Chapter 154: Phantom’s Strength
’He’s grown.’
Mercury stood at the center of the crater, fists raised, blood at her mouth, and finally let herself admit the thing she’d been feeling for the last few minutes.
He was getting stronger.
Not smarter. Not craftier. Actually, physically stronger, and it was happening while they fought. She thought back through the match, and she could pick out the exact moments it had jumped. His punches had been survivable at the start. Now each one rattled her arms. His speed had been a step behind hers early on. Now she was the one being caught out. Somewhere in the last few minutes, more than once, the man in front of her had simply become harder to hurt.
’That isn’t possible,’ she thought. ’Nobody grows in the middle of a fight. And yet I started this match against a clever man with good tricks, and now I’m trading punches with something that keeps up with me.’
Her eyes narrowed on the bloodied figure across from her.
’What are you, Phantom? What kind of man gets stronger the longer the world watches him?’
She didn’t know it, but she had just answered her own question.
Across the crater, the notifications were still raining.
{Ding!}
{+2,140 Charm points}
{Ding!}
{+1,760 Charm points}
{Charm Points: 9,850 and climbing}
Nicholas breathed through his broken ribs and let himself see the truth of it plainly, one time, without pride.
’If my ability was anything else, I’d have lost this fight.’
And he wouldn’t have lost it narrowly, either. He’d have been buried.
’Fire, ice, blades, clones, seals... against her, all of it is decoration. She was born past the finish line. There isn’t a power in this tournament that outmuscles her, and an hour ago there wasn’t a body in this tournament that could either. Mine included.’
His swollen eye throbbed. His fractured arms hung heavy. And through all of it, the screens kept singing.
’But my ability doesn’t fight. My ability doesn’t even touch her.’ He watched the numbers climb, fed by every screaming voice in sixty thousand seats and every racing heart behind two hundred million screens. ’My ability just asks one question, over and over, to everyone watching. Are you impressed?’
{Ding!}
{+1,980 Charm points}
’And tonight, the whole world keeps saying yes.’
The smile on his split lip steadied into something certain.
’That’s why you lose, Mercury. Not because you’re weaker. You’ve never been weaker than anyone. You lose because you made two hundred million people watch... and every second they can’t look away, I get paid.’
He opened the shop and emptied the vault.
{Purchase: Strength. Strength. Strength}
{Purchase: Agility. Agility}
{Purchase: Stamina}
{Charm Points: 9,850 → 210}
The power hit him like stepping into a waterfall. Bone knitted denser mid-breath. His swollen eye forced itself half open. The fractures in his forearms went from cargo to background noise, and when the flood settled, he pulled up the window he hadn’t fully opened since the tournament began.
{STATUS}
{Name: Nicholas}
{Strength: 291}
{Agility: 224}
{Stamina: 305}
{Intelligence: 21}
’...Still twenty-one,’ he noted. ’Somewhere, my old handler is laughing.’
He closed the screen, rolled both shoulders, and settled into the lowest, cleanest stance of his two lives.
Across the crater, Mercury felt it happen. Again. The ceiling moving. The impossible fifth jump. And instead of fear, what flooded up through her chest was the purest joy of her entire career.
"There it is," she breathed. "One more time, then. Everything."
Her feet left the ground. The air around her body began to scream, pressure folding around her fists, and for the first time in her life, in front of the whole planet, Mercury stopped holding anything back. The crater floor beneath her hover point cracked outward in a spiderweb just from proximity.
"MERCURY IS GLOWING, FOLKS, SHE IS ACTUALLY... AND PHANTOM ISN’T MOVING, HE’S JUST STANDING THERE, THIS IS IT, THIS IS IT!!" Julie had given up on her chair, her desk, and her job description. "THE FINAL EXCHANGE OF THE GREATEST MATCH EVER BROADCAST!!"
[Opalion: STAND UP. EVERYONE STAND UP]
[Marypaz13: I’m holding my grandma’s hand. she’s holding mine. we’re not okay]
[Will_1631: two nations. two monsters. one punch each. this is what the word HERO was invented for]
[infinite_shadows_2972: PHANTOM WIN. MERCURY WIN. I DON’T CARE. JUST LET ME SURVIVE THIS]
The colosseum rose, all sixty thousand, one motion, and the sound they made had no country left in it.
Mercury launched.
Nicholas launched.
The space between them lasted half a second, and the world got all of it in perfect clarity: the woman streaking in low across the ruined stone with a fist that had ended the argument of physics cocked back to her ear, wind detonating off her shoulders in rings, and the man in black meeting her head-on, no fold, no trick, gravity pouring down through his spine into legs that split the bedrock with every stride, his own fist drawn back past his hip, blood trailing off his jaw like a banner.
Selena’s hands went over her mouth.
Tianzun stopped breathing.
Ten meters. Five. One.
They swung.
The two strongest fists of the two strongest nations met at the exact center of the crater, knuckle to knuckle, everything to everything.
For one instant, nothing happened. The whole world hung inside a held breath, two figures frozen at the point of impact like a photograph of war.
Then the shockwave went out.
It split the crater in a cross. It climbed the barrier and whited it out from trench to sky. It tore the cloud ceiling above the colosseum open in an expanding ring, and through the torn clouds the evening’s first stars looked down on a stadium screaming in one voice as the pressure wave rolled over them like the hand of something enormous and gentle.
And in the heart of the whiteness, the deadlock broke.
Mercury felt it before she understood it. Her fist, the fist that had never lost an argument in its life, sliding backward. A centimeter. Two. Her arm folding at the elbow against a force that had no right to exist, that hadn’t existed four minutes ago, that had been built in front of her out of the world’s refusal to look away.
’...Ah,’ she thought, with perfect clarity, as her guard caved. ’That’s what you are.’
’You’re the audience’s hero.’
Nicholas’ fist came through.
The blow caught her clean, everything he had ever earned behind it, and the strongest woman alive left the crater in a streak, crossed the ruined stage, and carved a trench of her own through fifty meters of broken stone before the world’s stubbornest body finally, finally came to rest against the boundary ridge.
She did not get up.
She lay on her back, eyes open to the torn sky and the new stars, and she was smiling wider than her nation had ever seen.
BWOOOOOM.
The horn was almost inaudible under the eruption.
"IT’S OVER!! MERCURY IS DOWN, MERCURY CANNOT CONTINUE!!" Julie was crying and not hiding it. "MATCH EIGHT, THE GREATEST FIGHT IN CONVENTION HISTORY... GOES TO PHANTOM!! GOES TO AMERICAAAA!!"
{VICTORY: PHANTOM. AMERICA}
{POINT TRANSFER IN PROGRESS...}
{MERCURY: 300 PTS. PHANTOM}
{Ding!}
{A legend is written in real time!}
{+3,500 Charm points}
Nicholas stood alone in the crater’s heart, chest heaving, arm still extended through the finished punch, while the sound of the world came down on him like weather.
Then he walked. Across the wreckage, past the frozen medics, to the boundary ridge, and offered his shaking, fractured hand to the woman lying against it.
Mercury looked at the hand. Then at him. Then she took it, and let the man who beat her pull her up out of her own trench.
"Four minutes," she said, wiping blood from her mouth, voice wrecked and warm. "The monk took me three years to solve. You took four minutes to rebuild yourself into my answer." She held his forearm a moment longer, and her voice dropped, for him alone. "So listen to me, audience’s hero. I’m out of this tournament, and my rematch goes with me. That leaves you." Her eyes flicked across the arena, to the alcove where a mountain in saffron stood utterly still. "Beat the monk. Whatever he is under that smile... you’re the only one left built for it."
She released his arm, straightened her ruined collar with unshakable dignity, and walked toward the medics on her own two feet while her section sang her home.
Nicholas turned.
Across the ruined arena, through the settling dust and the falling light of the torn-open sky, Tianzun stood at his rail with his beads finally turning again, and the smile on the monk’s face had changed into something patient and vast and fully awake.
Nicholas held his gaze.
And this time, it was the hitman who moved his lips, slow and deliberate, shaping a single silent word across the roaring distance.
"Soon."