Chapter 1172. He Self-Authored a Power the System Couldn’t Even Name

Chapter 1172: 1172. He Self-Authored a Power the System Couldn’t Even Name

Rex’s eyebrow rose fractionally. For the first time since this performance began, the mask of detached amusement slipped, revealing something sharper: genuine curiosity.

That was new. Life affinity was a constant; it was predictable, nourishing, and harmonious.

It obeyed the laws of growth and preservation. Whatever Apollo was manifesting now defied every fundamental law of the magic Rex understood.

It wasn’t the goddess’s gift, nor was it the structured power of his own designation. When Rex activated his Divine Perception, scanning the anomaly with genuine, focused attention, the system stuttered.

The reading didn’t return a clean category; it returned a corrupted error. This was not magic granted by a higher power; this was something manufactured from the raw, bleeding marrow of a human soul.

It was a power born directly from the deepest, most necrotic point of the suffering Rex had spent the last twenty minutes meticulously constructing.

"You said I was too good to deserve this," Apollo said.

His voice had gone past anger, past grief, and even past hatred. It had gone cold—a temperature so absolute it felt like the heat was being sucked out of the room.

"You said my goodness was a weakness..."

"That it kept me from seeing what I truly was..."

Apollo’s head tilted back, and for a moment, he looked like something other than human. His jaw unhinged in a silent scream before the sound finally broke free.

"AAAAAAAAGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"

The scream was inhuman. It wasn’t a vocalization; it was a seismic event.

It started as a guttural roar from his diaphragm and escalated into a piercing, glass-shattering shriek that seemed to tear through the fabric of the domain itself.

Apollo’s muscles corded and bulged to the point of tearing through his skin; blood began to seep from his pores as his circulatory system struggled to contain the sheer pressure of the energy surging through him.

His eyes rolled back, showing only whites stained crimson by ruptured capillaries. He screamed for what felt like an eternity, a sound of endless, unceasing torment that demanded vengeance from the very stars.

"All right, then," Apollo growled between ragged, wet gasps, his voice echoing with a dual tonal distortion, his own voice layered beneath something deeper and more ancient. "Let’s find out how much of that ’goodness’ I can burn away to make you pay."

"For every friend... For every tear... For her..."

The eruption came a second later.

It wasn’t a flash; it was a detonation. The gold and red light exploded outward from Apollo’s center in one enormous, violent exhale that shook the entire domain to whatever passed for its foundations.

The unanchored structure groaned audibly, a sound like grinding tectonic plates as the violet pulse of the floor stuttered and skipped like a dying heartbeat.

BOOM.

The shockwave hit Rex like a physical wall of heat and pressure, but he didn’t move. The brightness was absolute, a supernova contained within a confined space that swallowed every detail of the world for a full second and a half.

The air screamed as it was displaced and superheated into plasma, and the sound of the explosion lingered as a high-pitched ringing that threatened to burst eardrums.

When the light finally began to recede, peeling back like burning paper to reveal what lay beneath, Rex was still standing exactly where he had been.

His feet were planted, his hands were loose at his sides, and that infuriating, hungry grin remained etched across his face. His violet eyes glowed brighter than ever, fixed with absolute, undisguised anticipation on the crater of shattered reality where Apollo had stood.

Rex didn’t care about the structural damage. He wasn’t concerned about the fading stability of his domain.

He only cared about what would emerge from that scorched circle. Because whatever was about to walk out of that light was something new, something terrifying, something broken, and something he had created.

And it had been a very long time since anything had truly surprised him.

The light did not dissipate; it sank. Instead of fading into the atmosphere, the searing gold and arterial red imploded inward, flowing back into Apollo like water down a drain, condensing until it settled beneath his skin.

Apollo stood in the center of the cratered, fractured floor, and the man who had stood there moments ago was gone.

The change was not a monstrous transformation; there were no wings, no scales, and no grotesque mutations, but the shift was terrifyingly visible. His physique had hardened; the muscle across his shoulders and arms was corded and dense, standing out like carved granite beneath his skin.

His flesh carried a faint, sickly luminescence, as though the energy coursing through his veins had become so pressurized it was beginning to burn through his epidermis.

His eyes remained gold, but the irises were no longer pure; at the center of each pupil burned a core of molten, deep crimson. When he blinked, the red lingered like the dying glow of embers behind closed eyelids.

The divine white sheath of the goddess remained, but it had been utterly subjugated. It no longer sat atop him like a garment; it had been woven into the new, darker tapestry of his power.

It ran through the veins of his new magic, folded into a working that had been forged from raw hatred and fed by a source far less sanctified than any celestial pantheon.

Rex activated Divine Perception, pushing his targeted analysis function to its absolute breaking point. The system stuttered, processing data that seemed to violate the very logic of the universe.

[Working type: UNCLASSIFIED.]

[Source: SELF AUTHORED.]

[Divine component present but subordinate.]

[Emotional substrate: PRIMARY POWER SOURCE.]

[No existing designation match found.]

[No pantheon signature detected.]

Rex read the text twice. His pupils dilated.

’Self authored.’

Apollo Brightsoul, the paragon of obedience, the man who had spent his entire life operating within the predefined parameters of a goddess’s blessing, had just committed an act of metaphysical heresy.

He had created something from nothing, using nothing but the scorched remains of his own soul and the agony Rex had so carefully cultivated.

Whatever the divine framework thought about mortals producing original, divine class workings out of pure, unadulterated grief, the system was too late to intervene. The blasphemy was already complete.

Rex found himself smiling. It wasn’t the cruel smirk of a manipulator anymore; it was the genuine, unguarded smile of a man who had finally found something worth playing with.

"This isn’t about saving Aethelgard anymore," Apollo said.

The voice was wrong. It was a dual-tonal nightmare, his own voice layered beneath a subsonic growl that seemed to vibrate from the floor itself.

"This isn’t about justice... This isn’t about duty..."

He took a step forward, and the fractured ground beneath his boot shattered further.

"This is about making sure you feel even a fraction of what you’ve given me."

He moved.

It wasn’t a run. It wasn’t a leap.

It was a sudden, violent displacement of space.

One moment Apollo was twenty meters away; the next, he was a blur of gold and crimson streaks cutting through the air.

Rex was ready. His mind screamed warnings before Apollo even shifted.

Foresight had mapped the trajectory two full seconds in advance. Adaptation was already recalibrating his magical defenses to counter the unknown energy signature.

His Peak Superhuman Physique had already begun the micro adjustments in his stance to pivot and evade. His brain was already executing the perfect counter maneuver.

But Apollo was moving faster than Rex’s ability to process the causality of the attack.

WHAM.

The punch didn’t just connect; it detonated against Rex’s jaw. The sound was like two slabs of marble colliding at supersonic speeds—a wet, bone-crushing CRACK that echoed through the domain.

The sheer force of the impact bypassed Rex’s magical barriers as if they weren’t there, transferring directly into his skull. His head was snapped sideways with such violence that his neck vertebrae audibly groaned under the strain.

Rex’s entire body followed a quarter second later, launched backward like he had been struck by a siege engine. He tore through three separate formations of Rex’s drifting light, each one shattering like glass upon impact.

He skidded across the fractured violet floor, his shoulder grinding against the jagged edges of the domain’s surface, sparks flying where flesh met magical stone.

He slid another eight meters, leaving a trail of blood and displaced energy behind him, before finally coming to a bone-jarring halt.

Blood trickled from the corner of Rex’s mouth, staining his chin as he gasped for air, his enhanced senses struggling to reassemble the reality that had just been violently torn apart.