now that you mention it... no. He’s put down like a hundred heroes and villains and every single time he KNOCKS them out. never once finished anyone]
[Eventfullmars: even that one time he had a clean kill on that impure in the harbor footage he just... didn’t. broke the guy’s arm and left]
[Ybbev: so the whole "murderer" bounty thing... doesn’t actually add up does it]
[Marshall_prat_4819: hang on if he’s never killed a single person how is he supposed to be the villain in all this]
[Vane: You’re not wrong, that attack from before was strong enough to flatten them all. Seems like he just wanted to talk]
[SirAnime_lord: guys I don’t like where this is going. what if the bounty story is a lie]
Julie’s feed remained pinned in the corner of the broadcast, her face pale and streaked with dirt from her scramble through the ruins as she watched the beating from a shattered window two blocks away, both hands pressed tightly over her mouth.
Nicholas heard none of it. He was too far inside the fight to hear anything but his own ragged breathing and the wet slap of blood hitting stone.
Through the haze of pain, and with the Third Eye still active, Nicholas finally saw what had been happening beneath the surface of the fight.
Thin threads of dark energy were pouring from every hero standing around him, individually so faint that he had barely noticed them before.
They weren’t coming from their weapons, nor were they being generated by their abilities. They were coming from something much simpler—their desires. Every one of them wanted the same thing in that moment. They wanted Phantom dead.
’They all want the same thing I do,’ Nicholas thought distantly, watching the tributaries converge. ’Except theirs is aimed at me instead of him. Nine desires, all pointed the same direction, all pouring into one weapon.’ His grip tightened on nothing, because there was nothing left in his hands to hold. ’He’s not just channeling his own want anymore. He’s channeling all of theirs. Every stranger who’s decided I deserve this.’
Zero stepped through the ring slowly, the blade humming softly in his grip as the energy of nine strangers’ certainty flowed into it. Their shared desire to see Phantom dead had turned the weapon into something far more dangerous than it had been moments ago.
"This is where it ends," Zero said quietly, and there was no cruelty in it, only the calm, settled tone of a man closing a book he’d already read the last page of.
Above, the chat kept scrolling, faster now, the tone shifting under its own weight.
[Marypaz13: no. no no no I don’t want this. even if he’s done bad things I don’t want him to DIE like this]
[Zerox4575: I’ve been watching this man fight since the tournament. He’s not a monster. I refuse to believe he’s a monster]
[Cyndy9338: what if it’s all a setup. what if none of this is real. someone please tell me this isn’t real]
[Missy_rain_0120: PLEASE somebody stop this. anybody. ANYBODY]
Nicholas said nothing.
He had no words left to spend that would change anything, and even if he had, some old, buried part of him had never been in the habit of explaining himself to strangers, not even ones crying out for him on a screen he couldn’t see.
Zero closed the last of the distance and raised the blade.
He came in fast, faster than anything Nicholas had matched all fight, the full weight of ten desires condensed into a single falling arc aimed for the crown of his skull, and Nicholas, bleeding and empty and out of angles, could only watch it come.
’This is bad, I can’t let that attack get me’ Nicholas thought, but it only remained in his mind as his body didn’t have enough energy to carry out that wish.
His blade rose above his head, gathering the full weight of the desires he’d absorbed into a single killing strike.
The blade never landed.
An extreme, invisible force slammed into Zero from the side, catching him mid-swing and hurling him bodily across the ruined street, through the shattered remains of a storefront, and into the collapsed wall beyond it hard enough to bring the whole structure down in a roar of falling brick.
A vast cloud of dust rose into the rain-streaked air, swallowing the wreckage whole, and every hero in the ring froze in place, weapons half-raised, staring at the place where their target had been about to fall.
From somewhere inside that cloud, a low, unhurried voice cut through the settling dust.
"How long do you plan to keep quiet? Phantom."
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