Chapter 1148. The Same Man He Had Trusted More Completely Than Anyone Alive

Chapter 1148: 1148. The Same Man He Had Trusted More Completely Than Anyone Alive

Apollo’s entire body trembled. It wasn’t the involuntary shake of terror, but something far more volatile: the violent, convulsive effort of a man restraining a hurricane.

His muscles were locked in a state of hypertension, his tendons standing out like steel cables beneath his skin as he fought the primal urge to simply lunge forward and tear Rex apart.

Rex watched that restraint with a detached, clinical fascination. Through the violet lenses of his mask, he could see the minute physiological tells: the rapid dilation of Apollo’s pupils and the erratic rhythm of his pulse visible in the carotid artery of his neck.

He wasn’t just watching a man; he was watching a dam about to burst. More interesting than the physical confrontation would be the psychological one: the slow, agonizing structural collapse of a worldview that had been built on the comforting assumption that the universe possessed some form of inherent justice.

"Veylor," Apollo began, his voice rising, cracking with the sheer volume of the grief and rage building in his chest. "Calivara... Eryndra... How many more, Xerollion...?"

"How many others have you butchered with your own hands while standing beside us?"

"How many times have you played the part of the concerned ally, pretending to be another victim of the same chaos you orchestrated?!"

"A fair number." The reply was immediate.

No hesitation. No flicker of guilt. Just a flat statement of fact, as dispassionate as a ledger entry.

"I’m not going to stand here and recite a death toll for your comfort, Apollo..."

"It isn’t what I came here for..."

"What I’m actually interested in is what you intend to do now that the illusion has been stripped away."

Apollo took a step forward. Then another.

The distance between them closed until only a few meters remained, and then the atmosphere itself seemed to ignite. The two opposing auras, Apollo’s searing, righteous gold and Rex’s cold, implacable violet, collided in the space between them.

The air grew heavy, charged with static that made the hair on Apollo’s arms stand on end. The pressure was physical, a tangible weight that pushed against their chests like the depths of an ocean.

Ssssss...

The sound of magical energy crackling between them filled the corridor like the hiss of steam.

"You killed the people I loved," Apollo said. His voice had dropped.

The shouting had ceased, replaced by something infinitely more dangerous: a quiet, focused hatred that carried more killing intent than any battle cry. "You destroyed the lives of people I swore to protect with every fiber of my being."

"You made Theo into—"

He stopped abruptly. His jaw locked so tightly that the bone seemed to strain against the skin. The name hung in the air between them like a poisoned blade.

"Theo wasn’t mine."

The interruption came from Rex, and for the first time, the calm facade slipped. A sharper edge entered his voice—not anger, but a cold, cutting precision that sliced through Apollo’s emotional outburst.

"Theo was the product of his own choices and a desperate god who found a broken young man at the bottom of a cliff and offered him a weapon," Rex said, stepping forward to meet Apollo’s gaze, refusing to let the commander dominate the space. "I merely happened to be standing at the end of a sequence of failures he had been assembling for months before I ever became relevant to his story."

Rex’s violet aura flared momentarily, casting jagged shadows across the blood-slick floor. "If you want to assign blame for Theo’s fate, Apollo, don’t waste your breath on me."

"Start with the household that stripped him of his dignity and the god who caught him on his way down just to use him as a blade."

"I didn’t break him... I simply watched as he shattered himself."

Rex began walking forward as he spoke. His stride was slow, almost casual, the measured pace of a man strolling through a private garden rather than closing the final meters toward a confrontation that would likely end in mutual annihilation.

Behind the obsidian surface of his mask, Rex was savoring the spectacle. He drank in every minute flicker of rage that contorted Apollo’s features, each twitch of his jaw and each desperate pulse in his throat.

That dormant part of his psyche, the part that had never required a strategic justification for cruelty, had surfaced in full, now neatly concealed behind a calm timbre and the soft, violet glow of his visor.

"Do you want to know what I find most interesting about this, Apollo?" Rex tilted his head slightly, examining his opponent like a specimen under glass. "You’re standing there trying to understand the reasoning behind everything that has been done to you."

"You’re searching for some grand design, some twisted logic underneath the carnage that would make all of it easier to carry once you finally uncovered it."

A cold chuckle rumbled in Rex’s chest. "There isn’t."

"There was never going to be... I did all of this because I could, and because I enjoyed watching the light leave their eyes."

Something inside Apollo didn’t just crack; it detonated.

The golden light surrounding Apollo erupted outward in a cataclysmic shockwave. It was a corona of divine fury that surpassed anything he had displayed during the plaza fight against Tremor, eclipsing the power he had summoned against Theo.

The radiance climbed to such an impossible intensity that several soldiers watching from forty meters back had to scream and dive for cover, raising their armored arms to shield their eyes from the searing brilliance.

The air around Apollo began to taste like the ionized copper inside a lightning storm. When he finally raised his gaze to meet the mask, his eyes were gone, replaced by two twin suns of pure, molten gold.

"I don’t care about your reasons anymore," Apollo said.

The divine resonance in his voice had grown so potent that the words didn’t seem to come from his throat alone; they vibrated out of the stone walls, the corpses, and the very air itself. "I only care about making certain you never hurt another living person after today."

Behind the mask, Rex smiled. No one could see it, but the shift in his stance made it unmistakable.

He spread both arms slightly outward, not in a defensive guard, but as an invitation. His entire body filled with the coiled, hungry anticipation of a predator that had finally found prey worth the effort of playing with before the slaughter begins.

There was no fear in him. There had not been fear in his soul for a very long time.

"Very well then," Xerollion whispered.

His voice dropped to a low, satisfied murmur that somehow carried across the entire stretch of the ruined corridor, cutting through the crackling static of their clashing auras. "Show me what an Apostle of Life can do once he’s lost everything."

The silence between them held for exactly one heartbeat, a suspended moment of absolute stillness where even the blood dripping from the ceiling seemed to freeze midair.

BOOM.

Then Apollo moved. He became a streak of golden lightning, roaring off his body in a blaze that ignited the corridor from wall to wall.

The sound of his boots hitting the stone was like thunderclaps, each step sending cracks spiderwebbing through the blood-slicked floor.

Rex met him halfway, moving not with desperation, but with something approximating joy.

The world narrowed down to a single point of collision. On one side, the hero who had spent months bleeding, grieving, and sacrificing for a city he loved; on the other, the enemy who stood in his way, the man who, though Apollo would not learn it in this corridor, or perhaps for a very long time afterward, was the same man he had trusted more completely than anyone else alive.