Chapter 1149. How Many Things I Believed Absolute Truths Died Five Minutes Ago

Chapter 1149: 1149. How Many Things I Believed Absolute Truths Died Five Minutes Ago

Apollo crossed the distance in a single, explosive movement. He didn’t just run; he became a projectile of divine wrath, his boots tearing gouges into the stone as he accelerated.

But the corridor answered before his fist could even find flesh.

CRACK BOOM!

The punch connected with the empty space where the masked figure had been standing a fraction of a second earlier, but there was no empty air.

Rex had moved with a preternatural fluidity that defied human reaction time. When Apollo’s fist missed, the golden light wrapped around his knuckles didn’t simply dissipate; it detonated against the air itself.

The shockwave rolled outward from the point of impact in a visible, searing ring of compressed dust and displaced light.

The force was so immense that it acted like a physical wall; the nearest soldiers on both sides were lifted off their feet as if struck by a battering ram, forty or fifty men tumbling backward into the corpses of their comrades.

The sound that followed was a bone-deep roar that slammed into the corridor walls and ricocheted back three times over, leaving a ringing silence in its wake that felt heavier than the noise itself.

Across a hundred meters of passage, the war simply stopped. Soldiers froze mid-swing, their blades suspended in the air.

They hadn’t made a tactical decision to cease fire; their primal instincts had simply overridden their training.

Their bodies had registered something at the center of the corridor that belonged to an entirely different category of existence, something that made their struggle for territory feel like children playing with wooden swords.

Hands loosened on sword hilts; armor rattled as men instinctively took half steps back. All eyes turned toward the epicenter of the devastation.

Twenty meters away from the chaos, Valentina Von Starlight had stopped casting entirely.

Her fingers, still stained with the residue of arcane channeling, twitched at her sides.

She had spent the last hour holding this retreat corridor with complex workings that would have drained three Academy mages to exhaustion, but she abandoned every spell the moment the duel ignited.

Her breathing was shallow as she witnessed something that violated every fundamental law of magical theory she had ever studied.

She watched with horrified fascination as the masked figure slipped a strike that should have been physically impossible to evade. She saw him twist his torso with impossible economy, finding a window of opportunity that lasted perhaps a tenth of a second, a gap so small it shouldn’t have existed, and counter with a precision that felt more like surgery than combat.

Her mind, trained by years of ruthless academic discipline, began to frantically build a mental profile of this combatant. His capability set didn’t just exceed the Apostle network’s records; it rendered them obsolete.

’This isn’t a fight,’ she thought, a cold sweat breaking out across her brow. ’This is a collision of fundamental forces.’

"Headmaster." One of her lieutenants appeared at her shoulder, his voice cracking with uncertainty. "Orders? We need to support Apollo before "

"Hold position." Valentina’s voice was flat, cutting through the lieutenant’s panic like a guillotine blade. "Nobody advances."

"That is an absolute order!"

"But Apollo is fighting for our lives! If we don’t push—"

"I am well aware of what Apollo is doing," Valentina snapped, her eyes never wavering from the golden and violet flashes erupting in the distance.

She watched a gout of golden flame erupt from the center, followed immediately by a shockwave of violet energy that shattered a nearby stone pillar into fine powder. "If we send soldiers into that space, they won’t be reinforcements."

"They will become debris... We hold position and we pray."

Morwenna Nightwing arrived beside Valentina only minutes later. Her breathing was ragged, with each inhale producing a sharp hiss through her clenched teeth, and the dark blood spattered across her silver gauntlets was clearly not her own.

She took one look at the apocalyptic display unfolding at the corridor’s center—the searing flashes of gold and violet that made the very air tremble and fell silent. For Morwenna, silence was never a sign of peace; it was a sign of calculation.

Valentina glanced sideways at her, noting the grim set of the warrior’s jaw. "You’ve gone quiet, Morwenna."

"That isn’t like you..."

"I’m thinking," Morwenna replied, her voice unnervingly steady despite the chaos. "I’m thinking about how many things in this city I believed to be absolute truths and how many of them died five minutes ago."

In the center of the hellscape, the fight had transcended human comprehension.

Xerollion had avoided Apollo’s devastating lunge by tilting his upper body precisely fifteen degrees. That was all.

His enhanced foresight had revealed the trajectory four seconds before Apollo had even fully committed to the motion, and his martial mastery had translated that data into the most economical correction possible: a minute shift of weight through his hips and a subtle rotation of his shoulders.

The blow, which carried enough kinetic force to level a fortress wall, whistled past his ear, close enough that the golden afterimage burned across his retinas like a brand.

Rex didn’t wait for the momentum to fade. He seized the opening with lethal intent.

WHAM!

He unleashed a straight kick, driving his boot upward with explosive force into Apollo’s midsection. It was a strike designed to shatter ribs and collapse lungs in a single heartbeat, the kind of blow that ended wars.

Apollo’s reflexes screamed. His forearm snapped up to intercept.

KRA KOOM!

The moment of impact was deafening. The life-affinity glow condensed along Apollo’s forearm like molten gold armor at the point of contact.

The kick, which should have folded him like parchment, instead drove him backward across the stone floor. His boots ground furrows into the rock as he skidded, sparks flying from the friction.

Just as he reached the limit of his slide, he planted his heel hard, absorbed the remaining kinetic energy through the reinforced tendons of his knee, and launched himself back into the fray.

Before the echo of Rex’s kick had even faded from the corridor, Apollo was already mid-assault, unleashing a lightning-fast four-punch combination that closed the distance with terrifying speed.

What followed stopped being a fight; it became a phenomenon.

For eleven seconds, the two combatants became a blur of impossible motion. To the soldiers thirty meters back, the exchange was less a series of blows and more a continuous strobing effect of gold and violet light.

Somewhere in that blur, forty individual strikes connected with bone-crushing force.

CRUNCH.

A sickening sound of cartilage grinding against cartilage echoed as Rex’s elbow struck Apollo’s ribs.

THUD CRACK.

Apollo’s fist connected with Rex’s ribs, sending a shockwave that shattered the nearby stone railing into shrapnel. Each connection produced its own localized pressure wave.

Men standing well outside the immediate radius felt the air slap against their faces in repeated, violent pulses, like standing too close to a series of explosions.

The corridor itself began to scream under the strain. Hairline cracks spiderwebbed across the ceiling and walls as the wild, uncontained magical discharge from blocked strikes found somewhere to vent.

High above, a massive stalactite the size of a supply cart snapped free from the ceiling forty meters behind them. It crashed to the floor with a thunderous explosion of stone and dust, but not a single soldier flinched.

Nobody moved.

Nobody breathed.

Every eye in the corridor was locked on the two monsters tearing each other apart in the center of the storm.