A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

The rain three years ago had smelled of copper and burning ozone, not entirely different from the downpour soaking the pavement tonight.

Zero remembered the weight of his old blade before the black miasma ever touched it. It had been clean alloy back then, standard association issue, balanced for precision rather than destruction. And the man standing across from him in that decommissioned subway terminal had been someone he’d shared hundreds of meals with.

His partner. Dale. A man who had saved Zero’s life on four separate deployments.

"You’re standing on the wrong side of history, Zero," Dale had told him, his voice echoing against the damp tile of the underground depot. Behind Dale stood seven other registered heroes, high-ranking vanguards who wore medals on their dress uniforms and smiles for the morning press.

"The council treats us like disposable stock. The contracts are cages. We take the administrative tower tonight, we purge the executive board, and we rewrite the charter on our own terms."

"You’re not rewriting a charter, Dale," Zero had replied quietly, his hands resting loose at his sides. "You’re starting a slaughter. The moment heroes turn their weapons on their own halls, the entire idea of what we are dies. The public won’t see reformers. They’ll see monsters who finally stopped pretending."

"Then let them see monsters!" Dale had roared, stepping forward as his kinetic barrier flared into a blinding golden shield. "At least we’ll be the ones holding the leash!"

Zero hadn’t argued further. He had never been a man of long speeches.

When the eight heroes surged forward, convinced their numbers and righteous indignation made them invincible, Zero had drawn his blade. The battle had lasted four minutes. It had been brutal, silent, and thorough. Zero did not rely on flashy elemental bursts; he moved with cold, mechanical finality, slipping past guards, breaking stances, and driving steel through vital seams.

One by one, the seven conspirators fell into the standing water.

When it was only Dale left, pinned to the shattered tile with his barrier shattered and blood bubbling over his lips, the dying man had looked up at Zero with wide, disbelieving eyes.

"Why...?" Dale had wheezed, his fingers clawing weakly at the damp concrete. "We were brothers, Zero... we built this rank together... how could you choose them over me...?"

"Because being a hero isn’t about loyalty to a friend, Dale," Zero had whispered, looking down at the man who had been his anchor for five years. "It’s about carrying the burden no one else wants to touch. Even when it tears out your own heart."

He had driven the blade down to finish the job.

The next morning, the Hero Association found eight corpses in the dark and zero witnesses. The council, terrified of public panic, buried the truth of the coup entirely, stamping the incident classified and labeling Zero an unhinged rogue who had butchered his own comrades in a fit of psychotic bloodlust.

The Hero Killer was born.

Zero hadn’t stayed to contest the report. He had packed his bags, turned his back on the medals and the crowds, and boarded a freighter for the eastern coast of Africa, vanishing into the ancient tombs to search for something that didn’t rot beneath a uniform.

The memory washed away with the cold rain streaming down Zero’s scarred forehead.

Back in the ruined street of District 6, the black light clinging to his blade roared like a furnace fed with pure kerosene. The dark miasma twisted in violent spirals up his arm, drinking the ambient hatred, the fear, and the ugly, collective desire pouring in from hundreds of watching strangers across the city.

Zero looked past the edge of his humming steel, his eyes settling on Nectron and Vixen.

"You see," Zero said, his voice cutting through the deluge with eerie, quiet clarity, "I tell you this because I know exactly where you’re standing. I stood there three years ago. I thought loyalty to the person beside me was the only thing that mattered."

He took a slow, heavy step forward, the pavement groaning beneath the gathered weight of his aura.

"Dale was my friend. Closer than a brother. And he was standing on the wrong side. He had convinced himself that burning the city was justified because the people running it were corrupt." Zero tilted his blade, the dark energy trailing across the wet asphalt, leaving scorched, hissing furrows in the stone. "Sometimes the person you trust is the one bringing the fire. Sometimes the friend you’re ready to bleed for is just another butcher."

He raised the sword higher, bringing the hilt to his ear as the black light concentrated into a single, razor-thin edge that made the air itself scream.

"You’re shielding a man who slaughtered four guards and an executive in cold blood, Nectron. You’re throwing away your lives for a mercenary who sells his violence to the highest bidder. Step aside. Or I will bury you both just like I buried Dale."

The wind howled through the narrow corridor of broken buildings, dragging sheets of freezing rain between them.

Nectron didn’t step aside.

The hero planted both boots into the cracked asphalt, driving his heels deep into the stone as his massive frame braced. The air around him compressed violently, gravity folding inward to form an invisible, ultra-dense barrier across the street. The veins along Nectron’s neck bulged like thick cables, his jaw locked in stubborn, immovable defiance.

"You talk too much about history, Zero," Nectron rumbled, his voice shaking the loose gravel around his feet. "I don’t care what happened in a subway three years ago. I care about what I saw with my own eyes. I watched this man stand on an execution stage with three broken ribs and a shattered knife while the rest of us were helpless, and he didn’t run. He held the line when the whole world was ready to roll over and die."

Beside him, Vixen’s eyes narrowed to sharp slits.

She didn’t raise a shield. She spread both hands wide, the space around her body twisting and warping in overlapping, shimmering layers.

Dimensional folds rippled across the air in front of Nectron’s gravity wall, weaving a secondary lattice of displaced reality designed to catch and redirect whatever horror came off Zero’s steel.

"You made your choice back then, Zero," Vixen said, her voice dropping into pure frost. "Now make your move."

Behind them, Nicholas stood swaying in the rain, his breath coming in shallow, agonizing gasps.

His lone eye looked at the two broad backs planted squarely in front of him. He saw the tension in Nectron’s shoulders. He saw the fine, desperate tremor in Vixen’s fingers as she held open spatial folds her battered body could barely sustain.

They were going to take the hit.

They knew the output on that blade was catastrophic . They knew hundreds of collective desires were feeding into that dark steel, turning it into a localized apocalypse. And they were still choosing to stand there, turning themselves into human meat shields for a man who had never promised them anything beyond a signed contract.

Through the Third Eye, Nicholas watched the trajectory of the strike forming along the blade.

It wasn’t a normal cut. It was a wave of pure, concentrated killing intent dense enough to cleave through Nectron’s gravity, shatter Vixen’s spatial lattice, and slice every building on this block in half. If they tried to tank that strike head-on, neither of them would survive to see the morning.

’Idiots,’ Nicholas thought, the word echoing flat and cold inside his head. ’Two absolute, stubborn idiots.’

And yet, in the deepest, most heavily guarded corner of his chest—the place where twenty-one years of assassination contracts, cold blood, and solitary rooftops usually sat undisturbed—something moved.

It wasn’t logic. It wasn’t tactical math. It was the simple, undeniable fact that for the first time across two entire lifetimes, people who owed him nothing were ready to die just to keep him standing.

Zero’s eyes hardened into gray flint.

"So be it," Zero whispered.

The blade came down.

The sky tore open as a colossal crescent of roaring black light erupted from the steel, screaming down the center of the street with enough force to vaporize the rain into superheated steam.

Nectron bellowed, pouring every drop of his gravity into the forward wall. Vixen locked her teeth, the spatial lattice snapping tight to meet the onslaught.

Before the black wave could touch them, a dark blur broke between their shoulders.

Nicholas didn’t use a spatial fold. He only had a few charm points to spend. But even then, he moved with pure, unadorned human muscle, dragging his battered frame through the gap and stepping directly into the path of the falling execution.

"Nicholas, NO!" Selena’s voice shrieked from the shattered van in the distance, she quickly made her way to the place after seeing Julie’s stream.

’This Idiot! What is he planning to do?’ Selena thought, her eyes wide with fear.

Nicholas planted his boots on the wet asphalt, raised his bare, bloodied hands, and looked straight into the blinding abyss of the incoming strike.

He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t drop into a defensive stance.

He simply opened his mouth, his flat, raspy voice cutting through the roar of the apocalypse:

"Is that all your desire is worth, Zero?"

The black wave of destruction was six inches from his face.

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