Chapter 1147. I Was Wondering How Long It Would Take You

Chapter 1147: 1147. I Was Wondering How Long It Would Take You

Rex took a single step forward. The ground beneath him hummed with restrained power.

The violet glow of his mask seemed to pulse brighter.

"Practice," Xerollion said, his voice flat and utterly devoid of empathy.

Rex didn’t use magic for the finishing blow. He didn’t need to.

He simply stepped into the man’s space and delivered a single, controlled strike across his jaw.

CRACK.

The sound of the mandible breaking was sharp and clean. The Apostle’s head snapped sideways with inhuman force, his brain bouncing against the inside of his skull.

He didn’t even have time to register the pain before consciousness fled. His body went limp, collapsing into the blood-soaked stone like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

Rex didn’t pause to check his pulse. He simply stepped over the fallen divine warrior and continued his advance into the heart of the slaughter.

Rex straightened his spine, the motion slow and deliberate, as if he were merely shaking off the dust of a long day rather than standing in the center of a slaughterhouse.

He took a long, measured breath, letting the metallic tang of blood and the acrid stench of scorched magic fill his lungs.

The corridor was unrecognizable. Six minutes ago, it had been a disciplined artery of golden armor and righteous purpose; now, it was a charnel house.

The central formation of Aethelgard hadn’t just broken; it had been pulverized. Over a fifty-meter stretch of stone, the floor was carpeted in human debris.

Bodies lay twisted at impossible angles, their armor shattered and their flesh torn.

The overwhelming majority were either unconscious from shock and concussive force or too broken to move, men with shattered femurs protruding through leather, men whose ribs had been crushed inward by gravitational spikes, leaving them gasping wetly through punctured lungs.

Crunch. Slosh.

Every step Rex took produced a sickening sound as his boots pressed into the congealing mixture of blood and viscera that now coated the stones.

The survivors, those few who still possessed the will to hold a weapon, had retreated with desperate, animalistic terror. They had pulled back toward the walls so far that the entire central span of the corridor now belonged to a single man.

The tactical formation was gone; there was only a terrified hollow circle around the predator. Field commanders were screaming retreat orders, their voices cracking with a hysteria that betrayed their loss of control.

"Fall back! To the secondary gates!"

"Break formation and run!" a captain shrieked, but the order was redundant.

The men were already fleeing, their boots slipping on the gore as they scrambled toward the flanks, abandoning their posts, their honor, and their comrades.

The momentum that had carried four thousand sanctified warriors through a golden gateway hadn’t just stalled; it had reversed with the violence of a collapsing star.

Rex watched them flee through the slit of his mask.

’Panic is the most honest emotion,’ he thought. ’No lies in it.’

’No dogma... Just the raw, naked terror of realizing you are prey.’

Apollo Brightsoul finally felt it far up the corridor, where the remaining disciplined elements of the vanguard still clung to their positions like drowning rats.

The commander of the Aethelgard forces froze. A coldness that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature crept up his spine.

He was mid-sentence, barking orders to reinforce the left flank, when the silence from behind him became too loud. The absence of the rhythmic march and the absence of the shouting—it was a vacuum that screamed of catastrophe.

Apollo turned. His golden armor glinted under the magical lighting of the corridor, but his face was pale.

His eyes swept across the wreckage, taking in the carnage that stretched back like a trail of broken promises. He saw the bodies, the blood, the shattered divine barriers, and the hollowed-out remains of his army.

Then, his gaze locked onto the source.

In the dead center of the devastation stood Rex. He was the eye of the storm.

Amidst the twisted metal, the broken bones, and the spreading crimson pools, Rex appeared preternaturally clean.

His breathing was steady, his posture relaxed, not a single scratch marring his gear. He looked less like a soldier and more like an inevitability.

Rex didn’t raise a weapon. He didn’t cast a spell.

He simply turned his head with agonizing slowness until his masked gaze found Apollo’s across the vast, blood-slicked distance.

The two men stared at each other across a wasteland of their own making. The air between them seemed to vibrate with the residual tension of a thousand dying screams.

Rex waited. He didn’t need to move.

He simply stood there, a silent sentinel in the ruins, letting the horror of what he had done sink into Apollo’s soul, waiting for the commander to realize that the real fight had only just begun.

Apollo disengaged from the front line the moment the implications of the carnage crystallized in his mind. The tactical reality was no longer about pushing forward; it was about survival.

"Elliot!" Apollo’s voice cracked like a whip as he seized his lieutenant’s shoulder mid-swing, spinning him around with enough force to stagger him. "The center..."

"Listen to me carefully... Take command of the forward push!"

"Hold this line at all costs, but do not under any circumstances advance past that stone ridge."

"Do you understand? That is an order!"

Elliot stumbled back, his sword lowering as his eyes followed Apollo’s frozen gaze down the corridor. The lieutenant’s face drained of color beneath layers of dried blood and battlefield grime.

"Apollo..." he whispered, his voice trembling. "Gods above, that’s how many of them are down?"

"That’s got to be three hundred people... Three hundred gone in minutes."

"Hold the line," Apollo repeated, his jaw working silently. "That is all I need from you."

Then, he began to move.

His pace was not the confident stride of a commander leading a charge; it was the measured, agonizingly cautious approach of an apex predator that had stumbled into the territory of something far more dangerous.

Every muscle in Apollo’s body was coiled tight, his instincts screaming at him that the man standing in the distance was not a soldier but a catastrophe given human form.

With every step Apollo took, the golden light of his affinity began to hemorrhage from his pores. It bled through his armor, coating his shoulders and forearms in a corona of divine radiance.

The light grew brighter, more desperate, casting long, dancing shadows against the gore-stained walls. By the time he came to a halt ten meters short of the masked figure, the corridor was flooded with a warm, artificial dawn.

Rex had not moved an inch. He remained a statue of obsidian and violet, standing precisely where he had been when Apollo first spotted him.

He stood amidst the broken bodies as if they were nothing more than fallen leaves in a courtyard, waiting with the terrifying patience of someone who had already won the game before the first move was made.

Apollo’s eyes swept the battlefield one last time. His gaze lingered on the crumpled form of a young spearman whose throat had been torn open, then on a veteran sergeant whose legs had been twisted into unnatural positions.

These were not just casualties; these were names. These were men and women Apollo had trained, men and women whose families he had promised protection to.

He had stood on marble platforms and spoken of divine necessity, and now he stood in the crimson reality of his own failure.

When he finally spoke, the anger that came out was not a roar; it was something worse. It was a low, vibrating fury that shook his entire frame.

"You did all of this," Apollo said, each word dripping with venomous accusation.

Rex tilted his head slightly.

"Be more specific," he countered.

His voice was flat, utterly unburdened by the weight of the corpses surrounding him.

"Not just here." Apollo’s hands clenched into fists so tight his gauntlets creaked ominously. "All of it..."

"The Undead Bringer."

"The tremor that shattered the northern provinces."

"The dragon that burned the eastern settlements."

"You are behind every single one of them... Every drop of blood spilled in this war traces back to your hands."

A ghost of a smile seemed to touch the air around Rex’s mask. The reply came with a calm, almost mild cadence, the tone of a tutor mildly disappointed in a student who had failed to grasp a simple concept.

"I was wondering how long it would take you." Rex said, stepping over the twitching corpse of a fallen guard without breaking eye contact. "Though I can’t say I’m surprised it took this long."

"You’ve always been far too busy trusting the people around you to actually look at what’s standing directly in front of you."