Chapter 1153. Watch How Fast the Darkness Returns When the Candle Burns to the Wick

Chapter 1153: 1153. Watch How Fast the Darkness Returns When the Candle Burns to the Wick

The golden sphere pressed against Xerollion like a physical tide, a tsunami of divine authority attempting to drown his very existence.

For three excruciating seconds, he had actually felt it—the terrifying, beautiful pull of entropy reversing, the sensation of his own heartbeat stuttering as time tried to unmake him.

It was the first time since his confrontation with Kaeleth that anything had made contact with him in a way that required genuine cognitive processing.

Three seconds of real, tangible effect. That wasn’t a failure; it was a data point of immense value. Most gods would have been unmade in the first millisecond.

’Impressive,’ Rex thought, his mind working with cold, inhuman speed even as the golden pressure roared around him. ’The output is magnificent... The scale is unprecedented...’

He filed the sensation away with genuine appreciation, a predator cataloging a new kind of venom. He reflected, not for the first time, on the grim mathematics of his own ascension.

His power, his godhood, and his terrifying adaptability—all of it had been purchased with the broken bodies and shattered souls of those who had dared to show him their ’best work.’ He didn’t hate them for it; he thanked them. Their corpses were the currency of his evolution.

Across the shimmering circle of golden light, the reaction of the two armies split with perfect, devastating clarity along the line of comprehension.

On the Aethelgard side, the atmosphere was one of religious ecstasy. The soldiers screamed themselves hoarse, their voices cracking as they roared encouragement.

To them, the sheer, overwhelming scale of the activation was proof enough of divine intervention. They had spent the last hour watching their sacred formations get systematically dismantled, watching their brothers die in the mud.

Now, seeing their Apostle bathe the world in a radiance that could heal wounds and reverse time, they believed salvation had finally arrived.

"HE’S REWRITING THE WORLD!" a young soldier screamed, tears streaming down his face as he raised his sword to the golden sky. "THE GOD IS HERE! WE CAN’T LOSE!"

They saw a sunrise. They saw the end of the nightmare.

A few dozen meters away, Cassandra stood like a statue carved from obsidian. She folded her arms across her chest, her eyes narrowed, watching the way the golden light licked at the edges of Xerollion’s static field.

Her expression was not one of awe but of profound, weary pity.

Gorvasha stepped up beside her, his breath hitching as the heat from Apollo’s aura washed over them. "Cassandra... look at it."

"The Apostle has unleashed everything... The tide has turned."

Cassandra didn’t blink. Her gaze remained fixed on the masked figure who stood unmoving in the center of the storm.

"They think that’s a victory," she said, her voice flat and devoid of emotion.

"What do you mean?" Gorvasha asked, glancing nervously at the screaming soldiers behind them. "Look at the scale of it!"

"Nothing has ever been this bright, this powerful."

"They think it’s a victory because it’s the largest thing they have ever seen," Cassandra interrupted, her words cutting through the noise like a blade. "But scale is not strength."

"Power without endurance is just a firework."

She watched as the golden light began to flicker at its most intense points, the strain of maintaining such a reality warping field showing in the minute tremors of Apollo’s stance.

"Watch what happens when those four minutes run out," she whispered, a dark warning hanging in the air. "Watch how fast the darkness returns when the candle burns itself to the wick."

Apollo crossed the threshold into the third minute of his divine activation, and the cost of godhood began to extract its toll.

The exhaustion wasn’t just fatigue; it was a parasitic drain that felt as though his very marrow was being siphoned out through his pores. Around the two and a half minute mark, the ’payment’ for reversing entropy became clear.

His guard dropped a fraction of an inch between exchanges, a fatal vulnerability against any other opponent. His breathing, once a steady rhythm of power, had become a wet, labored rasp that fought to be heard over the cacophony of clashing steel and magical discharge.

Sweat cut clean, pale lines through the drying blood on his face, stinging his eyes as he fought to maintain focus. His hands had begun to betray him; they shook between strikes, a fine tremor that forced him to reset his grip on his weapon each time, his knuckles white with the effort of containing the quaking muscle.

’Don’t falter... Not now.’

’Not when they’re watching.’

But he attacked anyway. And God help anyone standing in his way; he attacked with the precision of a surgeon and the fury of a dying star.

The opening combination of the third minute was a revelation—the most sustained, flawless offense he had produced since the duel began. Eleven strikes delivered in under four seconds.

Each blow was not just physical; each one carried the crushing, consecrated weight of his life affinity. The air screamed as his weapon cut through it, each swing leaving behind a trail of golden afterimages.

This wasn’t just divine technique; it was a confession. Every strike was fueled by an anger that had been compounding like pressurized steam since the moment he realized what Xerollion truly was.

’Veylor.’ Apollo’s teeth ground together so hard his jaw ached.

He could see Veylor’s face, the man who had been three weeks away from proposing to Iris, a man who believed in honor.

’Calivara.’ The woman who had stood beside him since his first day of training.

’Eryndra.’ Who had laughed at his terrible jokes when the rest of the world stayed silent?

’And the others...’

And beneath them all, the shattered remains of his own faith. He had extended his trust to a world that had seemed, for one brief, beautiful moment, like it might be fundamentally decent.

Now, he was standing in a corridor of corpses, fighting a monster that ate hope for breakfast.

CRACK SHINK! CRACK SHINK!

Xerollion moved like liquid mercury. He blocked nine of the eleven strikes with effortless, inhuman economy.

But the other two, the two that bypassed his guard, he took them deliberately.

Apollo had noticed this pattern halfway through the second minute, but his pride had refused to let him acknowledge the terrifying truth. The masked figure wasn’t failing to defend; he was choosing when to be hit.

Every so often, a strike that should have been intercepted would be allowed through at a slightly reduced angle. Xerollion would shift his weight just enough to absorb the impact rather than avoid it, letting the divine energy sear through his armor and bite into his flesh.

’Why?’ Apollo’s mind screamed. ’Why would you let me hit you?’

The answer arrived in the way Xerollion’s shoulders relaxed when the blow landed. The truth was worse than any tactical error: his opponent was enjoying the sensation.

Xerollion was treating Apollo’s desperate, righteous fury as nothing more than a series of exquisite stimuli. He was tasting the pain, savoring the divine burn against his skin.

Then, the atmosphere shifted. The air grew heavy, charged with enough static to make the hair on every soldier’s neck stand up.

What came next was the most punishing ninety seconds of the entire duel: a ninety-second descent into a hell of grinding bone, shattered magic, and raw, unadulterated violence.

It was a massacre of endurance that would punish both men in ways that transcended the physical. For Apollo, it was the slow, agonizing death of his spirit; for Xerollion, it was the exquisite torment of a predator being pushed to his absolute limit.