Chapter 1057. Let’s Give Them a Show They’ll Never Forget

Chapter 1057: 1057. Let’s Give Them a Show They’ll Never Forget

The world went silent. For a heartbeat, even the wind stopped.

The attack moved faster than light, a streak of absolute annihilation aimed directly at Rex’s sternum.

But Rex didn’t flinch. He didn’t dodge.

He didn’t even raise his hands to guard. He simply stood his ground, his eyes locked onto Theo’s with a cold, terrifying clarity.

His adaptation had reached its limit. He knew exactly what this move was.

He knew its speed, its mass, and its temporal signature.

As the fist of annihilation drew within an inch of his chest, Rex moved.

It wasn’t a blur; it was a statement of absolute dominance. With precise, economical motion, Rex raised his left hand.

CLANG.

The sound wasn’t a crash or an explosion; it was the sound of two immovable objects meeting. Rex’s palm met Theo’s glowing fist mid-strike, catching the full force of the oblivion strike with impossible ease.

The shockwave rippled outward through the ground, cracking the earth in a perfect circle around them, but Rex’s arm didn’t even tremble.

The golden light of the attack died against Rex’s skin. The silence that followed was deafening.

Rex’s palm held Theo’s fist fast, the two men frozen in a tableau of absolute power and absolute desperation. Rex leaned forward slightly, his face splattered with blood but his expression utterly serene.

"My turn," Rex whispered.

The silence that followed the impact was more terrifying than the explosions that preceded it. Theo’s eyes, wide and bloodshot, stared into Rex’s pupils.

He could feel the power of the Oblivion Strike, the attack meant to erase existence, simply bleeding away into Rex’s palm like water into sand.

Rex’s grip tightened slightly, not enough to break bones, but enough to remind Theo who owned the space they stood in.

"You’re exhausted, Theo," Rex said softly, his voice carrying an almost patronizing tenderness. "Your timeline is fraying at the edges."

"You’ve spent everything on a lie."

Theo tried to pull away, to trigger another burst of temporal energy, but nothing happened. When he tried to accelerate his own time to escape the grip, he felt nothing but a dull ache.

His magic wasn’t just failing; it was being actively rejected by the space around Rex. His Full Potential Adaptation had reached its final stage: temporal immunity.

"Impossible..." Theo wheezed, blood bubbling between his lips. "I am the end of all things... I am the clock that stops..."

"No," Rex interrupted, releasing Theo’s fist with a dismissive flick. "You’re just a boy playing with a broken watch."

Rex moved.

It wasn’t a fight anymore; it was a demonstration. Theo swung a desperate, wild haymaker.

Rex didn’t even seem to move; he simply leaned an inch to the left, letting the fist whistle past his ear.

WHOOSH.

Before Theo could recover, Rex delivered a lightning-fast flick to Theo’s forehead.

TOCK.

It sounded like a clock ticking. The force sent Theo spinning backward, his head snapping back.

Before he could hit the ground, Rex appeared beside him, grabbing him by the collar.

"Let’s try something different," Rex mused. "Since you love time so much, let’s see how you handle its absence."

Rex unleashed a controlled burst of dimensional compression. He didn’t hit Theo; he hit the space around Theo.

The air suddenly became as solid as steel, boxing Theo in a transparent, crushing cage of distorted reality.

CRUNCH.

Theo screamed as the compressed space began to squeeze his ribs. He tried to use temporal stasis to freeze the pressure, but the magic fizzled out like a dying candle.

Rex’s adaptation had already mapped the frequency of Theo’s stasis; the universe now simply refused to let Theo slow down anything within Rex’s immediate influence.

Rex walked up to the invisible barrier, tapping on it with a finger.

Tink. Tink.

"Look at you," Rex mocked, watching Theo struggle against the invisible walls. "The great harbinger of decay, trapped in a moment of his own making."

"You’re not a god, Theo. You’re just a glitch in my system."

Desperate, Theo gathered every last spark of Kaeleth’s essence. "I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL ERASE THE VERY CONCEPT OF YOU!"

He punched at the barrier, unleashing a Chronos Singularity, a black hole of temporal force aimed directly at Rex’s face.

VROOOOOM WHUMP.

The singularity formed, a swirling vortex of darkness that promised to devour all light and sound. It expanded toward Rex, a maw of absolute nothingness.

Rex didn’t even blink. As the singularity touched him, his skin rippled with a silver sheen, his full potential adaptation recognizing the threat and instantly generating a dimensional anchor that rendered the singularity harmless.

The black hole simply washed over him like harmless water, dissipating harmlessly against his skin.

Rex reached through the collapsing singularity as if it were a curtain of silk. His hand emerged unscathed, grasping Theo’s throat through the barrier.

SHATTER.

Rex broke the dimensional cage with raw strength, dragging a gasping, terrified Theo out into the open air. Theo’s legs gave out, and he collapsed to his knees at Rex’s feet.

The golden glow that had once defined him was now a sickly, flickering amber.

"Please..." Theo whispered, the word tasting like ash. "Make it stop..."

Rex crouched down, bringing his face level with Theo’s. The predator was done playing with its prey, but he wasn’t finished humiliating it. "Make what stop? The pain?"

"Or the realization that you never stood a chance?"

Rex raised a fist, not for a killing blow, but for a precise strike aimed at Theo’s solar plexus, a strike designed to maximize pain without causing unconsciousness.

"This is the lesson, Theo," Rex said, his eyes glowing with cold satisfaction. "Adaptation isn’t about surviving the storm."

"It’s about becoming the storm."

WHAM.

The blow landed with the precision of a surgeon and the force of a sledgehammer, sending Theo’s consciousness spiraling into a dark, screaming void, while Rex stood over him, the undisputed master of the present, the past, and the future.

Rex stood over the broken form of Theo, but his eyes weren’t on the boy. They were fixed on something far more interesting: the raw, untamed temporal energy still hemorrhaging from Theo’s fractured soul.

Rex could feel it, the golden ichor of time itself, leaking into the atmosphere.

A cruel smile spread across Rex’s face. He wasn’t just going to defeat Theo; he was going to dismantle his entire legacy.

He was going to turn Theo’s own power into the weapon that would execute his reputation.

"You wanted to control time, Theo," Rex whispered, leaning close enough that his breath stirred Theo’s matted hair. "But you never understood its most cruel property: it remembers."

Rex reached out, but he didn’t strike. His fingers sank into Theo’s chest as if passing through water.

This was Soul Manipulation fused with Adaptive Mimicry. Rex wasn’t just touching Theo; he was threading his own consciousness into the boy’s magical core.

Sssssss VROOOOM.

A sound like tearing parchment echoed through the courtyard as Rex forcibly synchronized his heartbeat with Theo’s magical pulse. He began to siphon the temporal essence, not to use it for himself, but to redirect its flow.

While Apollo remained trapped in a trance of temporal feedback from the earlier clash, Rex began to weave a web of deception.

Using Theo’s own signature, Rex sent microscopic pulses of temporal energy throughout the city of Aethelgard. To anyone watching, it would appear as though Theo’s power was lashing out involuntarily.

SPLAT. CRUNCH.

In the residential districts, shadows moved with terrifying speed. A child playing in an alleyway suddenly froze as a temporal blade mimicking Theo’s exact magical frequency sliced through the air.

SHING!

The child collapsed before they could even scream. A merchant in the market square was suddenly aged decades in a second, turning to dust before his eyes.

"Look at what you’re doing, Theo," Rex crooned, his voice echoing inside. Theo’s mind is like a poisonous hallucination. "Your power is hungry... It’s eating your people."

Theo’s eyes flew open, blood streaming from them. "No... I didn’t... I’m not doing this!"

"STOP IT!" But his voice was drowned out by the psychic feedback Rex was feeding him.

"Let’s show them the truth," Rex decided. His eyes burned with a malevolent silver light. "Let’s give them a show they’ll never forget."

Rex seized the core of Theo’s temporal magic and performed a grand temporal rewind, but he didn’t rewind the world; he rewound the perception of the world.

He created a massive, sky-spanning projection, a temporal mirror that forced the entire city to relive the last hour through Theo’s eyes.

KRA KOOOOOM!

The sky above Aethelgard split open. A massive, shimmering curtain of golden light descended over the city.

Everyone... every citizen, every guard, every noble stopped in their tracks, their necks craning upward.

And there, in the sky, they saw it.

They saw the visions of the slaughter Rex had orchestrated, but Rex had framed it perfectly. Through the temporal projection, it didn’t look like Rex was killing innocents; it looked like Theo was deliberately unleashing his rage upon them, his face twisted in demonic glee as he tore through the populace.

’WAAAAAHHHH!’ The screams of the projected victims echoed across the city.

Aurelia saw it.

"My son..." she gasped, her voice breaking. "What have you become?"

Beside her, the ancient eyes of Morwenna narrowed. She saw through the magical distortion, but the emotional weight of the image was undeniable.

The sin was laid bare before the gods.

"The bloodline is tainted," Morwenna whispered, her voice cold as winter. "The boy has invited darkness that cannot be undone."