Chapter 1161. Coughing Up Blood in a Universe I Bought With Loyalty Points, No Regrets

Chapter 1161: 1161. Coughing Up Blood in a Universe I Bought With Loyalty Points, No Regrets

On the Underlayer’s side of the carnage, the chaos seemed to momentarily freeze around two figures. Cassandra and Gorvasha stood rigid, their eyes locked on the impossible vacancy where the corridor’s center had simply vanished.

For the first time since either of them had knelt before Lord Xerollion, the iron discipline that defined them cracked. They shared a single, harrowing look—an expression of raw, unvarnished unease.

"Did you know he could do that?" Gorvasha asked.

His voice was flat, stripped of its usual gravelly confidence, less a question and more a desperate attempt to ground himself in reality.

"No." Cassandra’s jaw tightened so hard it looked as though her teeth might shatter. "And I have been in his confidence longer than anyone here."

"I have seen him unmake armies, Gorvasha, but I have never seen him unmake existence."

Meanwhile, in the heart of the Aethelgard formation, the performance of a lifetime was unfolding. Rex Rexilion tore himself away from the chaos, his face contorting into a mask of perfect, devastating panic.

"APOLLO! NO!" he shrieked, the sound tearing from his throat with such convincing agony that nearby soldiers instinctively recoiled.

He lunged toward the invisible barrier, muscles straining, veins bulging in his neck as three armored soldiers threw their full weight against him to hold him back.

To every horrified witness, he looked exactly like what he was pretending to be: a man watching the only thing that mattered disappear into an incomprehensible nightmare.

’Let them believe it,’ Rex thought behind the wall of his false terror. ’Let them think I am helpless.’

’Let them think the monster has won.’

But inside the domain, the world had gone utterly, terrifyingly quiet.

The violent spiral had spat them out into a realm that defied every law of perception. There was no sky, no horizon, and no distant walls to give a sense of scale.

It was an endless, yawning expanse of nothingness that refused to resolve into distance. Beneath their feet, there was no stone, no dirt, only a surface of slow pulsing, violet-black light that felt unnervingly like walking on firm flesh.

When they stepped, the surface gave slightly, a sickeningly organic recoil that sent vibrations up through their boots.

The silence was absolute. The screams of ten thousand soldiers, the clash of steel, the thunder of magic—all of it had been severed as cleanly as a limb.

There was only the wet, rhythmic sound of two sets of breathing in a space that had been conjured from nothingness mere seconds before.

Apollo turned in a slow, deliberate circle, his golden armor casting a faint, lonely glow against the encroaching dark.

When he spoke, his voice didn’t travel through air; it seemed to vibrate directly into the space around them, echoing off surfaces that didn’t exist.

"Where is this?" Apollo demanded, his hand instinctively moving to the hilt of his blade.

His divine aura flickered, struggling to find purchase in a world where physics had been revoked.

"Somewhere we can finish this without being interrupted."

Xerollion’s voice was transformed. It was deeper now, layered with a thousand harmonics that made it sound as though several entities were speaking in unison.

It carried the same unsettling register as Lustia’s chamber, a sound that felt like it was being whispered directly into the brain rather than heard by the ears. "No witnesses... No distractions... Just you and me now."

Rex felt the power of the domain thrumming through his veins, the violet light beneath them responding to his very heartbeat. He could feel the ’rules’ of this place waiting for his command, waiting to be written in blood.

Apollo didn’t flinch. There was no tremor of fear in his stance, no hesitation in his eyes.

Instead, there was only a hard, focused wariness, the cold, lethal expression of a predator who had realized he was no longer in a hunting ground but in a cage.

His eyes burned with celestial fire, promising one thing and one thing only: whatever rules Rex wrote here, Apollo intended to break them with sheer, unrelenting force.

Then, Apollo moved.

He didn’t just attack; he detonated. A streak of gold light tore through the violet void, a lance of celestial fury aimed directly at Rex’s sternum.

The fight that followed was not merely a duel; it was a cataclysm. Both men knew, in the primal, instinctive core of their beings, that they were experiencing something beyond mortal comprehension.

This was the pinnacle, the absolute apex of their respective existences.

Without the constricting walls of the corridor to cage them, the battle exploded into three-dimensional chaos. They became twin comets of gold and violet, launching off the pulsing floor into the yawning volume of the domain.

Rex would kick off the surface, feeling the organic recoil beneath his boots, propelling himself upward to meet Apollo midair.

CRACK BOOM!

They collided twenty meters above the floor, the impact producing a miniature supernova. Gold sparks hemorrhaged from Apollo’s fists while violet tendrils lashed out from Rex’s defensive barriers.

Each point of contact produced a concussive detonation that sent shockwaves rippling through the domain. The violet-black floor responded to every strike, rolling outward in slow, concentric waves like the surface of an enormous, patient liquid, absorbing the displaced energy of their god-tier violence.

Apollo held the rhythm. That was the terrifying truth that Rex had to confront between every bone-jarring exchange.

’Damn it,’ Rex thought, his mind racing through calculations even as blood spattered across his vision. ’It’s not just strength... It’s the variance...’

The residual touch of the goddess had done more than amplify Apollo’s power; it had made him fundamentally unpredictable. Every time Rex attempted to model Apollo’s attack patterns, the divine component shifted.

One strike would carry the weight of molten sunfire; the next, the piercing precision of a lightning bolt; the third, a crushing pressure that felt like gravity itself had gone mad.

Rex would adjust his guard for one expression of divine wrath, only for the next blow to arrive with a different harmonic signature, bypassing his defenses entirely.

And Rex was paying for it in blood.

Snap.

A sickening crack echoed through the void as Apollo’s elbow connected with Rex’s right forearm. The bone splintered audibly, sending a white-hot spike of agony through Rex’s nervous system.

He didn’t have time to scream; he barely had time to breathe before Apollo was on him again.

Squelch.

A blade of pure light grazed Rex’s side, opening a gash that wept crimson onto the violet floor. The blood didn’t pool; it sizzled against the domain’s surface.

A deep, mottled bruise spread across his ribs faster than his enhanced regeneration could knit the tissue back together. His left cheekbone cracked under a glancing blow, the mask’s edge tearing skin and sending a warm trickle down his jaw.

For the first time since he had watched a god kneel in a collapsing throne room, Rex Rexilion found himself on the back foot. He was not orchestrating this dance; he was struggling to survive it.

The part of his psyche that had defined itself as the apex predator, the man who walked into any room knowing he was the most dangerous thing in it, was reeling. His instincts were screaming at him, confused by a threat that refused to be solved.

But beneath the tactical assessment, beneath the pain and the mounting exhaustion, something darker and more exhilarating was stirring.

’This is it,’ Rex thought, a feral grin splitting his lips even as he coughed up blood. ’This is what I live for.’

’This beautiful, murderous chaos.’

He was, in the most twisted sense of the word, having the time of his life.

They broke apart for a fraction of a second, hovering in the weightless void. Apollo’s breathing was ragged now, his chest heaving beneath his gleaming armor.

A steady stream of blood leaked from his nose, where Rex had landed a devastating counterstrike several exchanges prior. His golden radiance flickered like a dying candle in a storm.

"You’re slowing down," Apollo spat, the words punctuated by a wet wheeze.

His eyes remained fixed on Rex with deadly intensity, refusing to acknowledge his own deteriorating condition.

Rex wiped a smear of crimson from his mouth with the back of his hand, the violet light of the domain reflecting off the fresh blood. His broken arm throbbed in time with the domain’s heartbeat, but his gaze was sharper than it had been at the start.

"I’m learning, Apollo," Xerollion answered, his voice carrying that terrifying, layered resonance. "There’s a difference."