Chapter 233: Nicholas Resolve [Edited]

The black crescent arc of compressed killing intent came straight for Nicholas, carrying the combined weight of the desires surrounding him. The heavy rain parted around the attack, evaporating into a thick mist as the immense pressure of Zero’s Qi tore through the street. There was no room left to dodge, and Nicholas knew that trying to escape would only leave the people behind him exposed.

He planted both boots into the ruined asphalt and lowered his center of gravity, forcing his heels against the bedrock beneath the shattered road as he prepared to take the attack head-on. The broken ribs in his left side screamed, bone grating against torn cartilage, but his mind went utterly silent.

His intent wasn’t noble, and it certainly wasn’t heroic. He simply refused to die here. There were still things he had to do, people he had to protect, and a bastard pretending to be him that he hadn’t dealt with yet.

’Can’t believe a day would come when I’d actually choose not to die’ His past life had nothing to offer other than just running from place to place, using different aliases. He had never looked forward to any day, and when death finally caught up to him, he embraced it.

But now, he had no plans to die.

He braced himself, slowing the attack down using what little charm points he had left. Gravity to slow it down and spatial tears to shrink the size of the massive arc.

He brought both bare palms together in front of his chest, catching the black crescent right at its apex.

BOOM!

The collision rang out like an artillery shell detonating in an enclosed room. The shockwave ripped outward, tearing a circular trench three feet deep into the asphalt beneath Nicholas’s boots.

The black edge finally reached him, cutting into both palms as the compressed Qi pushed through his hands. Pain shot through his arms as the force nearly broke his grip, but Nicholas held on, blood running down his wrists as he fought to keep the attack from reaching anyone behind him.

"NICHOLAS!" Vixen shrieked, taking a desperate step forward.

"STAY BACK!" Nicholas barked, the command tearing out of his throat laced with blood and cold authority.

Nicholas didn’t let go. His fingers tightened around the edge of the attack as he forced his newly awakened Qi through his damaged hands, using the energy to push against the black crescent and gradually disrupt its shape. The killing wave began to tremble under the pressure as Nicholas twisted his hips and redirected the attack downward.

The ground ruptured. A thirty-foot chasm tore through the pavement, swallowing the street in a geyser of pulverized stone, but the black wave was gone, dispersed into harmless sparks of fading miasma.

Nicholas stood in the smoking crater, his chest heaving as both hands hung loosely at his sides, trembling from the strain. Blood continued dripping from his damaged palms into the mud, but his lone visible eye never left Zero.

The street fell dead silent, broken only by the steady drum of rain against broken glass.

Zero stared at the bleeding hitman, his scarred forehead creasing as his grip on the hilt loosened by a fraction.

The other heroes stood paralyzed, their weapons half-raised, looking between the smoking chasm and the man who had just caught a lethal execution with bare bone.

Nicholas drew in a slow, ragged breath that rattled against his bruised lungs. He didn’t look at Nectron. He didn’t look at Vixen. He kept his eyes locked on Zero.

"You think I slaughtered those people in the alleyway, Zero?" Nicholas began, his voice raspy, flat, and carrying easily across the ruined boulevard. "You think I woke up at two in the morning, walked into a private dock, and broke five necks for fun?"

Zero didn’t answer. The dark energy along his blade flickered faintly.

"I don’t kill people for fun," Nicholas said, his tone devoid of any theatrical outrage. "I kill people because someone puts money in my hand and signs a contract. That’s the work. It’s always been the work."

He took a slow, heavy step forward, leaving a bloody footprint in the grit.

"I couldn’t care less about the lives of strangers. If an executive or a corrupt hero isn’t on my ledger, they might as well be furniture. But that also means I don’t waste time, or energy butchering civilians for free. I don’t work for exposure. And I certainly don’t leave my face under a security camera like a cheap amateur looking for headlines."

He tilted his head slightly, blood running down the side of his neck from his torn cheek.

"I have an eleven-year-old sister who wants to learn physics. I have an older sister who spends her nights worrying every time an emergency siren goes off. I fought through a tournament, I broke my bones trying to get a medal for the country, and I dismantled a doomsday cult so I could take them on a vacation to the ocean. That’s what I bleed for. A man who fights to put dinner on the table for his family doesn’t go around butchering dockworkers in the dark."

Nicholas stopped five paces from Zero’s blade.

"If someone paid me fifty million to wipe this city off the map, maybe we’d be having a different conversation. But nobody paid me, and I don’t do charity murder."

Nicholas wasn’t trying to convince them that he was a good person, because he wasn’t. He simply wanted them to understand that the massacre made no sense for someone like him. His violence had always been calculated, and killing civilians who had nothing to do with him gave him nothing in return.

High on the shattered third-floor window two blocks away, Julie’s auxiliary camera caught every single word, broadcasting the raw audio straight to the continental relay.

Beneath the video, the live chat panel exploded into a frantic, bewildered cascade:

[DreyEA: "I don’t do charity murder" BRO WHAT 💀]

[StandleyE: Wait... is Phantom literally admitting he’s a hitman on national television?!]

[Airman1991: Honestly? That makes ten times more sense than him suddenly becoming a bloodthirsty lunatic.]

[Eventfullmars: Look at his hands... he caught that strike barehanded to protect Nectron and Vixen. A psycho wouldn’t do that.]

[Marshall_prat_4819: At least now I know who to call when I’ve got beef with my landlord lol.]

[Marypaz13: He did all of that... just to take his sisters to the beach 😭]

[Vane: The doppelgänger story is a setup. The council is framing him. Look at him, he’s telling the truth.]

[Zerox4575: The Hero Killer looks confused as hell right now lmao.]

Across the circle, the nine heroes who had cornered Nicholas looked at one another in profound hesitation.

Rope Girl’s glowing cords fully recoiled back into her gauntlets with a soft, mechanical hiss. The armored vanguard on the left lowered his heavy shield, taking a step back.

Zero stood motionless in the center of the road.

His scarred expression slowly changed as the certainty in his eyes began to disappear, replaced by something closer to realization. He looked at Nicholas’s damaged hands, then at the blood covering the street around him, as though he were finally putting together pieces he’d ignored since the fight began.

The dark miasma clinging to the steel began to thin, unraveling into wisps of gray smoke as the surrounding crowd’s desire to kill Phantom quietly evaporated.

"You really aren’t a hero, are you?" Zero said softly, a dry, incredulous chuckle escaping his lips.

"I told you that ten minutes ago," Nicholas replied flatly.

"Dale was a hero," Zero murmured, looking down at the wet pavement. "He talked about justice, about changing the world, about duty. He had every pretty word memorized. And in the end, he was ready to burn an entire city just to prove he was right."

Zero lifted his head, his gray eyes looking into Nicholas’s lone, unblinking gaze.

"You’re not like him, it seems. You only care about money. Hahaha" Zero slowly lowered the point of his sword until the tip rested on the asphalt. "A man like Dale could kill five civilians in an alley and convince himself it was for the greater good. A man like you... wouldn’t waste the time except money was involved. I must say that’s a great work ethic."

The black light died entirely, leaving the blade an ordinary piece of dark, ancient metal.

"Whatever Phantom is, he’s not the man they told me he was." Zero said, his voice carrying across the ruined street. He lowered his weapon completely and took a step back. "I’m out."

A collective breath of relief rippled through the gathering. Vixen finally let her hands drop, the spatial folds collapsing with a faint hum, while Nectron wiped a mixture of rain and sweat from his jaw with a low, rumbling laugh.

"It’s over," Vixen breathed, stepping toward Nicholas. "We’ll get you to an association medical unit—"

Before Vixen could take another step toward him, the air directly behind Nicholas warped.

There was no sound, no flash of light, and no warning displacement of wind. A hand clad in a dark leather tactical glove materialized from thin air and clamped down hard onto Nicholas’s right shoulder.

Nicholas’s instincts screamed. He tried to spin, but the grip was like an iron clamp, locking onto his collarbone with impossible, familiar force.

"Nicholas!" Selena’s voice screamed from the side of the shattered van.

Space folded.

In the blink of a single millisecond, Nicholas and the figure vanished from the street entirely, leaving behind only a fading ripple in the pouring rain.

The air tasted of dry dust, engine grease, and stagnant coolant.

The sudden spatial transition dropped Nicholas onto cold, cracked concrete, and the first thing he noticed was the smell of dry dust, engine grease, and stagnant coolant. Wherever they’d brought him, it was clearly an abandoned industrial facility.

But he didn’t care about that, the moment his boots touched the floor, his combat reflexes took over. Ignoring the blinding agony in his torn hands, his right fingers swept down to his hip holster, drawing a concealed nine-millimeter pistol on pure muscle memory.

He spun, leveling the barrel at center mass, and squeezed the trigger.

BANG!

The bullet tore through the gloom, but the figure had already anticipated the draw, shifting his torso several inches to the side and allowing the round to pass harmlessly beside his head.

The figure stepped back five paces, retreating into the dim light of a high-bay industrial floodlight.

Nicholas kept his weapon raised, his lone eye scanning the cavernous, abandoned warehouse. Concrete pillars, rusted overhead cranes, and stacks of decommissioned crates surrounded them in total isolation.

"Fast draw," a voice said.

The voice was raspy, flat, and chillingly familiar. It was the exact cadence Nicholas heard every time he spoke.

The figure raised both hands, reaching up to the dark cloth wrap covering their left eye. With a smooth, unhurried motion, the person untied the knot and pulled the mask away.

Nicholas’s finger froze against the trigger.

Standing across from him under the flickering halogen light was his own face.

The same black hair, the same sharp jawline, the same cold, unblinking dark blue eyes. Even the dark tactical coat and the way he stood—with his weight perfectly balanced on the balls of his feet—were identical. Like looking at himself in the mirror.

Specimen B tilted his head, studying Nicholas with a faint, mocking smile.

"You did well out there, Original," the clone said quietly. "Clearing your name. Breaking Zero’s resolve. The public loves you again."

The fake Nicholas drew a pristine, unchipped carbon blade from his belt.

"Larry sends his regards," Specimen B murmured, his stance sinking into the exact close-quarters combat form Nicholas had used for twenty years.

"The world only needs one Phantom. And tomorrow morning... I’m the one who goes home to our sisters."

[A/N: Thanks For reading! Share your thoughts on the Chapters so far!]