Chapter 238: Don’t Stain My Coat [Edited]

The dust had barely begun to settle across the shattered concrete before Nicholas stepped through the debris, his left arm raised as pure white Qi coiled around his knuckles like condensed lightning. His dark blue eye remained fixed on the struggling shape buried beneath the fallen pillar, and there was no hesitation in his stride now.

The weakness that had nearly left him crawling across the warehouse floor was gone, replaced by something far more dangerous—a cold, focused certainty that this fight had already taken enough from him.

He had spent the last several minutes bleeding, running, improvising and barely staying alive, and he had no intention of giving Specimen B another opportunity to turn any of it against him. He wanted the fight over, and judging from the pressure gathering around his hand, he intended to make sure it ended on his terms.

Beneath the pulverized granite, Specimen B coughed up a thick mouthful of crimson fluid, one arm trembling beneath the weight of the fallen pillar as he tried to push himself free.

His ribs had taken the full force of Nicholas’s Qi strike, and every attempt to draw a proper breath sent another wave of pain through his chest. Yet it wasn’t the injuries that made him freeze. It was Nicholas. The man walking toward him no longer moved like the exhausted person he’d been beating moments ago.

There was something different in his posture, something horribly familiar in the stillness of his face, and for the first time since the fight began, fear showed openly on Specimen B’s identical features.

"You... you’re a monster," Specimen B wheezed.

"You’re me. You should’ve known that before coming to mess with my life," Nicholas said flatly.

He lunged forward, the Qi-infused palm driving downward to crush the clone’s skull.

Specimen B didn’t try to block. In sheer, desperate survival, the clone threw both bloodied hands toward the ceiling.

{Spatial Shred}

The air between them did not simply fold; it violently tore apart. A dozen jagged spatial fractures erupted around Specimen B in a dense, shrieking storm, each tear cutting through the air from a different angle as the surrounding space collapsed into a chaotic web of invisible edges.

There was no safe direction to move. The attack wasn’t designed to drive Nicholas back or force him into a defensive position—it was meant to surround him completely and carve through everything caught within its reach.

Nicholas gritted his teeth and poured every ounce of his newly awakened Qi into a forward barrier.

BOOM!

The spatial blades collided against the wall of pure willpower, screeching like grinding gears as the two absolutes tore the warehouse floor into powdered rubble. The sheer concussive backlash blew Nicholas back half a step, the raw Qi screaming in his ears as he forced the dimensional cuts to shatter into harmless sparks of light.

In that split second of blinding glare, Specimen B didn’t fight. He rolled backward, dragging his broken body toward the nearest fold in space, his entire body was pulled through it.

Nicholas lunged after him, but the portal snapped shut before he could reach it, leaving nothing behind except a smear of dark blood across the concrete and a crater where the clone had been lying moments earlier.

Nicholas stopped at the edge of the crater, his fist still wrapped in fading white Qi, staring at the empty space where Specimen B had disappeared. He had escaped—and Nicholas knew immediately that this wasn’t the end of him.

High on the catwalk, hovering just beneath the shattered skylights, three tiny, marble-sized lenses rotated in absolute silence.

Julie’s auxiliary micro-drones had slipped through the broken roof right behind Vixen, their high-gain transmitters capturing every single frame.

Across the entire continent, the live broadcast reconnected.

Two billion people, still reeling from the confrontation with Zero, watched Julie’s camera stabilize on the warehouse floor.

For several seconds, nobody seemed to understand what they were looking at. Then the camera shifted, bringing both men into the same frame—the battered Phantom standing amid the wreckage and Specimen B bleeding several meters away, wearing the exact same face.

The chat exploded.

[DreyEA: THERE ARE TWO OF THEM?!]

[StandleyE: HOLY SHIT IT WAS A CLONE. THE ENTIRE MASSACRE WAS A FAKE]

[Airman1991: We blamed him... we literally put a fifty-million bounty on the guy who saved us from Vance]

[Eventfullmars: Look at him. His arm is broken, his chest is bleeding, and he was still fighting his own duplicate in the dark]

[Marypaz13: I’m crying actual tears right now. We failed him. The whole world failed him 😭]

[Marshall_prat_4819: I feel like the biggest piece of shit on Earth. (well I don’t) Phantom, I’m so sorry bro]

[Nova_Fall: Councillor Larry needs to be arrested immediately! He framed our hero!]

[Zerox4575: HE WAS INNOCENT THE ENTIRE TIME. PHANTOM IS THE GOAT]

Within seconds, the conversation had changed completely. The same people who had spent hours calling Phantom a murderer were now demanding answers from the people who had put the bounty on his head.

Inside the warehouse, Nicholas didn’t hear the cheers or the weeping.

The moment Specimen B’s spatial tear sealed shut the brilliant white Qi circulating through Nicholas’s veins simply stopped.

There was no gradual drain, no warning, no final flicker of resistance. The QI he’d forced through his battered body collapsed all at once, and the artificial reinforcement holding his shattered ribs and broken arm together disappeared with it.

A wave of dizzying, ice-cold blackness slammed into his skull.

"Ah," Nicholas muttered, his voice barely a breath.

His knees gave out.

He fell forward like a felled tree, his face slamming into the grit and broken glass of the warehouse floor with a heavy, sickening thud.

"PHANTOM!"

Selena leaped off the ten-foot catwalk without checking her landing, hitting the concrete in a ragged roll and scrambling across the rubble on her hands and knees. Her sidearm clattered away, forgotten, as she reached his side.

Vixen folded space in a panicked blur, appearing directly beside him, her hands trembling as she hovered over his limp, bleeding body.

"Phantom! Hey! Look at me!" Selena cried, rolling him onto his back with frantic, trembling hands.

Nicholas lay limp in the dust.

His black hair was completely soaked in sweat and dark blood. His skin was the color of chalk, cold and clammy to the touch. Blood was pooling freely beneath his torn coat from his reopened stab wounds, his fractured arm hung at an unnatural angle, and his chest barely rose with shallow, wheezing rattles.

From the doorway, Julie came sprinting in with her portable transmission console bouncing against her hip, tears streaming down her soot-stained face.

"PHANTOM!" Julie shrieked, skidding onto her knees in the dirt beside Vixen. "No, no, no, don’t die! The stream is at ninety million viewers! You can’t die when the metrics are this high! That’s bad for the algorithm!"

"SHUT UP ABOUT THE ALGORITHM, JULIE!" Selena screamed, her voice cracking into pure, terrified fury as she pressed both hands against Nicholas’s chest, desperately trying to stem the bleeding. "He’s crashing! His pulse is barely there!"

Vixen pressed two fingers to his neck, her jade eyes wide with absolute horror. "His internal temperature is plummeting... he burned through his own life force to hold that barrier... we need a medical transport right now!"

"I’m calling Cho! I’m calling Cho right now!" Julie sobbed, her fingers slipping across her blood-smeared phone screen as she dialed the emergency line with frantic stabs.

On the cold concrete, Nicholas’s dark blue eyes fluttered open a fraction of an inch.

The world above him was a blur of spinning shadows, flashing drone lights, and three terrified women leaning over him through the haze.

Selena was crying. Actual tears were dripping off her chin, splashing directly onto his forehead.

Nicholas tried to take a breath, but his lungs felt like they were filled with broken glass. He looked up at Selena’s panicked, tear-streaked face, his dry, cracked lips parting with agonizing slowness.

"Supervisor..." he rasped, his voice a faint, dying whisper.

Selena leaned down instantly, pressing her ear inches from his mouth, her shoulders shaking.

"I’m here! Nicholas, I’m right here! What is it?! Stay with me!"

Nicholas swallowed a mouthful of coppery blood, his lone expression as flat and serious as a contract ledger.

"...If you get tears... on the leather coat..." Nicholas wheezed faintly, "...the dry-cleaning surcharge... comes out of your salary..."

Selena froze.

Her tears stopped mid-fall. Her breath hitched in her throat as she stared down at the half-dead hitman whose face remained entirely devoid of shame.

"You..." Selena gasped, Her voice trembled somewhere between relief and the overwhelming urge to strangle him with her bare hands.

"You absolute, insufferable, brain-dead BRAT! You are literally dying in a puddle of your own blood, and you’re charging me for DRY CLEANING?!"

"It’s... imported leather..." Nicholas whispered, his eyelids fluttering shut as his head rolled weakly to the side.

"DON’T YOU DARE CLOSE YOUR EYES!" Selena roared, grabbing his face between her blood-stained palms and shaking him frantically.

"Nicholas! NICHOLAS! Wake up! I’ll pay for the coat! I’ll pay for ten coats! Just open your damn eyes!"

"Doctor Cho is on the line!" Julie screamed into her phone, holding it up like a holy relic.

"DOCTOR CHO! HE’S DYING! PHANTOM IS DYING!"

Through the tinny speaker, Doctor Cho’s painfully bored, flat voice crackled over the line:

"I told him last time to avoid strenuous activity. The emergency helicopter dispatch fee is eight hundred thousand credits. Will that be cash or wire transfer?"

"I’LL PAY IT! I’LL PAY DOUBLE! JUST GET HERE IN TWO MINUTES OR I’LL THROW YOU OFF A CLIFF!" Selena shrieked into the phone.

Above them, the drone cameras caught every single second of the chaos.

Across the globe, ninety million viewers watched their stoic, unkillable legend lying motionless in the dirt, surrounded by his weeping supervisor and screaming teammates, his life slipping away by the millimeter on a live, global feed.

[Marypaz13: PRAY FOR PHANTOM. EVERYONE PRAY RIGHT NOW]

[Zerox4575: HE CAN’T DIE LIKE THIS. NOT AFTER SAVING EVERYONE]

[StandleyE: HOLD ON BRO! THE MEDICS ARE COMING!]

In the darkness of Nicholas’s fading consciousness, a soft, familiar golden chime echoed in the void:

{Ding!}

{The world weeps for their fallen savior.}

{Public Reverence & Grief: Transcendent.}

{+12,400 Charm points}

{+18,900 Charm points}

{Charm Points: 45,620 and climbing...}

Nicholas didn’t see the numbers.

His breath hitched once, shallow and thin, and then the dark took him.