Chapter Text
His hands were drenched in dark blue, almost black, liquid up to the elbows, the warm crimson soaking through his sleeves and clinging to his skin. His own breathing sounded alien and wrong in his ears – ragged, too loud, as if it belonged to someone else. He reached out with trembling fingers toward the bluish-purple clots on the ground and pulled out an object. The sudden chill of cold metal against his palm cut through the haze like a razor, sobering him for a brief, cruel moment.
Chaos raged all around him. The crowd on the bridge was roaring, chanting his name in a frenzied rhythm, mixed with incoherent screams and guttural howls. Hundreds of voices merged into one deafening, thunderous roar – hundreds of throats, hundreds of eyes fixed solely on him. The entire world had shrunk to the miserable dimensions of this cursed bridge: the wet asphalt pressing into his knees, the cold wind carrying the thick metallic stench of death, and the body lying motionless at his feet. What terrified him most was how ordinary it all felt. Because Smile was dying right before his eyes – dying with the brightest, most radiant smile he had ever worn, as if in this final moment he was finally, genuinely happy.
X woke up in his own bed with a strangled gasp that never quite made it past his throat. A wave of cold sweat drenched him instantly. He jolted upright, body trembling, the faint scent of the new shampoo he’d bought recently still clinging to his hair, mixed with the stale trace of beer he and Smile had been drinking the night before. He yanked his torso up so violently that his vision swam and darkened. The sagging mattress creaked loudly beneath him, the sound cutting sharply through the silence like a knife. In his stomach, a tight string of tension and dread kept twisting tighter and tighter, refusing to loosen.
The foggy haze in his head didn’t fade. A few seconds later, X lurched desperately toward the bathroom. The taste of rust coated his tongue. But the nausea was only surface-level – a shallow ripple on the water. Deeper, somewhere beneath his ribs where the alcohol could no longer reach, something else was stirring. It had no taste, no smell – only color. A deep indigo-black, thick and viscous, like spilled ink spreading through water. A premonition. It didn’t scream or pound in his temples. It simply lay there inside him – heavy, alive, breathing in perfect sync with his own ragged breaths.
X closed his eyes, but the darkness offered no relief. Behind his eyelids, a face drifted past – blurred and indistinct, like a reflection in a rain puddle. Someone he hadn’t lost yet… but already knew, with bone-deep certainty, that he would. The knowledge made his stomach clench, not from the drink, but from pure, ice-cold terror.
When the tension in his body finally eased just a fraction, he dragged himself out into the living room.
The room greeted him with an echoing, unnatural emptiness. There were no crushed shashlik boxes, no empty beer cans, not even the greasy napkins scattered across the table with their oily stains. The usual chaos left behind by a night of drinking was completely gone. Even the main culprit of that chaos – Smile – was nowhere to be seen. Only a faint trace of alcohol still lingered in the air, a quiet reminder of what had happened a few hours before.
X leaned his shoulder against the doorframe, feeling the cool wood press against his overheated skin. Fragments of memories rose slowly in his mind, drifting up through a thick fog. He tried desperately to catch the exact moment when consciousness had finally slipped away and his body had treacherously surrendered. Judging by the fact that he had woken up in his own bed, neatly tucked under the blanket, Smile hadn’t simply left. He had carefully carried X there, made sure he was comfortable, and then disappeared without a sound.
In itself, that wasn’t strange at all. Smile had always been like that – quietly thoughtful in ways no one expected. But deep inside, somewhere beneath X’s ribs, an uneasy, sticky anxiety refused to settle. It twisted and turned like a living thing, making it hard to breathe normally.
And then the house shuddered. Not violently, but noticeably, as if a giant hand had given the walls a firm push. The floor trembled beneath his feet, and the windowpanes gave a soft, protesting clink.
X tensed instantly, every muscle snapping tight as if he’d been electrocuted. His heart lurched and began hammering wildly against his ribs. Without thinking, he darted across the living room toward the balcony door. X didn’t dare step out onto the balcony itself. Instead, he carefully pulled the heavy curtain aside with two fingers and pressed close to the glass, peering out.
What he saw froze him in absolute, bone-chilling shock.
On the old stone bridge spanning the wide river, a dense, buzzing crowd of spectators had already gathered. People were talking excitedly, craning their necks, some shouting enthusiastic words of support while others simply devoured every movement below with greedy eyes. The very air vibrated with tension and feverish anticipation.
And beneath the bridge, on the opposite bank from X’s house, a real battle was raging.
When X finally focused his gaze past the railing, it hit him like a lightning bolt. He stood paralyzed.
Just a few dozen meters away, two heroes from the largest rival corporations were fighting each other with raw, unrestrained fury. One of them was Nice. He moved with the graceful precision of a predatory bird – twisting, diving, slipping away from strikes at the very last fraction of a second, as if dancing on the razor’s edge of death. Facing him was Dragon Boy. Powerful, savage, with eyes blazing like living flames. Every blow he delivered landed with the crushing weight of a blacksmith’s hammer; every lunge carried the raw, primal force of a wild beast. The ground beneath their feet was already cracking, and the air itself rang with the clash of superhuman powers.
For a second, X stood completely still, unable to tear his eyes away.
“What the hell could possibly make two monsters from opposing corporations clash in a real, furious battle… right under my windows?” the thought screamed through his mind.
But there was no time to think. The air began to hum with accumulated energy, and X felt a shiver race across his skin. This was no longer just a fight. This had become something far more serious – something dangerous.
Without wasting another second, he snapped his fingers sharply. The world blurred for a split second. Space obediently folded around him, and in the next instant X was already standing right beside Nice. Without any ceremony, he grabbed the hero by the collar of his pristine white suit – as if snatching a misbehaving kitten and with one powerful yank, teleported him onto a wide support pillar of the bridge that towered high above the roaring crowd below.
The wind whipped at the white fabric of the costume. Nice was breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling. Beneath them, the excited crowd continued to buzz, now laced with a new, astonished murmur.
“If I had been even one second later, you would already be dead,” X said quietly, not even glancing at Nice. The hero stared up at him in stunned silence.
X let out a heavy sigh, still feeling lingering unease echoing heavily in his chest. Then, without hesitation, he leaped decisively from the high pillar.
As he fell, he snapped his fingers again. The world responded instantly. Reality trembled like the finest fabric of existence, pulled taut and reshaped by an invisible, masterful hand. The air ignited with sparkling orange and golden spirals. Space folded into intricate, geometrically perfect portals that resembled glowing stained glass. Time stretched for a moment like thick, slow honey, then snapped back with a sharp, almost musical click.
A fraction of a second later, gravity caught him once more, and X landed softly on the riverbank – directly in front of the enraged Dragon Boy.
The guy was clearly in a full-blown frenzy. His eyes burned with a wild, almost insane flame. His chest heaved with heavy breaths, and his fists glowed with searing energy. The air around him shimmered from the intense heat.
Behind X, Nice landed quietly and gracefully. The hero’s white suit was slightly disheveled, his breathing uneven. He clearly didn’t know what to do with himself – he stood a little to the side, shifting his wary gaze nervously between Dragon Boy and the unexpectedly appeared X. The confusion in his posture was almost palpable.
Judging by that bewilderment and the ferocious battle that had been raging just a minute earlier, Dragon Boy was clearly not in the mood for negotiations today. X stared at him in silence, his mind racing with alarming thoughts.
“Could it be that his company – Mighty Glory – deliberately sent their best fighter to publicly settle the score with Nice? But how the hell did they end up right here… exactly under my windows? As if it was planned. What if this is a trap? What if the whole thing is a carefully staged performance designed to lure me out? To force me to intervene, to reveal myself, to show my abilities in front of hundreds of eyes and cameras?”
His heart clenched unpleasantly. X suddenly regretted, with sharp and bitter clarity, that he had acted so impulsively – rushing out without a single second of thought. Now it was too late to back down.
He let out a heavy, almost resigned sigh, feeling the cool river wind tug at his hair while the tension in the air grew so thick it became almost physically palpable, pressing against his skin like an invisible weight.
“What luck,” Dragon Boy sneered, his voice dripping with savage glee. “Looks like today I’m not just hitting the bullseye. I’m taking the whole damn top spot!”
With those words, he launched himself straight at X.
The hero’s jaw clenched so tightly that his teeth audibly cracked. Deep inside him, a dark premonition stirred uneasily – something was deeply wrong. A heavy, sticky darkness hung in the air, thick and suffocating. But there was no time to hesitate.
One sharp, almost careless snap of his fingers and the space around Dragon Boy obediently contracted. An invisible force snatched the enraged hero up as if he were nothing more than a scrap of paper and hurled him with tremendous power straight into the river.
The crowd on the bridge exploded in the same instant. The roar of voices doubled, then tripled in volume – people were shouting, pointing frantically, some cheering with wild excitement, others gasping in fear. A wave of shock and feverish energy surged over the river like a crackling electric discharge.
X didn’t even spare the crowd a glance. He turned slowly. Nice stood only a few steps away, but he wasn’t looking at X at all. The young hero’s knees buckled beneath him, and he collapsed onto the asphalt of the embankment as if his legs had been cut out from under him. A raw, broken sob tore from his chest, quickly dissolving into a genuine, heart-wrenching wail.
Nice wept in pure agony, his entire body shaking with violent tremors. He wanted to bite, to claw his way out of his own skin, to whimper from the unbearable pain while simultaneously howling with the burning rage that scorched him from within. Everything at once. All of it twisted together into one unbearable, tangled knot of torment.
X approached him carefully. Each step echoed heavily in the sudden, heavy silence that had fallen between them – a fragile pocket of quiet that somehow existed despite the screaming crowd above.
On the dark, wet asphalt, a thick, indigo-black puddle was slowly spreading – viscous and oily, like fresh ink mixed with crude petroleum. It glistened under the dim light, almost alive in its slow, creeping movement.
X dropped to one knee right beside Nice, who was still wracked with hysterical sobs. He was close enough now to hear the boy’s ragged, wheezing breaths and catch fragments of incoherent, feverish words spilling out between the tears.
Without taking his eyes off the strange black mass, X slowly extended his hand. His fingers hovered just a few centimeters above the dark substance. With careful, almost reverent caution, he lowered his palm, trying to feel for anything solid within that clinging darkness. An ice-cold wave of horror slammed into him, so sharp and sudden that his breath caught in his throat. Thick, ugly black liquid slowly dripped from his fingers, leaving sticky, oily trails across his skin. And from beneath that vile, shifting veil, the features of a face began to emerge – a face X would have recognized even in total darkness.
Smile.
The same Smile who had been sitting across from him at the table just a few hours earlier, laughing, cracking open another can of beer, and lazily talking about the most ordinary things. Now he lay on the cold asphalt like a motionless wax figure, his face unnaturally calm and still. On his lips lingered the faint trace of one final smile – quiet, almost forgiving, as if he had already known that everything was over.
X did not flinch. He allowed himself no outward display of emotion. But deep inside his chest, everything tightened into a hard, painful knot. The horror was cold and heavy, almost physical: it spread through his veins like poison, making his heart beat slow and dull, while the world around him seemed to tilt and blur. This was not a scream or tears. It was a quiet, paralyzing emptiness — the devastating realization that the person he had shared the evening with was simply gone. X’s hand trembled traitorously.
In the dead fingers of his friend, he saw a thin cord. At its end hung a small pendant. The very same one Smile had shown him earlier that evening. With careful movements, X opened it. Inside, protected by a thin layer of glass, was a photograph: Smile himself, beaming brightly at the camera, and beside him a little girl – his daughter.
X's teeth ground together so hard that the pain shot straight into his temples. Without a word, he closed the locket and silently slipped it into his pocket.
All of this was very strange. Too strange.
"Could it be that one of the agencies needed to take out Smile right now, of all times?" X's thoughts raced, cold and almost mechanical.
"Judging by how desperately Nice is sobbing nearby and the fierce battle that was raging before I arrived… Mighty Glory has decided to start stirring trouble even before the official start of the Hero Tournament. The boy in white was probably just a bystander. He saw the attack on Smile and rushed to help…" Everything inside X clenched painfully. His heart was squeezed by a heavy sense of foreboding. Something was deeply wrong. It shouldn't be this simple.
He slowly glanced back at Nice, who was still on his knees, shaking with silent sobs. X clicked his tongue almost inaudibly to himself.
Turning around, he exhaled heavily.
He didn't want to resort to this. He didn't want to take on the right to decide other people's fates, and least of all – to bear responsibility for their lives. But circumstances had placed him in a position from which there was no clean way out.
Snap.
X shot a quick look at his watch, and his heart clenched with anxiety. In the same instant, he darted to the front door and yanked it open.
In the dim light of the hallway stood a familiar figure. Whole. Alive. Unmarred by that vile, ink-black sludge.
"Are you some kind of psychic?" came a muffled, slightly mocking voice from beneath a bright yellow motorcycle helmet.
"Something like that," X replied quietly, stepping back.
He was overcome with strange, almost painful feelings. He could still feel Smile's lifeless body on the cold asphalt, the waxy stillness of his face, that final frozen smile. Yet now, the same person stood before him – alive, warm, real. It was both a relief and a tormenting dissonance.
Smile took off his helmet, shook his hair back, and proudly displayed the treats he'd brought: the exact same set of eight cans of beer and two boxes of fragrant shish kebab. Everything was repeating itself, second by second.
If this kept up, X would soon watch his friend die all over again.
X's fists clenched involuntarily, his nails digging into his palms. His pulse spiked sharply, a dull pounding in his temples. Just the memory of the black sludge and that motionless body made his stomach churn with nausea. His gut twisted into a knot.
Pushing the nightmare images away, he lifted his gaze to Smile and asked, as calmly as he could:
"Can we go to the bar tonight?"
The older man, who had just barely taken off his helmet, turned in surprise. His eyebrows shot up.
"What's gotten into you today? Usually, I don't even bother suggesting a bar, you wave it off immediately, and now you're volunteering yourself?" Smile let out a loud, warm-hearted laugh.
That laughter twisted the anxiety inside X into a tight, painful knot.
"I think sometimes you need to go out," X replied quietly, then added almost in a whisper: "In case you never get another chance."
Smile just snorted, but a flicker of concern passed through his eyes.
"Alright, go get changed. I'll have us there in no time."
A few minutes later, they were tearing through the night city on a powerful motorcycle.
X pressed himself tightly against Smile's broad back, feeling the warmth of his body through the leather jacket and the steady, confident rhythm of his breathing. The wind slammed fiercely against his face - cold and fresh, saturated with the scent of the river and asphalt. The city sprawled around them in a panorama of lights: neon signs blurred into bright streaks, high-rise windows twinkled like golden and blue dots, and the old bridge, that very same ill-fated bridge rushed past beneath them like a heavy stone arch.
The evening air was alive. It stung his cheeks, tousled his hair, made his eyes water. X pressed his forehead against the back of the man in front of him, trying to hold onto this warmth, this moment, this breath. While it still lasted.
They turned off the bustling main streets and soon found themselves in a relatively secluded neighborhood. The motorcycle slowed down and stopped in front of a modest, dimly lit bar with a worn-out sign. It was quiet here, with few people and almost no risk of being recognized or filmed on a phone. The kind of place for those who just wanted to drink and talk without drawing unnecessary attention.
X jumped off the motorcycle in one swift motion and stepped over to the curb, trying to steady the shaking in his hands.
"Wait for me here, I'll just park quickly," Smile called out, turning the bike around.
X nodded and glanced at his watch.
Neither Dragon Boy nor Nice were anywhere in sight. It seemed no one had raised an alarm about their fight just yet. For a moment, it felt like everything could still be changed.
He lifted his gaze and in that same instant, the world stopped.
A black car came flying around the corner at tremendous speed. With a dull, horrific thud, it struck Smile, who had barely stepped away from his parked motorcycle. An icy chill shot through X. His hands began trembling so violently that he nearly dropped his phone.
He broke into a sprint and rushed toward his friend's body.
A dark pool of blood was already spreading beneath his feet, glistening in the glow of the streetlights. X dropped to his knees, pressing his fingers frantically against Smile's neck, desperately searching for a pulse.
Nothing. Silence. Only a faint, barely perceptible warmth still lingered in his skin.
He was too late.
Snap.
So running away wasn't an option. If Smile didn't end up at his house this evening, he would die somewhere else, at some other time, but with the same inescapable finale. Fate stubbornly kept leading him toward death, and X could already feel its cold breath on the back of his neck.
He took one last look at his watch and yanked the front door open with a sharp, almost angry motion.
"Are you some kind of psychic?" came the muffled, teasing voice from beneath the bright yellow motorcycle helmet.
"Something like that," X replied quietly, stepping back.
Smile took off his helmet, and X's gaze locked onto his face, as if he were trying to read every answer to the questions burning inside him from those familiar features. Why did Smile have to die tonight of all nights? What did he need to do – or not do – to prevent it? If he had only made it back earlier, he would already know what happened on the bridge, how Smile had fallen under the influence of Fear, and why Nice had been forced to fight Dragon Boy.
"Hey, buddy, you're acting weird today. Something wrong?"
Smile warmly placed a heavy hand on his shoulder. X flinched as if jolted by electricity. In just a couple of hours, he would lose these touches forever.
"Let's just go to the living room…" he muttered darkly.
Smile stepped inside, tossed the food he'd brought onto the table with a familiar, casual motion, and collapsed into the armchair that had long since become his rightful spot in this house. He stretched, his spine cracking audibly, and smiled.
"I got chicken and beef. Didn't know what you'd be in the mood for tonight, so help yourself, eat it while it's hot," he said good-naturedly, popping open the first can of beer.
When Smile reached for the second can, X suddenly stopped his hand.
"Not tonight. My head is splitting."
Smile grunted but didn't argue.
"Want me to run to the pharmacy and get you something?"
"Don't bother," X waved him off. "It'll pass."
The evening was unfolding exactly on schedule, as if some invisible hand was meticulously calibrating every second.
They ate a couple of skewers of shish kebab, exchanging the occasional familiar, easygoing phrase. Everything was almost as usual. Almost.
Until X's phone shattered the quiet with a shrill ringtone.
He picked up. A familiar voice on the other end delivered a few short sentences. X's expression shifted slowly: confusion gave way to displeasure, then surprise.
When the call ended, Smile set down his beer can and looked at him intently.
"What happened? Who was that?"
X swallowed hard.
"The company. A security system failure. They urgently need me and a few other employees."
Smile nodded without hesitation.
"If it's that serious, go. I'll give you a ride."
Inside X, a heavy, sticky sense of foreboding began to grow once again. He tried to talk his friend out of it, but Smile was adamant. Arguing with him at times like this was useless.
Soon enough, the motorcycle pulled up in front of the ill-fated FOMO building – the very same one X had left just an hour and a half ago, sincerely hoping he wouldn't have to return for at least the next ten hours.
X took the elevator up to his floor and stepped straight into chaos. People were darting through the corridors: some running with tablets, others speaking loudly on their phones, every face was tense, almost frightened. His colleagues immediately swept him up and quickly brought him up to speed: FOMO was under a massive DDoS attack. The priority was to protect the data at all costs and prevent any leaks.
X sat down at his computer. His fingers began moving mechanically across the keyboard, launching protocols, monitoring traffic. Panic was building around him: someone was cursing under their breath, someone was pounding on a desk, someone else was clutching their head in despair.
But his thoughts kept drifting away to Smile. To how he might already be driving back… or standing somewhere on the street, completely unaware that death had already chosen its time and place for him.
X kept glancing nervously at his watch. The hands moved slowly, almost mockingly. Nothing was happening. Not yet.
Just as the main threats had finally been fended off through their combined efforts and the room was beginning to calm down, a breathless employee suddenly burst through the doorway with a shout.
"We've got a major incident on the servers! Witnesses are live-streaming a huge brawl between heroes from the major agencies!"
X let out a heavy, resigned sigh and dropped his head onto the desk, pressing his forehead against the cold surface.
Snap.
Perhaps it wasn't enough for him to simply show up before his own meeting with Smile. Fate demanded more.
X glanced at his watch. His shift at the company was about to end. What if he removed another variable from the equation? If, in addition to Dragon Boy, Nice also joined the fight tonight… If X could keep the kid away, could Smile survive?Maybe it was precisely because he was trying to protect the younger hero that Smile had died last time. Without him – one-on-one against Dragon Boy – would he be able to fend off the attack?
It was worth a try. Because X genuinely didn't know what else to do anymore. It felt as if fate itself stubbornly refused to let him interfere, and every step he took only tightened the noose further.
As soon as his shift ended, X bolted. Without waiting for the elevator with the others, he practically ran down the stairs, burst out of the building, and dove into the nearest alley without looking back. Once he was around the corner of the massive office building, away from prying eyes, he snapped his fingers sharply.
Reality responded instantly and furiously.
The world cracked like thin glass under the blow of an invisible hammer. Vivid, jagged fractures raced through the air, space warped into impossible geometric shapes, as if someone had turned the very fabric of existence inside out. Time stretched into a viscous, shimmering spiral, and then snapped back together with a deafening, grinding crunch.
X made several swift leaps through the rifts in reality, the city flashing around him in blurred lights and shadows, until finally, he materialized inside the quiet, dimly lit dressing room of the young hero.
Nice spun around at the sound.
On his face was a raw, animal expression of fear: eyes wide open, pupils contracted to pinpricks, shoulders tensed as if he were ready to either lunge into battle or flee without looking back.
"X? Wh-what are you doing here? Who let you–" Nice's voice faltered. He instinctively stepped back, pressing his spine against the table, as if trying to melt into it, to dissolve into the wood.
Could X have come to kill him? Had he found out that Nice was using Fear as a weapon? Out of the corner of his eye, the boy frantically scanned the table for anything he could use to defend himself. Where was that vial… that particular vial of Fear that Shang De had given him earlier?
X didn't waste time on explanations or formalities. His voice was hard, almost commanding:
"Listen to me carefully. Tonight, you'd better not stick your head out of the tower. Not one step outside. Don't you dare go out, understand? This is a matter of enormous importance."
Nice clenched his teeth so hard that the muscles in his jaw bulged.
Inside him, a tight spiral of paranoia instantly unraveled. Every micro-gesture of X's – the slight movement of his fingers, the tilt of his head, even the way he breathed – seemed lethally dangerous. The boy was waiting for a trick, waiting for an attack, waiting for the hero standing before him to tear him apart at any moment.
Nice’s back is still pressed against the table.
The wood bites into his spine through his hero suit, a solid pressure, real. He focuses on that. On the edge digging in, because if he stops focusing on that, he'll start shaking again, and if he starts shaking, he won't be able to stop.
The smell of ozone lingers, sharp and thin, curling at the back of Nice's throat. Beneath it is the stale sweat on his own skin, the metallic tang of fear he's been breathing out for months. His hands are flat on the table behind him. He can feel his own pulse in his palms.
He knows.
The thought isn't a thought anymore. It's a pressure behind his eyes, a vibration in his teeth, a rhythm that matches his heartbeat, thudding over and over: he knows he knows he knows.
Nice pushes off the table and immediately regrets it. His knees are unsteady. He catches himself on the edge of the desk, fingers curling around the wood grain, and stands there, breathing too fast.
The makeup mirror along the wall reflects his own face back at him. He looks pale. The kind that comes from the inside out. He turns away from the mirror.
Nice’s eyes sweep the desk. He sees brushes, powders and small vials of setting spray and primer. And there half-hidden under a folded towel the other vial. The one Shang De gave him. The glass is cold when he moves his hand towards it. Small enough to hide in his palm. Inside, something dark shifts, slow and thick, like it's breathing.
Nice's jaw aches, he’s been clenching it for so long the pain has spread up into his temples, a dull, persistent throb that won't let him think straight.
"He knows…" pounded inside his head again. "He knows everything. Every secret of mine, every weakness… He knows what I'm supposed to do tonight."
Nice doesn't want to do this.
The thought arrives soft, almost tender, and it hurts more than the jaw pain. He remembers the first time he saw Smile fight. It was on a screen, a grainy livestream from some district nobody cared about. Smile had been outnumbered, three against one, and he'd still been smiling. A real smile, like he was genuinely happy to be there, like the fight itself was a gift. Nice had watched that clip forty-seven times. He knows the number because he counted.
And tonight, he is supposed to make sure that man dies.
Shang De's instructions had been clear. Without Smile, your path opens. You will take his place in top 10.
Nice’s own reflection stares back from the dark glass – hollow cheeks, shadows under his eyes, a mouth that doesn't know how to smile the way Smile does.
He doesn't want to do this. But wanting has never mattered.
If someone else took all the burden on themself, the rest of heroes wouldn't have to suffer.
His hand is trembling. The air in the room is heavy. He can hear the distant hum of the city, muffled through the walls, and somewhere closer, the soft tick of the clock on the wall.
Nice desperately wants to just sit down in the chair in front of the mirror. Enough to look at his own face and try to recognize it. Enough to press his palms flat against his thighs and breathe, slow and deliberate, until the shaking subsides. Enough to lie to himself.
He tells himself he has no choice. That Shang De would kill him if he refused. That the Commission would lock him away if they knew what he'd already done. That Smile's death is not his fault, it's just the shape the world has taken, and he is only following the contours.
He knows the mirror won’t believe him. The face staring back is not the face of a man with no choices. It's the face of a man who made a choice a long time ago and has been trying to outrun it ever since.
Nice drops his gaze. His hands are still touches the smooth surface of table, fingers intertwined so tightly the knuckles have gone white. He can feel his own heartbeat in his wrists, fast and shallow, like a bird trapped behind his ribs.
He doesn't want to kill Smile. The thought returns, soft as before, and this time it brings company: But I will.
He can’t run from himself. He is going to walk out of this room tonight. He is going to find Smile. And he is going to do what he was told.
Not because he wants to, but because somewhere along the way, wanting stopped being the point.
It’s not his fault he has to do that. It’s Shang De’s fault, he told Nice to do that and it’s Smile’s fault, that he was unlucky enough to be in the wrong place and it’s also X’s fault, because if he knows what Nice is going to do, he didn’t stop him. Yes, that’s it. It’s easy now. Nice feels anger boiling inside. How dare the man in front of him make demands without even trying to help if he knows enough to come here.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Nice's voice cracked, rising higher and sharper. "And what gives you the right to make demands of me like this?"
X tried to keep his voice calm.
"People's lives depend on this. You have to stay in the tower. Do not go out tonight, no matter what."
But the boy only sneered viciously, retreating even further toward the table.
"What if I call the Commission right now? What then? Let them figure out why you're barging in here and threatening me."
X frowned. The image of the ideal, radiant hero that Nice projected to the outside world was crumbling before him. Beneath that snow-white mask was a very different person – frightened, embittered, ready to bite.
Nice stepped forward aggressively, his voice trembling with fury.
"People wouldn't die if you just saved them all! You're the strongest, aren't you? That's your job! If you took full responsibility, the rest of us heroes wouldn't have to suffer. We wouldn't have to risk our lives every single damn day!"
The words struck X directly in the chest.
In his mind, Smile's lifeless body on the wet asphalt flashed instantly – the dark pool of blood, that frozen smile.
Guilt washed over him in a heavy, suffocating wave. His power, capable of tearing the very fabric of reality, was powerless against this single death. He had already tried. Many times. And every single time, circumstances aligned so that he was forced to stand aside and let Smile die.
X exhaled heavily, feeling everything inside him turn to ice, and snapped his fingers.
The world shattered once more into shimmering fragments. Colourful spirals of portals, the crackling of breaking reality and a moment later, he was standing at the edge of a high tower rooftop.
The cold evening wind slammed into his face, sobering him, blowing the heavy fog from his mind. The last rays of sunlight painted the sky in blood-orange hues, slowly fading behind the silhouettes of skyscrapers.
X stood motionless, watching the dying sunset, reflecting quietly.
How strangely Nice had behaved… Like a cornered animal, ready to either lunge or break at any moment. Not a trace remained of that bright, confident hero they showed on television. Something had broken deep inside that boy. Or someone had broken him.
When X returned home, the first thing he did was check his watch. Smile would be arriving very soon.
X let out a heavy, resigned sigh and pressed his forehead against the cool wall. A faint, almost desperate hope flickered in his chest:
"Maybe this time… things will be different."