Chapter 1152. The Struggle Makes the Eventual Breaking So Much Sweeter

Chapter 1152: 1152. The Struggle Makes the Eventual Breaking So Much Sweeter

At exactly the four-minute mark of this escalating nightmare, the impossible happened. Apollo found his opening.

It wasn’t a lucky strike; it was a masterpiece of desperate calculation. For three excruciating exchanges, Apollo had been feeding Xerollion false data, deliberately overcommitting to his left side, telegraphing a clumsy stumble, and building a feint that felt like weakness.

He baited the trap. He saw the masked figure’s guard drop by a mere four inches, a micro adjustment in anticipation of a failed lunge.

’NOW!’ Apollo’s mind screamed.

He planted his lead foot, feeling the stone crack beneath his divine weight, and unleashed an uppercut that carried every ounce of momentum from his legs, his core, and his raw fury.

CRACK THUD!

The sound was sickening—the wet, splintering noise of bone meeting unstoppable force. The blow caught Xerollion square along the jaw.

The masked figure’s head snapped sideways with such violent velocity that his neck vertebrae audibly popped. For one enormous, roaring second, the Aethelgard side of the corridor erupted.

A primal, terrified shriek rose from the soldiers, a sound of hope so loud it shook dust from the ancient ceiling.

"HE GOT HIM!" someone screamed. "APOLLO DID IT!"

But the triumph lasted less than a heartbeat.

The head snapped back to center within half a second, moving with an unnatural, mechanical precision. Before the pain could even register in Xerollion’s nerves, his Infinite Regeneration had already knitted the fractured mandible back together.

The bone fused with terrifying speed; the cartilage reasserted itself before the blood could even trickle from his lips.

Xerollion simply rolled his neck in a casual, almost bored gesture, and the world turned upside down.

WHOOSH.

In a blur of motion too fast for the human eye to track, Xerollion closed the distance. His gauntleted hand shot forward like a striking viper, fingers locking around Apollo’s throat with the crushing finality of a steel trap.

CHOKE.

"Nnngh!" Apollo’s protest died in his throat as his windpipe collapsed under the pressure.

The lift that followed was not merely a feat of strength; it was a violation of physics. Xerollion’s Peak Superhuman Physique provided the raw, terrifying power, while his telekinesis amplified the grip to a molecular level.

Apollo was wrenched off his feet, his boots kicking uselessly three feet above the stone. Both of Apollo’s hands clawed frantically at the wrist holding him, his fingernails scraping against the armor, but the grip did not shift by a single millimeter.

It was as if he were trying to pry apart two mountain ranges.

Xerollion held him there suspended in midair for two full seconds. In the deadly theater of this duel, those two seconds weren’t a tactical pause; they were a statement of absolute dominance.

A message to Apollo and to everyone watching: ’You cannot hurt me.’ You cannot even touch me.’

Then, with a grunt of contempt, Xerollion hurled him.

BOOM!

Apollo became a golden streak of broken momentum. He hurtled across the corridor twenty meters in the blink of an eye.

When he hit the far wall, it wasn’t a collision; it was an explosion. He punched through the outer layer of reinforced stone like it was wet parchment, vanishing into a catastrophic cloud of pulverized rock, mortar, and choking dust.

The silence that followed was absolute. It wasn’t just quiet; it was a vacuum.

The Aethelgard soldiers stood frozen, their breath trapped in their lungs, the sudden absence of the magical cacophony feeling like a physical blow to their eardrums.

’Did he die?’ The question hung unspoken in the air. ’Is that all the Apostle of Life has left?’

Four seconds passed.

Four seconds of agonizing, suffocating stillness.

Then, the rubble began to shift.

The silence of the corridor was shattered not by a scream, but by the grinding of stone.

From the heart of the pulverized wall, a silhouette emerged. Apollo didn’t stagger out of the rubble like a broken man; he stepped out like a vengeful god emerging from a tomb.

Blood ran in thick, crimson rivulets down the left side of his face from a jagged gash above his eyebrow, matting his hair and stinging his eye. His ornate chestplate was spiderwebbed with deep fractures, the metal twisted inward from the impact.

For one horrifying heartbeat, his left arm hung at an impossible, nauseating angle; the elbow joint clearly shattered before a surge of brilliant gold pulsed through the limb.

CRACK SNAP.

The sound of bones knitting back together was wet and violent. The life affinity forced the joint back into its socket with brutal efficiency, overriding the pain with raw cellular reconstruction.

He didn’t limp. He walked.

The golden radiance surrounding him hadn’t dimmed from the impact; if anything, it had become more pressurized, more dangerous.

"You’re strong," Apollo said.

His voice was hoarse, the words catching on the blood pooling in his throat. His breathing was ragged, with each inhale sounding like a wet rasp that indicated his punctured lungs were struggling to find air.

"Stronger than anything I have ever faced..."

"Anything I have ever heard of." He paused, tilting his head back to spit a glob of copper-tasting blood onto the pristine stone.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist in one defiant motion. "But I’m not going to stop... I can’t stop."

"I know." Xerollion’s voice drifted through the haze of dust.

There was no mockery in it, only something far more unsettling: genuine, predatory pleasure. "That’s exactly what makes this enjoyable, Apollo."

"The struggle makes the eventual breaking so much sweeter."

Apollo’s eyes locked onto the mask. "Then let’s see you break."

"ACTIVATE."

The word wasn’t shouted; it was commanded.

For two centuries, Academy texts had attempted to codify the Full Activation of an Apostle of Life. They spoke of ’temporal manipulation’ and ’biological restoration,’ but they were pathetic lies.

They couldn’t capture the terror of it. Those standing in the northern corridor who had never witnessed such divinity understood within one terrifying second that reality itself was being rewritten.

The golden light didn’t just brighten; it transformed. It ceased to be mere photons and became a physical presence, a crushing weight of existence that expanded outward from Apollo in a perfect, terrifying sphere.

It swallowed forty meters of the corridor in every direction, and inside that golden radius, the arrow of time began to spin backward.

WHOOSH SHHH.

The sound was like a thousand reversed whispers. The cracks in the walls groaned as they sealed themselves shut.

The dust suspended in the air didn’t just settle; it condensed, flowing backward like reverse snowfall, reassembling into fragments that knitted themselves back into the stone surfaces they had been torn from.

The furrows Apollo’s own boots had ground into the floor smoothed themselves flat, as if the violence had never occurred. At the very edge of the radius, wounded soldiers felt their wounds seal and their exhaustion vanish in a rush of supernatural vitality.

Several men collapsed to their knees, weeping openly, overwhelmed by a sudden, inexplicable euphoria they couldn’t comprehend.

"GLORY TO THE APOSTLE! "A roar went up from the Aethelgard side, thousands of voices joining in a thunderous hymn of desperate hope.

But inside the golden sphere, Xerollion felt something alien.

It was a disorienting, nauseating sensation. He examined it with the detached, clinical interest he applied to all novel stimuli, noting the way his own cells seemed to be receiving urgent, divine instructions to revert to an earlier configuration.

His body wasn’t being treated as flesh and bone but as a mathematical equation being solved in reverse. For one agonizing second and a half, the effect took hold.

His wounds from earlier closed; his muscles relaxed into a state of pre-combat readiness; his very timeline began to unravel.

Then, the countermeasure triggered.

THUM THUM.

Full Potential Adaptation completed its analysis in a microsecond. Inside Xerollion’s mind, the mechanism resolved itself as a clean structural map.

Target: Entropy Reversal.

Method: Cellular register manipulation via divine authority channel.

Countermeasure: Static Temporal Anchor.

The adaptation engaged with the cold finality of a guillotine. The sensation of being pulled backward simply... stopped.

His body slammed back into its present state, anchoring itself to the current moment with absolute stubbornness. When the golden wave of Apollo’s power washed over him again, it passed through him like wind through smoke, leaving him completely untouched.

The Apostle was pouring everything he was into the universe, and the masked man simply stood there, unchanged.

Behind the ruined, blood-flecked mask, Rex’s lips curled upward. A slow, hungry smile spread across his face.

"My turn."