Chapter 153: Mercury Vs Phantom 2
The coin of light fell out of the top of the sky, and the world watched it become a spear, then a comet, then a sunrise happening in the wrong direction.
Mercury dove with her fists extended and the air surrendering around her, dragging a cone of white fire that had nothing to do with any ability and everything to do with velocity, and the mathematics of what was coming wrote themselves across the face of every physicist watching the stream. A body that strong, from that height, at that speed.
The stage would not survive. The trench would not survive. Whether the man standing at the impact point would survive was the only open question on the planet.
Nicholas watched her fall, and opened his last screen.
{Charm Points: 87}
’All of it. Every coin in the jar.’
{Purchase: Strength}
{Charm Points: 0}
Zero. A worldwide legend, standing on a broken stage with empty pockets, every scrap of a fortune worn as muscle and bone. His body settled into its new weight, the strongest it had ever been, the strongest it could currently be, and there was a strange, clean calm in having nothing further to spend.
’No fund. No Void. No tricks left to buy.’ He set his feet, and borrowed gravity poured down through his frame, anchoring him into the bedrock like a nail driven by a mountain. ’Just everything I already am.’
He raised both hands to the falling sun.
’Come on then, superhero. Let’s see what the definition is worth.’
She arrived.
The sound did not reach the crowd first; the light did, a flashbulb whiteness that turned sixty thousand faces pale, and then the impact came up through the earth and through their shoes and through their teeth. He caught her fists in his palms at the heart of the stage, matter met matter with nowhere left to go, and the world around that meeting simply failed. The stage vanished to bedrock in a ring fifty meters wide. The trench walls folded. The barrier screamed to its whitest, hexagons flaring and cracking and healing, and beyond it the city lost power in a rolling wave, block by block, as the shockwave rolled over the grid like a hand over candles.
At the bottom of a smoking crater lit only by barrier-light, two figures stood locked, palm to fist, and neither one had gone down.
The colosseum came apart.
Not in cheering. In chaos. Sixty thousand people lost their collective composure at once, strangers grabbing strangers, sections chanting against sections, PHAN-TOM crashing into MER-CU-RY in a war of sound with no winner, flags of countries not even fighting waving out of pure overflow, and above it, Julie’s hoarse voice fighting the noise and losing.
"I DON’T KNOW!" she was shouting to two hundred million people, all pretense of neutral commentary abandoned. "YOU WANT ME TO CALL IT AND I don’t KNOW! NOBODY KNOWS! LOOK AT THE BOARDS!"
The betting boards had frozen. Every house on the planet had suspended the odds mid-fight, the numbers flickering helplessly between the two names, because no model still functioning could say who won this.
[Opalion: THE CITY LOST POWER. THE FIGHT TURNED OFF A CITY]
[Marypaz13: I’ve changed my mind six times in forty seconds. WHO WINS THIS??]
[yanko_abreu: my dad says Mercury. my mom says Phantom. my parents are not speaking to each other]
[SirAnime_lord: the betting sites SUSPENDED. they’ve NEVER suspended]
[Decato: I refuse to blink. if it ends while I’m blinking I will never recover]
And in the crater, the fiercest battle of the modern age entered its final country.
They fought at their absolute maximums, and the maximums were, at last, the same size. He had bought his ceiling with a fortune; she had been born under hers; and now the two ceilings ground against each other blow after blow after blow with nothing above either of them to appeal to. Her fist came like a train and met his forearm and the crater grew. His counter came like a falling gate and met her crossed guard and the crater grew. They tore up out of the pit and fought across the ruined floor, through the last standing ridge, up the trench wall, along the barrier’s blazing face, two silhouettes hammering one another against a wall of light while the world screamed.
There were no techniques left in it now. There was no forecasting, no geometry, no patience, no craft. Both of them had spent all of that an age ago. This was two bodies at their limits asking one question over and over with their fists, and neither body would give the answer.
Mercury’s knuckles opened his cheek to the bone. He answered through the blood and his cross broke something in her guard that made her hiss for the first time in her life. Her knee found his taped ribs and he heard one give. His elbow found her jaw and the second line of red joined the first at her mouth. They went through a barrier buttress together, came out grappling, hit the crater floor rolling, broke apart, rose, and swung again.
Slower now. Both of them. Like two boxers in a fifteenth round that the referee refused to end.
In the American alcove, Selena had stopped pretending to be a supervisor. She was on the rail, both fists, shouting his name raw into the wall of noise with everyone else. Dana stood beside her, silent, clipboard long abandoned, watching with her hands pressed together against her mouth. Nectron and Vixen flanked them like statues.
In the Australian alcove, Jackson had gone hoarse. Beside him, small and bandaged and wrapped in a blanket, Furry watched her captain trade blow after blow with wide brown eyes and whispered, "She’s smiling. She never smiles that much."
In the medical wing, a bandaged Hunter sat before a screen with his broken hands folded, grinning like a man at a feast.
And at the front of the Chinese alcove, Tianzun watched the two bleeding titans stagger apart at the center of the crater, and his knuckles had gone pale around his beads.
Down in the pit, Mercury spat red onto the broken stone, straightened her spine by pure will, and raised her fists again.
"One more," she said, and her voice was wrecked and happy. "One of us is a liar, Phantom. One of these bodies has something left it isn’t admitting. Let’s find out whose."
Nicholas dragged himself straight opposite her, one eye swollen shut, ribs grinding, arms carrying their fractures like luggage, and set his feet in the ruin.
’She’s right,’ he thought, distantly, through the ringing. ’This is the last exchange. Whatever’s left after this belongs to the medics.’
And then, through the roar, he heard it.
{Ding!}
His remaining eye flickered.
{The world cannot look away!}
{+1,250 Charm points}
{Ding!}
{Two hundred million hearts are racing for you!}
{+1,890 Charm points}
{Ding!}
{Ding!}
{Ding!}
The notifications were cascading, stacking faster than he had ever seen them, because sixty thousand people were screaming their uncertainty into the night and two hundred million more were doing it through their screens, and every gasp, every argument, every parent not speaking to the other parent, every soul on the planet held hostage by the question of who wins...
...was paying him.
The chaos was income. The doubt was income. The whole burning, deafening, divided world was pouring its heart into his empty pockets in real time.
{Charm Points: 4,730 and climbing}
At the center of the crater, standing across from the definition of a superhero on the last exchange of the fiercest fight of his two lives, Nicholas began, very quietly, to smile.
’...The crowd’s still paying.’