Chapter 236: Looking For Phantom [Edited]

The rain in District 6 continued to fall in steady sheets, washing through the wreckage that had been left behind by the battle. Black miasma dissolved into the gutters, blood thinned beneath the constant stream of water, and the cracks running through the asphalt slowly filled until the entire street looked less like the site of a battle and more like something the city itself was trying to erase.

But the damage remained everywhere—collapsed storefronts, overturned vehicles, shattered windows, and the fading distortion in the air where Nicholas had disappeared.

Selena reached the spot where Nicholas had disappeared first, her eyes scanning the empty space as though she could somehow force him back into existence by finding something the others had missed.

"Who was that?" she demanded, her voice carrying over the rain as the worry in her expression hardened into panic. "Where did they take him?"

"Julie! Get the remaining drones in the air! Sweep a two-mile perimeter around this coordinate right now!"

Two blocks away, in the shattered window of the second-floor office, Julie’s fingers flew across the emergency console.

"I’m scanning!" Julie shouted into the comm line, her fingers moving rapidly across the emergency console as three micro-drones shot into the rain and scattered across the surrounding rooftops.

"Thermal, optical, motion tracking—all active. I’m sweeping the entire two-mile perimeter, checking rooftops, alleys, open streets, underground access points, everything I can reach from here!"

The tactical display on Selena’s forearm filled with rapidly shifting markers before almost all of them disappeared into flat gray.

"There’s nothing," Julie said a moment later, her voice cracking. "Whoever took him isn’t within the vicinity"

Nectron stepped forward, his massive fists clenched at his sides, his jaw tight as he stared at the empty street. "A spatial fold. Whoever grabbed him had an instantaneous jump. They could be five miles out by now."

Vixen walked to the center of the residual ripple. She knelt, her slender fingers spreading over the faint seam where reality had been torn and stitched closed. She closed her eyes, feeling the microscopic fractures left behind in the atmospheric weave.

"It’s my ability," Vixen said quietly, her green eyes snapping open with cold realization. "Or an exact duplicate of it. The displacement signature is identical to a long-range fold."

"Can you track it?" Selena demanded, grabbing Vixen’s arm.

"I can reconstruct the coordinate from the residual spatial friction," Vixen replied, her brow tightening as she studied the faint distortion left behind in the air.

"There’s still some traces left behind. The problem is that the signature is scrambled. I’ll need to separate the original trajectory from the interference before I can determine where they actually landed." She clenched her fingers as the silver light around them became denser. "Give me ten minutes."

"Ten minutes?!" Selena’s voice rose, her knuckles turning white around her unpowered sidearm.

"Look at the blood he left on this road! His hands were shredded! His ribs were broken! He doesn’t have ten minutes to wait in a ditch especially when we have no idea who took him!"

"It’s the only option we have, Selena," Nectron said heavily, placing a massive, grounding hand on her shoulder. "If we guess and jump blind, we lose him completely. Vixen, start the cipher. We move the second she gets a lock."

Vixen sat cross-legged in the rain, raising both

hands as delicate ribbons of silver light unraveled from her fingertips, beginning the agonizingly slow process of tracing the fold across the city’s grid.

Back inside the cavernous warehouse, three tons of splintered oak and iron shipping crates came tumbling down in an avalanche of dust and sharp edges.

Specimen B’s carbon blade descended in a decapitating arc, intending to cleave through the kindling and end the original’s life.

The blade met nothing but rotted pine.

Nicholas had already rolled.

He didn’t move with any supernatural speed or spatial ability. He moved on the ugly, agonizing, animal instinct that had kept him alive in thirty years of dirty alleyways and failing contracts.

His broken right arm was tucked tight against his chest, bound inside the torn lining of his jacket to keep the fractured bone from tearing through the muscle.

With his functional left arm, he dragged himself beneath the heavy steel undercarriage of an industrial forklift, rolling into the narrow blind spot behind the rear axle.

His breaths ragged and heavy, "Shit" he muttered gritting his teeth.

Specimen B stepped through the settling kindling, resting the blade flat against his palm with an amused chuckle.

"Crawling like a rat under machinery, Nicholas?" the clone’s voice echoed off the high corrugated ceiling. "You know it’s pointless. I have your muscle memory. I know you love taking the blind angle beneath low-clearance vehicles because it restricts an attacker’s vertical slashing plane."

The clone thrust his palm downward.

{Gravity Push}

The heavy four-ton forklift groaned, its steel chassis bending under sudden, violent pressure as it was slammed downward to crush whoever lay beneath it.

Nicholas wasn’t under it anymore.

The instant Nicholas heard the air compress beneath the forklift, he understood what Specimen B was about to do. He didn’t wait to see the machine move.

He kicked off the concrete with both heels, using the little strength left in his legs to propel himself across the grease-slicked floor and into the narrow gap between two towering stacks of decommissioned shipping containers.

The forklift slammed down behind him a moment later, its steel chassis folding against the concrete with a deafening crash that shook dust from the rafters.

He yanked the iron lever down.

A suspended engine block—two thousand pounds of solid, unpowered cast iron—dropped straight out of the rafters, whistling through the gloom like an anvil.

Specimen B reacted with textbook precision. He didn’t waste an ability; he slid a half-step sideways on the balls of his feet, letting the engine block shatter the concrete four inches from his boots.

In that exact half-second when the falling engine block shattered the concrete and filled the air with dust, Nicholas struck—not with another punch or a desperate blade attack, because both would have been predictable against an opponent who possessed his own combat instincts, but with something far less elegant.

He snatched up the industrial grease canister and hurled it directly into Specimen B’s face before immediately scooping a handful of dry concrete powder from the floor and throwing it after the lubricant.

The thick black grease splattered across the clone’s eyes and forehead, and the powder clung to the wet film instantly, turning the entire mess into a dense layer that completely obscured his vision.

"Cheap parlor tricks!" Specimen B snarled, sweeping his blade in a wide defensive circle as he tried to clear the space around him. He couldn’t see Nicholas, but he didn’t need to; he had spent the entire fight anticipating the movements the original would normally make.

The problem was that Nicholas wasn’t fighting normally anymore. He was abandoning the clean, efficient movements that had been copied into Specimen B’s body and replacing them with whatever ugly solution the warehouse happened to offer, forcing the clone to react instead of predict.

Nicholas didn’t charge the circle. He stepped around the perimeter of the blind swing, closing the distance at an oblique angle, and drove the heel of his heavy combat boot directly into the side of the clone’s left knee.

CRACK!

The joint buckled. Specimen B gasped, his balance breaking for the first time in the fight as he dropped to one knee on the broken concrete.

Nicholas didn’t try to follow the strike with a combination. He knew his limits better than anyone, and his body was already a wreck of broken bones, torn ligaments, shredded palms, and bruised organs.

A sustained fight against a fresh version of himself would end with him on the floor again, and this time there would be no second chance. He couldn’t overpower Specimen B, and he couldn’t outfight him using the same techniques the clone already possessed, so the only advantage he had left was the one thing his opponent couldn’t predict perfectly—the willingness to abandon every rule of a clean fight and use whatever happened to be within reach.

Before the clone could wipe the grease from his eyes, Nicholas swept a rusted steel crowbar off the floor with his boot, caught it in his left hand, and drove the heavy iron point downward into the clone’s weapon wrist.

The blade clattered to the floor.

Specimen B let out a feral roar, abandoning weapons entirely as he reached up with both hands, his raw Strength stat flaring as his fingers clamped around Nicholas’s collar.

The clone drove his forehead forward in a savage headbutt.

CRACK!

Nicholas took the blow square across the bridge of his nose. Blood sprayed across both of their faces, but Nicholas didn’t let go of the crowbar. He twisted the iron tool beneath the clone’s arm, levering the weight of the fallen engine block beside him to shove the clone violently backward into the narrow gap between two steel containers.

Nicholas immediately kicked the release pin on the container’s locking door, letting the massive, six-hundred-pound rusted steel hatch swing shut with a concussive SLAM, temporarily pinning the clone inside the narrow partition.

The heavy steel door buckled outward almost instantly under the clone’s furious, superhuman punches from the other side.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The iron hinges were groaning, tearing free from the rusted frame with every strike. It would hold for thirty seconds at most.

Nicholas fell back a few paces, sliding his back down against a concrete pillar until he hit the floor.

His chest heaved in ragged, wheezing gasps.

Blood was pouring freely from his nose, his chin, his broken arm, and his shredded palms. The pain was blinding, white-hot, and suffocating. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the shattered half of his X-glasses, and tossed the plastic onto the floor with a tired sigh.

He tilted his head back against the cold concrete, looking up at the broken skylights where the rain dripped through the shadows.

He knew Selena was out there. He knew Vixen and Nectron would tear the city apart searching for him. Julie had the drones, and Selena was probably pushing to find him as soon as possible.

They were coming.

He just had to keep breathing until they arrived.

The iron hinges on the container door shrieked, metal fatiguing as the clone’s fist punched a dent clean through the center of the steel plate.

Nicholas forced his eyes open, watching the door with an exhausted, dry smirk.

"How long till they come?" Nicholas muttered under his breath, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his broken sleeve.

"To think a day would come when I’d actually be waiting for people to save my ass"