Chapter 1159. I Bought a Pocket Dimension Because Renting One Felt Cheap

Chapter 1159: 1159. I Bought a Pocket Dimension Because Renting One Felt Cheap

The exchange that followed was not a fight; it was a sustained assault of metaphysical violence. Rex found himself caught in a storm of pressure more relentless than anything he had endured since the cataclysmic destruction of the Throne outside of Time.

Even as he was forced backward, his boots grinding crimson slurry into the stone, his mind remained a cold, analytical engine, dissecting every syllable of Apollo’s divine fury.

Apollo had transcended the tactical. He had stopped fighting like a man seeking victory and had begun fighting like a force of nature seeking to erase an obstacle.

His combat philosophy had shifted into something terrifyingly suicidal: he abandoned defense almost entirely. He stopped parrying and bracing.

He simply accepted the consequences of Rex’s counterattacks, allowing the white divine sheath to absorb impacts that would have shattered his organs twenty minutes ago.

He was trading flesh for momentum, and the trade was rigged in his favor. His divine accelerated healing was now outstripping Rex’s adaptation, a mathematical certainty that both men realized in the same heartbeat.

WHAM.

Apollo walked through a telekinetic barrage of nine razor-sharp stone fragments that shredded his tunic and drew blood, using the momentum to drive a knee into Rex’s solar plexus. The air left Rex’s lungs in a wet gasp.

FROOOM.

Without breaking stride, Apollo leaned into a compound elemental wave, the same unclassifiable frequency that had obliterated three stacked barriers an hour earlier.

The energy roared across Rex’s shoulder and chest, searing through fabric and flesh alike, but the divine sheath around Apollo simply refused to acknowledge the attack. It didn’t deflect the energy; it simply declined to be touched by it.

That was the detail that made Rex’s blood run colder than the wounds on his body. Elemental Magic Creation was designed to defeat defenses by finding their resonant frequency and exploiting the gaps in their logic.

But the goddess’s touch had no frequency. It was not a shield that could be bypassed; it was a fundamental refusal of reality to be altered.

It was the way a mountain declines to be moved by an argument.

Rex knew he had to change the variables, and he did so with desperate precision.

In ninety seconds, he shifted his approach three times. First, he applied Gravity Manipulation at moderate output.

For four seconds, Apollo’s movements became sluggish, his divine footsteps heavy as if wading through mercury. But then, the white layer began to compensate, pulsing with a countergravitational rhythm that pushed back against the curse.

Next, he pivoted to energy manipulation.

This was a surgical strike, aimed not at Apollo’s body but at the microscopic seam where his natural life affinity met the foreign divine reinforcement.

The result was spectacular. A genuine stagger, Apollo’s head snapped back, and for one glorious microsecond, the white sheath flickered like a dying candle.

Rex filed that data away with the hunger of a starving man: ’There is a seam... There is a weakness.’

Finally, he considered Sovereign Necromancy. His fingers twitched with the urge to summon the dead, to flood the corridor with the rotting hands of the fallen, and to drag Apollo down into the earth.

But he held back. He could not risk raising a corpse in front of an Apostle of Life while a goddess’s gaze burned through the divine channel.

The risk of exposure was too absolute.

"You keep changing methods," Apollo taunted, his voice echoing with that terrifying, doubled resonance.

He moved in a blur, a combination of strikes that ended in a devastating spinning heel kick that caught Rex across the temple. "That’s what a man does when nothing he has is working!"

Rex stumbled, blood streaming from beneath his mask, but his eyes remained sharp, focused, and deadly.

"That’s what a man does when he’s collecting data," Xerollion spat.

He threw up his crossed forearms to catch Apollo’s follow-up strike, a hammer fist aimed at his skull.

CRACK.

The sound was sickening, the unmistakable noise of radius and ulna splintering under divine pressure. Pain exploded through Rex’s arms, white hot and nauseating, but he didn’t break his stance.

"Though I admit," Rex growled through gritted teeth as he felt the bones grinding beneath his skin, "the distinction is getting academic."

Apollo didn’t just strike; he unleashed a three-hit execution designed to dismantle Rex’s very sense of space.

THUD CRACK BOOM.

A lightning-fast jab to the solar plexus to stagger, a hooked elbow that shattered Rex’s left cheekbone, and then the finisher.

Apollo pivoted, his entire body coiled like a loaded spring, and brought both fists down in a devastating downward hammer blow. The force wasn’t just kinetic; it carried the crushing weight of divine judgment.

The impact was apocalyptic. Rex was launched backward, not just sliding, but punching through the corridor wall like a cannonball through parchment.

The sound was a thunderclap of masonry exploding, followed by the wet, grinding noise of flesh meeting solid stone. When the dust began to settle, Rex was embedded a full meter deep into the solid rock.

A crater yawned open around him, with radial fractures spiderwebbing three meters in every direction, the stone groaning as it settled around his broken form.

For the first time in the entire engagement, the underlayer side of the corridor fell into a deathly, suffocating silence.

Ten thousand soldiers, ten thousand witnesses, held their breath in unison. The only sound was the settling of dust and the distant, fading echo of Apollo’s divine radiance.

Then, movement.

Rex began to peel himself out of the ruined masonry. Every movement was slow and deliberate, a conscious decision to not let the pain overwhelm his motor functions.

He shrugged loose chunks of granite off his shoulders, the stone clattering to the blood-slicked floor. He straightened his spine with an audible pop crack that made several nearby soldiers flinch.

Behind the mask, his mind was running a brutal inventory.

’Four major lacerations closing.’

’Rib three: cracked, mended, cracked again under the impact.’

’Left radius: hairline fracture, stabilizing.’

’Internal bleeding: minimal, compensated by regeneration.’

None of it mattered. None of it would matter in sixty seconds.

All of it was real, painfully, viscerally real in a way nothing had been since the apocalyptic slaughter in the throne room outside of time.

But beneath the ruined edge of his mask, Rex’s expression was not one of frustration.

It wasn’t anger, and it wasn’t even pain.

But it was delightful. A genuine, unguarded, terrifying delight.

’Finally,’ he thought, a dark smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. ’Someone who can actually make me bleed.’

This was only the second time in his entire existence that anything had forced him to exert this level of effort. The first time had ended with a god lying broken on the floor of his own domain, missing a vital piece of his divinity.

There was an enormous, almost intoxicating pleasure in this—the specific, predatory joy of a man who has spent months drowning in boredom finally being asked to actually try.

Underneath that pleasure, however, his strategic mind was already cold and calculating, assembling the only viable answer.

’I cannot fight this here,’ he reasoned, watching Apollo’s silhouette through the haze of dust. ’Not with this audience watching.’

’Not with a goddess using this very moment as a window into my soul.’

’And not with my other body standing forty meters away as a hostage to my reputation.’

Every problem he had enumerated—the audience, the Goddess, the strategic exposure—had the same fundamental shape: they were all problems of location.

Then, as if hearing his unspoken calculus, Lustia’s voice drifted from the golden chamber. It didn’t sound like a distant echo; it sounded as though she were standing directly beside him, her words carrying perfect, crystalline clarity:

"A personal domain, Rex..."

"A space you author entirely, where your own rules supersede the world’s default physics."

"A place where you can retreat, where you can plan, and where no one—not even a goddess—can interrupt you."

The words ignited something in his mind.

A solution.

A sanctuary.

A killing field where he could finally drop the mask entirely.

The system notification flickered into his peripheral vision the instant he reached for the concept in his mind.

[Domain Creation: 15,000 pts.] Confirm purchase?]

Rex didn’t pause. He didn’t weigh the cost.

He didn’t calculate the risk. He simply slammed his mental fist into the confirmation.

[Purchase Confirmed. Initiating Domain Genesis...]