Chapter 1144. A Demonstration of Absolute, Uncontested Dominion

Chapter 1144: 1144. A Demonstration of Absolute, Uncontested Dominion

The air in the corridor didn’t just feel heavy; it felt hostile. The violet haze surrounding Xerollion seemed to pulse in time with the grinding of teeth and the panicked breathing of the soldiers caught in his gravity well.

The suspended debris—shattered blades, jagged stone, and splintered bone—swirled in a lazy, hypnotic orbit that belied the lethal potential coiled within.

Then, the silence of the standoff shattered.

"For Aethelgard...! Strike now!" an officer screamed, his voice cracking with desperate bravado.

A squad of nine elite soldiers, veterans who had survived countless campaigns, made the attempt anyway.

They moved with the terrifying synchronization of a single organism, executing a coordinated collapse formation.

They hit him from four angles simultaneously, their shields overlapping, their weapons converging on the masked figure in a lethal pincer designed to overwhelm even the most powerful Apostle-ranked entities.

It was textbook, and it was flawless. But it was also a death sentence.

’Foresight.’

Inside the mind of the masked figure, time didn’t flow; it fractured. The next four seconds unfolded in layered, kaleidoscopic probabilities.

He saw every thrust before the muscle even twitched; he felt every shift in weight before the boot touched the stone. To him, the elite soldiers weren’t rushing forward; they were moving through molasses.

He moved. But he didn’t attack.

He simply... flowed.

The spearman charging from his left lunged with lethal intent, his spear tip aimed at the throat. Xerollion pivoted, a movement so minute it seemed almost lazy.

The spearhead tore through empty air, passing through the space where Xerollion’s neck had been a quarter second prior.

The momentum of the thrust was so great that the spearhead didn’t stop; it punched eighteen inches of consecrated steel through the shoulder of the swordsman closing from the front, the blade emerging from the man’s back in a spray of hot crimson.

Squelch CRACK.

The swordsman didn’t even have time to scream before his lungs filled with blood.

"What—no! Fall back, fall—" the spearman began, but his words died as the physics of the room turned against him.

The two soldiers closing from behind suddenly felt their own momentum inexplicably multiply. It was as if the air itself had grabbed them and flung them forward.

They hurtled past their target with terrifying speed, colliding with each other in the center with a wet, bone-crushing THUD that sent both crashing to the floor, unconscious before they even hit the stone.

A fifth soldier swung a massive warhammer in a desperate overhead arc, but as he committed to the strike, the gravity beneath his feet seemed to twist. His weapon missed Xerollion entirely, instead coming down with devastating force directly onto his own comrade’s spine.

The sound was unmistakable: the splintering of vertebrae like dry kindling breaking under a boot.

CRUNCH.

To any observer more than five meters away, it didn’t look like a fight. There was no clashing of steel, no heroic struggle.

It looked like a nightmare of impossible coincidences: a group of the finest soldiers in the realm suffering an inexplicable, catastrophic cascade of coordination failures.

Nine seconds after the engagement began, eight of them lay broken on the gore-slicked floor. The ninth, a young recruit whose eyes were wide with primal terror, turned and bolted, his boots slipping on the viscera of his fallen brothers.

What followed was not a battle. It was a demonstration of absolute, uncontested dominion.

A soldier, desperate to reclaim some shred of agency, attempted to sneak attack from behind. He lunged with a dagger, but mid-motion, his wrist was seized by an invisible force.

With a casual flick of intent, Xerollion snapped the radius and ulna backward.

CRACK.

The sound cut through the ambient noise of the war like a gunshot. Before the soldier’s scream could even escape his blood flecked lips, his entire body was hauled sideways by his own shattered arm.

He was swung like a human shield, his back slamming into a volley of arrows fired by his own panicked allies who were trying to hit the masked figure behind him. Three shafts buried themselves in his spine with three wet thwips.

Xerollion dropped the convulsing corpse without so much as glancing at it, moving on as if he had simply brushed aside a fly.

"Burn, you bastard!"

"Burn in the light of the gods!"

A battle mage, positioned twelve meters back behind a makeshift barrier of corpses, screamed her incantation. Her hands glowed with divine radiance as she completed a complex compound fire lance, a spell that required three seconds of precise channeling.

She watched with a flicker of savage satisfaction as the lance of superheated energy left her fingertips, streaking toward the violet haze.

She never saw it connect.

Mid-flight, the fire lance didn’t explode. It didn’t even slow down.

Energy manipulation caught the spell’s structure in midair, freezing the molten magical plasma. For a heartbeat, it hung there, quivering in the violet light.

Then, with a cruel twist of physics, the directional vector inverted. The spell didn’t just stop; it reversed, accelerating back toward its source with twice the velocity it had been launched with.

The mage’s eyes widened. "Oh=="

The fire lance struck her center mass. There was no prolonged struggle.

The superheated spell punched through her torso, cauterizing as it tore, leaving nothing but a smoking hole where her heart had been. Her scream was cut short by the sound of her own body collapsing into a charred heap.

Behind the impassive metal of his mask, Rex was savoring something sweeter than victory: he was savoring release.

For months, he had played the part of the mediocre student, pulling his punches in the Academy yards, deliberately faltering during tactical assessments, and stifling the monstrous potential of his body to avoid unwanted attention.

But here, amidst the copper tang of fresh blood and the screams of dying men, the shackles were off. His martial arts mastery and peak superhuman physique weren’t just tools; they were predators unleashed.

Every movement he made was terrifyingly economical. He didn’t waste energy on grand flourishes or heroic stances.

His motions were lazy, almost bored, yet each one ended with the wet thunk of a blade finding flesh or the sickening crunch of bone giving way. He moved like a predator that knew the prey had nowhere to run.

Roughly sixty seconds into his advance through the meat grinder, a figure emerged from the chaos that actually made Rex’s pulse quicken.

A captain of the elite guard.

This wasn’t some green recruit or a panicked conscript. This man moved with the terrifying grace of a seasoned killer.

His enchanted longsword hummed with residual holy energy, carving through the air with a whistle that cut through the din of battle. The captain launched into a masterwork combination of six flawless strikes that flowed together like liquid steel.

A high-line feint that demanded a parry, immediately followed by a low commitment that swept for the shins; a reverse cut that shifted elevation mid-swing with impossible fluidness.

This was a sequence honed through decades of bloodshed, a deadly dance designed to find the smallest gap in any opponent’s defense.

’Impressive,’ Rex thought, the words echoing in the private chamber of his mind. ’Let’s see how you handle real physics.’

Rex didn’t retreat. He didn’t even raise his hands to defend.

Instead, he performed a series of movements so minute they bordered on the insulting. A casual rotation of his left shoulder allowed the blade to whisper past his ear; a two-inch tilt of his head sent the next strike grazing his cheek without drawing blood.

He never stepped fully out of the sword’s reach, never breaking his stride. To step back would have been to acknowledge the captain as a threat.

To Rex, the Captain was merely an obstacle in motion. ℴℴ𝘮

On the seventh strike, a desperate, killing thrust aimed at the throat, Rex finally acted.

He didn’t block the sword. He reached out and caught the captain’s wrist.

CRACK SNAP.

The sound was sharp, like a dry branch breaking under immense pressure. With a single, brutal rotational snap, Rex folded the man’s wrist backward at an angle that defied human anatomy. Tendons frayed and bones shattered audibly.

The enchanted longsword clattered to the stone floor with a hollow metallic ring, abandoned by its master. Before the Captain’s first scream could even fully form in his throat, Rex’s palm connected with his sternum.

BOOM.

The strike landed with the force of a battering ram. The captain’s ribs didn’t just crack; they imploded, sending shards of bone inward toward his lungs.

The air was driven from his body in a spray of saliva and blood as he was lifted off his feet and slammed into the ground. He lay there, conscious and staring at the ceiling with pupils blown wide in shock, his chest cavity collapsed, breathing in wet, shallow gasps that sounded like drowning.

He was alive, but he was broken physically and spiritually beyond any hope of recovery.

Xerollion didn’t pause to gloat. He simply stepped over the convulsing officer and kept walking.

The psychological domino effect was instantaneous. The effect of his presence spread through the Aethelgard ranks faster than any commander’s order could stem.

These were men who had charged into this corridor forty minutes earlier with righteous fury, shouting hymns about justice for Veylor and Calivara.

Now, that fury had been replaced by something far more potent: primal terror.