Chapter 1145. A Belief in Their Own Protection Died in That Moment

Chapter 1145: 1145. A Belief in Their Own Protection Died in That Moment

The psychological collapse of the Aethelgard forces was not a gradual retreat; it was a systemic failure. The formation didn’t just break it; it liquefied.

Men who had been prepared to die screaming hymns of divine justice moments before were now reduced to panicked animals, their boots scrabbling uselessly against the gore-slicked stone as they scrambled backward.

Their eyes, wide and bloodshot with terror, remained locked on the solitary masked figure, a walking catastrophe that had dismantled their finest elite in less time than it took to draw a full breath.

"Fall back to the flanks!"

"Disengage from the center immediately!" a high commander bellowed, his voice cracking like breaking glass as he witnessed the slaughter. "Redirect to the secondary lines!"

"Form a defensive perimeter around the archers!"

"MOVE, YOU COWARDS!"

On paper, the order was sound. It was a tactical concession meant to contain the anomaly by conceding the center ground.

But in the reality of the corridor’s claustrophobic confines, it was a catastrophic surrender. By attempting to avoid the meat grinder that was Xerollion, the soldiers were inadvertently creating a vacuum—a perfect, empty kill zone that Rex could dominate with terrifying ease.

He hadn’t just broken their line; he had hollowed out their entire strategy. He had been handed the heart of the battlefield on a silver platter, and he hadn’t even broken his stride to claim it.

Behind the cold metal of his mask, Rex inhaled deeply.

The air tasted of copper, burnt ozone, and fear. He could hear everything: the desperate shrieks of dying men, the wet slap of boots retreating, and the whimpering of soldiers who had finally realized they weren’t fighting a man, but something fundamentally alien.

’This is it,’ Rex thought, a dark chuckle echoing in the private theater of his mind. ’This is what it feels like to stop pretending.’

If anyone had been close enough to peer through the violet-lit slits of his mask, they would have seen something that would have frozen their blood: genuine, unadulterated delight dancing in his eyes. The adrenaline was a drug, more potent than any elixir the Academy could brew.

He pushed deeper.

Fifteen meters further into the Aethelgard formation, Rex reached the point of no return.

Here, the density of the retreating soldiers was so high that retreat had become a physical impossibility. The mass of armored bodies was jammed together, a human dam straining against the pressure of their own panic.

No matter what the commanders screamed, there was nowhere to go. They were trapped in a bottleneck of their own making.

Xerollion stopped.

The violet aura surrounding him suddenly intensified, bleeding outward like ink dropped into clear water.

He raised one hand, palm upward, fingers splayed as if grasping for something unseen. His fingers curled slightly, and Gravity Manipulation took hold with the wrath of a collapsing star.

"What is—? Why am I—" A soldier’s plea was cut off as his feet left the stone.

In a ten-meter radius around Rex, the world simply ceased to function.

Thirty-one soldiers were yanked from the ground simultaneously. There was no gradual lift, no feeling of rising; it was as if the earth itself had rejected them.

They rose six meters into the air in eerie, absolute silence. For two agonizing seconds, they hung there suspended in a state of impossible physics. Their weapons slipped from nerveless fingers, clattering uselessly against the walls.

Their bodies rotated slowly in the air, limbs flailing in a nauseating, disorienting spin that overrode every instinct of balance and survival their training had ever instilled.

The silence of the suspension was more terrifying than the noise of battle. It was the silence of the grave.

Some soldiers managed to scream high, thin sounds of pure existential horror, but most were too disoriented, their brains unable to process why the world had suddenly turned upside down. They hung there like meat suspended from hooks, helpless, vulnerable, and utterly doomed.

Xerollion’s fingers twitched. His eyes gleamed with cold amusement as he watched them dangle in his grasp.

Then, he released.

Gravity didn’t just return; it betrayed them.

In the span of a heartbeat, Rex inverted the gravitational constant. The suspension didn’t end with a gentle descent; it ended with a violent, crushing compression.

The thirty-one soldiers who had been floating like corpses in water were suddenly slammed downward by a force three times stronger than natural gravity.

CRUNCH SQUELCH.

The sound was catastrophic. It wasn’t the clatter of armor or the ring of steel; it was a single, wet, percussive explosion of breaking bone, bursting organs, and collapsing metal.

It sounded like thirty-one heavy sacks of meat being dropped from a tower onto concrete simultaneously.

The impact was so devastating that the stone floor of the corridor didn’t just receive them; it buckled, spiderwebbing outward in a radial pattern of shattered masonry that groaned under the sudden, impossible weight.

"Gods save us—" one soldier began, but his plea ended in a wet gurgle as his own ribcage collapsed inward, puncturing his lungs.

Most did not get up. Those who did didn’t stand; they convulsed, their limbs twisted at impossible angles, leaving trails of crimson smear across the cracked stone as they tried to crawl away from the carnage they had become.

Several would never walk again; their spines had been pulverized into something resembling gravel.

Rex watched through the violet haze, his breathing steady, his pulse a slow, rhythmic drumbeat of satisfaction.

’Physics is such a beautiful weapon,’ he mused.

But the Aethelgard forces weren’t finished. From the rear of the corridor, a contingent of battle mages, the last desperate hope of the remaining formation, began their incantations.

Their voices rose in a panicked, harmonized chant that reverberated off the walls.

"Shield of the Eternal Sun!"

"Bastion of Aethelgard!"

"Stand firm!"

They threw up three separate layers of defensive barriers, stacking them in the legendary ’Triple Tier’ configuration, the same magical architecture that had survived dragonfire during the Ignivara incident and repelled every siege the Legion had ever launched at Aethelgard’s walls.

Three concentric shells of shimmering gold and cerulean light formed a wall across the corridor’s width, a barrier designed to absorb, disperse, and nullify any known elemental threat.

Rex didn’t even flinch. He simply opened his palm, fingers curling as if grasping an invisible thread.

"Let’s try something new then," he whispered behind the mask.

Through Elemental Magic Creation, he unleashed a wave of energy. It wasn’t fire.

It wasn’t lightning. It was a phenomenon that had no name in any textbook in Erosyne, a searing, violet-black frequency of raw energy that defied every known taxonomy of magic.

The barriers didn’t shatter. They didn’t crack.

They simply... ceased to be.

The mages watched in frozen horror as their centuries-old defensive protocols encountered something their frameworks couldn’t even recognize. The barriers didn’t resist the wave; they dissolved from the outside inward, evaporating like mist before a supernova.

In less than a second, the ’impenetrable’ wall was gone, and the wave passed through the space where the barriers had been as if they had never existed.

Then, it hit the mages.

The scream that tore through the corridor was primal. The energy didn’t burn them so much as it unmade them, searing through their robes and flesh in an instant of incomprehensible agony.

The panic that followed was worse than the casualties. Soldiers could understand dying to a sword or even a fireball.

But watching three stacked, legendary barrier workings evaporate as though they were nothing more than decorative cobwebs broke something fundamental in the formation’s psyche. The belief in their own protection died in that moment.

The shouting spreading from that section of the line wasn’t tactical; it was the sound of men who had looked into the abyss and seen it smiling back.

"I-It’s not possible! "The barriers held against dragons!" someone shrieked, their voice cracking with genuine, soul-deep terror. "What is he? What IS HE?"

Rex didn’t give them time to answer. In the chaos of their terror, three soldiers, men who had decided that distance was their only remaining ally, hurled their spears at him simultaneously.

Three silver streaks cut through the smoke and blood, launched from three different angles with desperate, killing intent.