The minute between rounds was a silent, humming wire. In Kyon's corner, Faraday sealed the cut again, his ancient fingers steady as a jeweler's. Gregor whispered a final, vicious incantation. "His right is dead. The shoulder you hit, it's gone. He will paw with it. He will try to grab. You go to the left side. Uppercut. Then the temple. Shatter the bell."
Across the ring, Volkov's corner was a scene of frantic, desperate energy. His head trainer was screaming in his ear, shaking him. The Bear's chest still heaved, the solar plexus shots having stolen the rhythm from his breath. The invincible aura was cracked, and Moscow's fear leaked through like a cold draft.
Kyon bounced on his toes, the adrenaline burning away the pain from the cut, the ribs, the kidney. The Phantom Reflex was no longer just a defensive ghost; it had merged with the Berlin-forged power into a singular, predatory instinct. He was the needle and the hammer.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Round 6.
Kyon moved forward, not with aggression, but with the inevitability of a closing door. The crowd's roar was tinged with a new, anxious note. Volkov met him in the center, but his feet were flat, his movement a lumbering echo of his earlier grace. He pawed a jab, a slow, probing thing. Kyon slipped inside it, his head a moving target on a wire.
He feinted low. Volkov's right hand twitched downward, a sluggish, pained movement. It was as Gregor said—the right was wounded. Kyon exploded upward, driving a left uppercut through the narrow gap between Volkov's elbow and ribcage. It connected with the soft, vulnerable tissue under the armpit, a nerve cluster.
Volkov gasped, a wet, pained sound. His entire right side spasmed, the arm dropping like a dead weight.
Kyon was a surgeon now, cutting away the giant's limbs. He circled left, away from the still-dangerous but slower left hook. He fired a straight right that smashed into Volkov's nose. Cartilage crunched. Blood erupted in a crimson spray, painting Volkov's chest and the canvas.
The referee, Vasiliev, hovered, his face pale. His role as protector was being rendered obsolete by the sheer, one-sided precision of the violence.
Volkov, driven by pride and primordial instinct, swung a wild, looping left hook. Kyon saw it from a mile away. He ducked under it, and as the massive fist sailed harmlessly over his back, he rose and launched a right hook of his own. It landed with a sickening thock on the hinge of Volkov's jaw.
The Bear's legs did a strange, stuttering dance. His eyes rolled back, showing the whites. He crashed into the ropes, held up only by the strands, a puppet with cut strings.
The arena's sound died. Seventy thousand people held their breath.
Vasiliev, finally forced to act, stepped between them. He looked at Volkov's glazed, unseeing eyes, at the river of blood from his nose, at the arm hanging uselessly. He began a count, his voice thin in the silence. "One... two..."
This was the moment. The syndicate's instrument was broken, their champion humiliated on home soil. The siege had succeeded. Kyon could taste it—the cold, metallic flavor of vindication.
Then, from the front row, he saw the silver-haired syndicate man. The man wasn't looking at Volkov. He was looking directly at Kyon. And he gave a small, almost imperceptible nod to someone at ringside.
A movement flickered in Kyon's peripheral vision. Near Volkov's corner, a man in a tracksuit—a "corner man" who hadn't been there before—stepped onto the ring apron, a water bottle in hand. He wasn't looking at his fallen fighter. He was looking at Kyon, his expression blank. He raised the bottle, not to pour it, but as if to throw it.
It was a distraction. A cheap, chaotic ploy to buy a second, to disrupt the count, to give Volkov a chance to recover.
But in that fraction of a second, Kyon saw more. He saw the man's other hand dip into his pocket. He saw the faint glint of something metallic. Not a weapon for Kyon. Something smaller. A vial? A needle?
The "Friend of the Professor's" warning echoed in his mind: "They see the sport as a garden. They have fertilizers. They have poisons."
They weren't just trying to save Volkov from a knockout.
They were going to augment him.
Vasiliev reached "five." Volkov was blinking, a dim awareness returning to his eyes. The tracksuit man on the apron stepped back, melting into the chaos.
Kyon's decision was instantaneous, a product of his new, monstrous calculus. A clean knockout was victory. But it was a punctuation mark. What he needed now was an ellipsis of terror. He needed to show "V" that their tools were not only useless, but that he would break them in their hands, in front of their eyes, on their own terms.
He waved Vasiliev away. "He's fine," Kyon said, his voice cutting through the murmuring silence. "Let him fight."
Vasiliev stared, incredulous. The crowd buzzed in confused shock. In his corner, Gregor roared, "NO! FINISH HIM!"
Kyon ignored him. He stepped back, giving Volkov space. The giant, leveraging the ropes, pushed himself upright. Blood and snot streaked his face. His right arm hung limp. His breath came in ragged, wet heaves. But he was standing. The animal pride was still there, burning through the ruin.
The referee, utterly bewildered, wiped Volkov's gloves on his shirt and waved the fight on.
The message was sent. Kyon wasn't just winning. He was curating the destruction.
Volkov charged, a final, desperate bear rush fueled by shame and chemical adrenaline. It was all left hooks and clumsy grabs. Kyon weaved and pivoted, a matador to a mortally wounded bull. He wasn't hitting hard now. He was picking spots. A sharp jab to the swollen, shattered nose. A hook to the damaged right shoulder. A thumb grazed over the swollen, shut eye.
He was demonstrating total, effortless domination. He was proving to the silver-haired man, to Solano in his suite, to the world, that the monster they had created was beyond their control. He was the weed that could crack concrete.
With thirty seconds left in the round, Kyon ended the exhibition. He stepped inside a wild swing, wrapped his left arm around Volkov's neck in a clinch, and in that intimate, brutal embrace, he spoke directly into the champion's ear, his voice calm and clear.
"This is for the letter you sent," he whispered. Then he drove three short, devastating uppercuts into Volkov's exposed solar plexus. Not to knock him out. To obliterate the function.
Volkov's body went rigid. A geyser of vomit and water erupted from his mouth, splattering the canvas. He didn't fall. He simply folded, dropping to his knees, then onto his side, curling into a fetal position around the ruin of his midsection, retching helplessly.
The bell rang, a meaningless sound.
The referee didn't bother to count. He frantically waved for the doctors. The arena was a cathedral of stunned silence, broken only by Volkov's guttural, choking sounds.
Kyon turned his back on the wreckage and walked to his corner. He did not raise his arms. He did not look at the crowd. He looked directly at the silver-haired man in the front row.
The man's cold mask was gone. His lips were pressed into a thin, white line. His eyes held not anger, but a cold, recalculating assessment. He met Kyon's gaze for a long moment, then stood, turned, and walked away from the chaos, his retinue following. The puppet show was over. The puppet was broken. The puppeteer had business to attend to.
In the ring, the doctors worked on Volkov, who was now on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over his face. The cheers that finally came were scattered, confused, tinged with national shame.
Gregor was in Kyon's face, furious. "You are insane! You give him chance! He could have grabbed you, lucky punch!"
"He had nothing left," Kyon said, letting Faraday tend to his cut. "And they were going to give him something. I needed them to see it wouldn't matter."
Gregor stared at him, understanding dawning. He nodded once, grimly. "A message."
"The only kind they understand."
The ring announcer, his voice lacking all its earlier bombast, took the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen... at one minute and... of the sixth round... the winner by technical knockout... and NEW Undisputed Middleweight Champion of the World... KYON 'THE PHANTOM' WILSON!"
The boos returned, weaker now, hollow. Kyon was handed two monstrous belts—the WBC and WBA middleweight titles—adding them to the ones he already owned. The weight of them meant nothing. The gold was cold.
He gave a cursory, cold interview to the international broadcast, his words short, his eyes already scanning the exits. As he was led back through the screaming tunnel, his mind was already past the victory.
He had stormed the fortress. He had broken their champion. He had stared down the puppeteer.
But as he reached the sterile quiet of the medical room for his mandatory post-fight check, the adrenaline began to recede. The pain from his injuries rushed in to fill the void—a throbbing symphony. The doctor, a different one this time, cleaned the cut, checked his vision, prodded his ribs.
"You have at least two cracked ribs," the doctor said, his tone professional, no longer hostile. "The ear will need drainage. You should go to hospital."
"Just clear me," Kyon said.
He was being stitched when Lena burst in, her phone in hand, her face alight with a fierce, triumphant fire. "You magnificent, terrifying bastard," she breathed. "Do you know what you just did? The PPV numbers are stratospheric. The narrative is flipping. They're calling it the greatest middleweight performance in decades. The 'Reckoning Engine' is global."
"Where's Solano?" Kyon asked, his voice flat.
Her expression tightened. "He left his suite before the fight ended. My source says he looked like he'd seen a ghost. He's on his way to the airport."
Kyon nodded. One enemy in retreat. But the other...
"And the silver-haired man?" he asked. "The one who left."
Lena's eyes darkened. "Gone. Vanished into the night. But we have a name. Piotr Vasilievich Orlov. Not a boxing man. An industrialist. Shipping, mining, private equity. A collector of things. Including, it seems, champions."
Orlov. The name lodged in Kyon's mind like a shard of ice.
"Find out everything," he said. "Every connection. Every subsidiary. Every dirty deal."
"We will," Lena promised. "But tonight, Kyon, you are the king of a very bloody mountain. Enjoy it for five minutes."
He was cleared. They moved him to a private locker room. The silence there was profound. He sat on the bench, the belts piled beside him like discarded trophies. He looked at his hands, the knuckles swollen and split, the wraps stained dark with his blood and Volkov's.
The monstrous hunger that had driven him here was… not sated, but changed. It had been given a taste of its own capability. It had felt the foundations crack. And it wanted more. Not just to break the puppets. To find the hands. To find the brain that guided the hands.
His phone, retrieved from Darius, buzzed. A single text, from an unknown number.
It was a picture. A grainy, black-and-white surveillance photo. It showed Eleanor, through the window of the cabin, reading a book by the fire. She looked peaceful. The timestamp was from one hour ago.
Underneath, a message:
The garden is larger than one flower. A weed that grows too tall is still a weed. We are watching. - V
The cold fury returned, cleaner and sharper than ever. They weren't conceding. They were repositioning. The war wasn't over. It had just declared its true borders.
He deleted the message and the photo. He would have Lena trace the number, but he knew it would lead nowhere.
He stood, his body protesting. He looked at his reflection in the mirror—the stitched cut, the swollen ear, the eyes of a man who had walked through fire and decided he liked the temperature.
The Phantom was a ghost.
The Reckoning Engine had done its work.
Now, something new had to be born from the ashes of Moscow. Something that could hunt not just in the ring, but in the boardrooms, in the shadows, in the silent spaces where the real power lived.
He picked up a single championship belt, hefting its cold weight.
The siege was over.
The hunt had begun.