Chapter 237: The Desires I have [Edited]

The cold seeped into his bones through the wet concrete.

Nicholas sat with his back pressed against the pillar, watching the crimson puddle beneath his boots slowly widen with every drop that fell from his ruined hands. His breathing had become shallow and uneven, each breath barely filling his lungs before another wave of pain forced it back out.

’Too much blood’ he thought, gritting his teeth.

The darkness gathering at the edge of his vision wasn’t an ability, a hallucination, or some hidden technique waiting to awaken. His body was simply running out of blood, and for the first time in either of his lives, Nicholas found himself staring at death and realizing that he wasn’t ready to accept it.

it ends,’ he thought, the words drifting through his mind with the cold detachment he had carried for thirty years.

In his past life, when the military ordnance tore through the warehouse roof, Nicholas had closed his eyes without a single regret. There had been no one waiting for him then. No family expecting him to come home, no voice asking whether he’d eaten, no little sister waiting to tell him about something she’d learned at school.

There had been no names tied to his chest at all. He had lived alone, killed alone, and eventually died alone, leaving behind fifty million dollars to an orphanage that would remember him only as another anonymous check in the mail.

Back then, death had been nothing more than the end of a long and quiet shift. There was no reason to fear it because there was nothing waiting for him on the other side of it.

A vision flickered across the gloom of the warehouse, and for a moment the ruined concrete around him disappeared.

He was back in the tiny kitchen in Detroit, surrounded by the smell of burned stew and cheap spice as Marina stood over him with her hair tied into a messy bun, tears in her eyes while she scolded him for coming home injured and shoved a warm plate into his hands anyway.

Then the scene shifted to Katie marching across the living room with her chest puffed out, waving a notebook covered in messy handwriting and proudly declaring that she was going to become the strongest hero in the world.

He remembered Selena standing in the basement shooting range with her ears bright red, desperately trying to maintain her usual stern expression while teaching him how to handle a pistol, and Julie running toward him with her camera in hand, that ridiculous, unshakeable grin on her face as she screamed his name into a microphone like the entire world had just given her a reason to celebrate.

None of them were particularly grand memories. There were no legendary battles or miraculous victories among them.

They were ordinary moments, the kind Nicholas had spent his first life believing were worthless because they couldn’t be converted into money. Yet now, lying on the floor with his blood slowly leaving his body, those ordinary moments were the only things he could think about.

For twenty-one years, money had been his only anchor. He had chased it because an empty stomach was the only kind of fear he understood, and money had always been the simplest answer to fear. Money could buy food.

Money could buy shelter. Money could buy weapons, information, medicine, and eventually enough distance from the world that nobody could ever force him into a corner again. But somewhere along the way, without Nicholas realizing it, money had stopped being the thing he was fighting for. The apartment, the vacations, the beach trip, the dinners, the people waiting for him to come home—those were the things that had become important. For the first time across two lifetimes, the money itself didn’t matter.

’I promised Katie a beach.’

The thought settled in his chest like an iron nail.

’I promised Marina I would always come home.’

Nicholas closed his eyes.

He didn’t want to die.

He couldn’t leave them. If he died here in the dark, Marina would spend the rest of her life carrying the weight of a broken family alone. Katie would grow up in a world full of monsters without a brother to stand between her and the dark.

He didn’t want to die.

The desire didn’t arrive as another thought. It had been there beneath every other thought, buried underneath the money, the missions, the battles, and the years he’d spent pretending that survival was enough.

It was the reason his hand had reached for the beach trip instead of the battlefield when Katie talked about her dreams. It was the reason he had promised Marina he would come home. It was the reason he’d stood between Zero’s killing blow and the people behind him even when every sensible part of his body had been screaming at him to run.

He wanted to live.

Not because he feared death.

Not because he wanted more money.

Not because he had unfinished business.

He wanted to live because there were people waiting for him.

And that desire answered.

Zero had called desire the root of the Plague. He had called it Qi, willpower given form. Nicholas finally understood what he meant.

It wasn’t some mysterious energy hiding inside his body.

It was the weight of everything he refused to lose.

The pressure erupted through him.

The bleeding in his palms slowed as the concentrated force tightened around the damaged vessels. His shattered arm trembled once before the fractured bones were pulled into alignment, not healed, but held together by an invisible pressure that refused to let them break any further. Pain still tore through his body, but beneath it was something stronger, something Nicholas had never possessed in his first life.

A reason to keep going..

CRASH!

The rusted steel container door blew outward, torn from its hinges by a monstrous kick that sent fragments of metal skidding across the warehouse floor.

Specimen B stepped through the settling dust with his carbon blade resting casually against one shoulder, his coat untouched and his breathing perfectly steady despite the fight that had just ended. He looked exactly as he had moments ago—fresh, composed, and completely certain that the original version of himself was already finished.

"Found you, Original," the clone said with a familiar smirk. "Did you finish saying your prayers?"

Nicholas slowly pushed himself away from the pillar.

Something about the movement made Specimen B’s smile disappear.

Nicholas didn’t stumble. He didn’t use the wall for support. He simply stood, his broken arm hanging uselessly at his side while faint threads of Qi curled around his body. His dark blue eye remained fixed on the clone, and the pressure surrounding him wasn’t particularly large compared to what Zero had displayed earlier.

It was simply focused.

Specimen B took half a step backward before he realized he’d moved.

"What... what is that?"

Nicholas didn’t answer. He stepped forward, his feet moving across the broken stone with silent, lethal grace.

The clone panicked. He raised his left hand, pouring his entire reservoir of copied force into an execution strike.

"{Gravity Crush!}" Specimen B roared.

A massive, invisible pillar of downward kinetic weight slammed down from the ceiling, intending to flatten Nicholas into paste against the concrete.

Nicholas had calculated the line before the clone’s fingers even closed.

Instead of resisting the gravity, Nicholas accepted it. He dropped his body lower and let the crushing force drive him into the floor, using the sudden increase in downward acceleration to propel himself forward rather than fighting against it.

His boots skimmed over the concrete as he shot beneath the center of the attack, closing the distance before the full pressure of the technique could settle over him..

Nicholas’s left palm struck upward, infused with a concentrated burst of pure Qi, catching the base of Specimen B’s striking wrist. He didn’t block the gravity; he redirected the entire kinetic momentum of the clone’s own technique into the clone’s planted feet.

CRACK!

Specimen B’s ankles and knees buckled under the redirected weight of his own thirty-gravity strike. The concrete beneath the clone’s boots

shattered into powder, his footing completely destroyed.

"How—?!" the clone choked out, his balance entirely lost.

"You have my moves," Nicholas whispered, stepping in hip-to-hip, his voice cold and bone chilling "But you’ll never have the desire I have."

Nicholas drove an open-palm strike straight into the center of the clone’s chest.

BOOM!

The concentrated Qi detonated upon impact, sending a violent shockwave through Specimen B’s ribcage that blew the clone thirty feet backward, crashing violently through two concrete support pillars.

At that exact moment, the reinforced skylights above the warehouse shattered in a cascade of glass and twisted metal. A brilliant seam of silver tore open across the ceiling, the edges of reality folding outward as Vixen forced the spatial passage wide enough for the others to enter.

She dropped through first, landing lightly on the catwalk before immediately throwing both hands outward and spreading a lattice of silver displacement barriers across the warehouse exits. There would be no second escape this time.

A moment later, Selena landed beside her, sidearm already raised, her expression tightening the instant she saw the state of the warehouse below.

"NICHOLAS!"

Her voice thundered through the cavernous building.

Nicholas stood in the center of the wreckage, surrounded by drifting dust and faint white strands of Qi. His coat was torn, his right arm hung broken at his side, and blood still covered his hands, but the man who had been lying against that pillar moments ago was gone.

He glanced toward the catwalk.

The hitman didn’t look back at the clone.

"You’re late, Supervisor," Nicholas murmured.