Chapter 1151. Rewriting the Reality of the Corridor With Every Heartbeat

Chapter 1151: 1151. Rewriting the Reality of the Corridor With Every Heartbeat

In the heart of that swirling hellscape of gold and violet light, Apollo heard it.

The sound pierced through the ringing in his ears and the wet rasp of his own labored breathing. For a fraction of a second, a heartbeat so brief it would have been invisible to any observer, he allowed his focus to slip.

He glanced sideways.

Through a haze of sweat and blood, he saw him.

Rex.

Standing at the precipice of the circle, his face contorted in what looked like raw, unadulterated terror, his hand raised as if to ward off the inevitable.

A strange, painful tightness constricted Apollo’s chest. It wasn’t just physical pain; it was a surge of something dangerously close to admiration.

’Of course,’ Apollo thought, his mind fragmenting under the strain of the duel, ’of course Rex would try to intervene.’

’Of course he would rush into the furnace.’

’He has stepped into every goddamn crisis this city has endured for the past year without blinking.’

’That is who he is... That is the man I trust.’

The bitter irony of the moment that Apollo was standing between two identical masks of heroism, reading genuine loyalty in the eyes of a predator, was completely lost on him. He was too far gone, too buried in the primal need to survive.

"NO!" Apollo screamed.

The word tore from his throat, raw and ragged, shaking with the impossible effort of maintaining his defensive stance while shouting across the chaos. "STAY BACK, REX!"

"DON’T YOU DARE!"

The masked figure sensed the momentary lapse. The stranger didn’t hesitate; he exploited it.

With a flick of his wrist that looked almost casual, he unleashed a telekinetic volley. Three jagged chunks of broken stone, each the size of a human skull, screamed through the air from three different angles.

WHIP CRACK!

Apollo twisted his body with desperate agility, but he wasn’t fast enough. The middle projectile clipped his left shoulder with the force of a sledgehammer.

SHLICK.

The stone tore through fabric and flesh alike, gouging a furrow across his deltoid. Blood sprayed across the stone floor in a crimson arc, hot and steaming in the cool air.

Apollo grunted through clenched teeth, the pain igniting a fresh spike of adrenaline that burned like acid in his veins.

"This is mine!" Apollo roared back at Rex, his eyes blazing with a desperate pride. "I have to finish this myself!"

"Don’t you interfere!"

At the edge of the circle, Rex Rexilion froze.

The hesitation that crossed his features was nothing short of a theatrical masterpiece. For one and a half agonizing seconds, he allowed his face to transform into a battlefield of its own.

He showed the world the internal agony of a man torn between respecting a friend’s dying wish and the instinct to save them from certain slaughter. His jaw tightened until the muscles corded like rope; his brow furrowed in anguish; his forward foot remained planted, poised for a charge that would never come.

Finally, he offered a slow, reluctant nod, the gesture of a man conceding defeat to fate itself. He stepped backward, retreating into the safety of the Aethelgard ranks.

"Get him some space," Rex commanded, his voice rough and strained, as if the effort of holding back his ’concern’ was physically taxing.

He turned to the soldiers crowding around him, his eyes hard and commanding. "If the tide turns or if he falls, we go in together."

"All of us at once. No heroics, no suicidal charges."

"We hit him like a hammer."

The soldiers nearest him nodded eagerly, their faces pale with relieved gratitude. To them, Rex wasn’t just a comrade; he was the anchor holding their courage together.

They saw a leader who was disciplined enough to hold back even when his heart was breaking.

Nobody looked at him twice. Nobody questioned the sincerity of his grief.

Behind the mask, Rex’s eyes remained fixed on Apollo’s bleeding shoulder, cold and hungry.

’Almost there,’ he thought. ’Just a little more pressure.’

’Just a few more broken bones, and then you’re mine.’

Xerollion, the man behind the mask saw the shift in Apollo’s posture and made a cold, clinical decision. The moment Apollo refused Rex’s help, the game changed from a test to an execution.

It was a simple, ruthless calculation. An Apollo who refused assistance was an Apollo who would push himself past the breaking point, past the threshold where survival instincts should force a retreat.

And an Apollo who fought past that point would finally reveal the true, unguarded mechanics of what the Apostle of Life could actually achieve. Rex had been starving for that data for months; now, he intended to feast on it.

’Time to peel back the layers,’ Xerollion thought behind his mask, his breathing steady while Apollo’s came in ragged gasps. ’Let’s see what makes your divinity tick.’

He began the layering process with terrifying precision.

First came telekinesis. With a violent twist of his fingers, CRUNCH SHATTER the accumulated debris of the corridor; shattered armor plating and broken spear shafts were yanked into orbit around the duel.

This wasn’t the chaotic storm of a novice; this was a coordinated system of death. The fragments moved in synchronized, deadly arcs, each piece tracking Apollo’s heat signature independently.

They swarmed him like angry hornets, forcing his guard to split between the blade in front of him and the shrapnel screaming at his flanks.

Then, he layered on the Elemental Mastery.

Waves of supernatural fire began to roll across the stone floor in low, undulating sheets. This wasn’t normal combustion; it was a hunting flame.

When one wave surged upward, catching Apollo across the ribs with the force of a molten sledgehammer, the Apostle cried out in genuine, shocked agony.

"GAHH!" Apollo’s voice broke as he stumbled back, clutching his side.

His divine barrier, the instinctual shield that should have absorbed elemental heat automatically, had failed to engage.

The energy signature Xerollion was wielding was so alien, so fundamentally ’wrong’ to the world’s natural laws, that Apollo’s magic didn’t even recognize it as a threat category until it was already searing through his flesh.

But the most terrifying part was the martial choreography. Xerollion fought the close-quarters combat like a conductor leading a symphony of slaughter.

Every thrust of his weapon was positioned to force Apollo to dodge into the path of a telekinetic stone; every defensive parry was a calculated setup for three subsequent attacks that would land exactly two seconds later.

’Left hook to force the retreat now, the stone spike from below now, the fire sweep yes, dance for me, little god.’

Apollo, bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts and panting through the smoke, realized he could no longer play defense. He could feel his ribs grinding against each other with every breath, the metallic tang of blood filling his mouth.

If he didn’t escalate, he would be dismantled piece by piece.

"Fine," Apollo growled through gritted teeth, blood spattering his chin. "You want to see what I can do?! THEN LOOK!"

Apollo opened up.

The golden light erupting from his body didn’t just glow; it detonated.

The intensity climbed to a level that turned the entire corridor into a bleached white furnace, throwing the shadows of the thousands of watching soldiers up the walls in enormous, distorted shapes that danced like demons.

The very air began to hum with the frequency of creation itself.

With this escalation, the quality of his strikes underwent a terrifying metamorphosis. His power was no longer just blunt force; it was reversed entropy, the power to undo time itself.

CLANG!

A chunk of floating debris caught a glancing blow from Apollo’s fist. Instead of breaking into fragments, it instantly crumbled into fine, ancient sand, the state it would have become after eight thousand years of wind and rain.

The effect was instantaneous and absolute.

CRACK BOOM!

The stone beneath Apollo’s feet couldn’t withstand the pressure of his stance; radial fractures spread outward like spiderwebs with every step he took, each crack glowing with residual gold.

The air itself seemed to warp around his movements, leaving behind a faint, shimmering golden haze that lingered in his wake like the ghost of a star. He wasn’t just fighting anymore; he was rewriting the reality of the corridor with every heartbeat.