Chapter 1168. Grief Is the Price of Having Loved Someone Properly...

Chapter 1168: 1168. Grief Is the Price of Having Loved Someone Properly...

Apollo stared up at him, his vision blurred by a hot flood of tears. His entire world, the moral compass he had relied upon to navigate the darkness, wasn’t just broken; it was being ground into powder beneath Rex’s boot.

Behind the tears, something deeper was happening. Something fundamental in his psyche was fracturing, a psychic collapse that made his hands shake with involuntary spasms.

"You’re not... you’re not the Rex I knew," Apollo whispered.

The words were pathetic, a weak attempt to cling to a ghost that had never existed.

"I was never the Rex you knew," Rex answered, the grin widening until it seemed to split his face unnaturally. "You just hadn’t met the real one until now."

"The one beneath the performance... The one who actually has the spine to do what needs to be done..."

Rex began to walk.

He didn’t charge; he didn’t threaten. He simply began to circle Apollo slowly, like a shark circling a wounded whale.

His hands hung loose at his sides, relaxed in a way that was more terrifying than any clenched fist. His boots made no sound whatsoever on the pulsing violet surface, as if he had become untethered from the physical laws of the world.

When he spoke again, his voice had shifted; it had lost its venom and gained something worse: the casual, measured cadence of a professor lecturing a student or a storyteller recounting a legend.

"Let me tell you something, Apollo..."

"Because I think you’ve earned the right to know... After everything I’ve taken from you, it would be almost cruel not to show you the full scale of my craftsmanship."

"You’re going to be the only person alive who ever gets to see the full picture, the complete architecture of this masterpiece."

"And really, it seems like such a waste not to share it with someone who appreciates the artistry."

Apollo lifted his head. His eyes were bloodshot, swollen from grief and exhaustion, but beneath the agony there was a terrible, hollow curiosity.

It was the morbid fascination of a man standing on the edge of an abyss, knowing that if he looked down, he would fall, but unable to tear his gaze away from the void.

"The Undead Bringer," Rex said, the name dropping like a guillotine blade into the silence. "That was me, Apollo..."

"Every apostate he slaughtered in those northern territories, every reincarnator who vanished without a trace during those six months of chaos, every bloodbath that kept your council awake at night... that was all my handiwork."

Rex paused, savoring the way Apollo’s breathing hitched.

"I wore Xavier Xenworth’s face to do it," Rex continued smoothly, stepping closer, his violet eyes casting jagged shadows across Apollo’s broken form. "Because the Goddess of Justice never formally withdrew his designation after his ’accidental’ death."

"His soul’s departure was ambiguous enough that the divine registry left his record in a transitional state—a ghost in the machine."

"So, when your investigators ran their signature scans, they didn’t see a new threat."

"They saw a corrupted Apostle of Justice... your entire network, your brilliant, tactical network, spent four months chasing a dead man, hunting a shadow that I had painted onto a corpse."

Apollo made a small, choked sound, a whimper that died in his throat. His mind flashed back to the war room, the maps spread across the table, the sleepless nights spent pouring over magical residue signatures.

He had personally led two of those investigations. He had stood before the council, confident and determined, promising that they would unmask the monster that was slaughtering their allies. He had staked his reputation, his authority, and his faith on the hunt.

And he had been hunting his best friend.

"Tremor," Rex continued, his voice relentless, steamrolling over Apollo’s attempts to breathe. "The catastrophic earthquake that leveled the northern district."

"The screams of thousands buried under tons of rubble..."

"All those civilians who died screaming for a god who never answered... That was me."

Rex took another step, his violet eyes pulsing like a dying star. "That stone meteor that tore through the Starlight Garden?"

"The one that took Lily and Diana out of the world before they could even scream?"

"That was my handiwork as well..."

"Do you remember the gauntlets of the Earth Sovereign’s Vessel? The ones I reported as stolen during that undead assault on Sable Island?"

"I had them fully integrated into my own circulatory system two days before the attack even began."

"I staged the theft, Apollo... I sent one of my own constructs running into the night with an empty artifact so your precious network would have a thief to chase, a convenient scapegoat to keep you from looking at me."

"The dragon..." Apollo whispered.

The words felt like glass shards in his throat. He knew where this was going; he could feel the shape of the horror forming in the air, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking, the way a condemned man might ask about the weather before the trapdoor drops.

"Ignivara." Rex nodded approvingly. "She was Legion once."

"Now she is mine... She has been mine since long before her public defection."

"Every scrap of intelligence she fed your network, every ’crucial’ warning that allowed you to reposition your forces? All of it was filtered through me first."

"I wrote her scripts... I dictated her lies..."

"She sat in a room with Valentina, your most trusted strategist, and delivered a briefing that I had personally authored."

"And Zane Mortavius?" Rex’s grin turned razor sharp. "I let him escape the purge specifically so he would act as my messenger, carrying my poison into your inner sanctum."

"Once he stopped being useful, I disposed of him."

Apollo was shaking violently now, his entire body convulsing with a primal terror. Every revelation landed like a war hammer against his skull, each one more devastating than the last.

The physical pain of their battle—the shattered ribs, the blood filling his lungs, the grinding pain in his limbs—was nothing compared to this. That fight had only broken his bones; this was breaking his soul.

He was watching the last year of his life be dismantled, piece by piece, revealing that every tragedy he had grieved, every investigation he had poured his heart into, every friend he had buried... they were all orchestrated performances.

He had been mourning corpses while the murderer stood at his shoulder, offering him a handkerchief.

’He was there,’ Apollo’s mind screamed. ’Every time I cried, he was there.’

’Every time I failed, he was there to help me pick up the pieces.’

"Wait," Apollo said, his voice thinning out until it was nothing more than a ghostly rasp. "The night of Veylor’s funeral."

"The city was in mourning... You... you stood next to Iris at the coffin."

"You put your hand on her shoulder..."

"You looked her in the eyes and told her that ’grief was the price of having loved someone properly. ’I remember it."

"Half the city remembers it... People called it the most noble thing anyone had done during the dark weeks."

Rex nodded slowly, completely unbothered, his expression one of mild academic interest. "I did say that."

"And I meant it, in its own twisted way."

"Grief is the price of having loved someone properly."

Rex leaned down until his face was inches from Apollo’s, the violet glow of his eyes casting a sickly light over Apollo’s tear-streaked features.

"The only problem, Apollo, is that I’d already killed him eleven hours earlier."