Chapter 1173. Whatever You Built to Get Around Defenses Doesn’t Work Here

Chapter 1173: 1173. Whatever You Built to Get Around Defenses Doesn’t Work Here

Rex lay motionless for several heartbeats, his body sprawled across the fractured violet floor. His mind was not focused on the pain; pain was merely data but on the rapid-fire assessment of his own deteriorating condition.

’Jaw fractured in two places.’

’Left clavicle hairline crack.’

’Rib three bruised.’

’Shoulder joint compromised.’

He could feel his Infinite Regeneration working, a familiar hum of cellular reconstruction beginning to stitch his tissues back together. But something was wrong.

The process felt sluggish and even heavy. The usual instantaneous knitting of bone and sinew was being met with something viscous and resistant.

That red energy that self-authored blasphemy wasn’t just attacking him physically; it was interfering with the very mechanism of his immortality.

It was poisoning the acceleration of his healing, forcing his body to work through a metaphorical mire of crimson sludge.

’Interesting,’ Rex thought, a cold thrill running through his spine. ’That is very, very interesting.’

With a grunt of effort that sounded more like amusement than agony, Rex forced himself upright. His movements were precise despite the damage, the mechanical efficiency of a predator refusing to acknowledge injury.

He raised his thumb to his mouth, wiping away the smear of crimson that stained his lips, and stared at the blood coating his skin.

"Better," Rex said, his voice smooth despite the grinding of his broken jaw.

He deliberately placed the blood-stained thumb in his mouth, sucking the copper-tasting liquid off it while maintaining unflinching eye contact with Apollo.

The gesture was calculated with sadistic precision, a provocation designed to remind Apollo that even in defeat, Rex remained the master of this game.

"I’ve been waiting for you to show me this since the moment we started..."

"I was wondering when you’d stop pretending to be a saint and start being a weapon."

Apollo did not answer. He didn’t even blink.

The man who had once offered forgiveness now offered only annihilation.

He came again.

The approach was a violation of physics that made Rex’s enhanced senses recoil. Apollo didn’t run in any conventional sense; he didn’t push off the ground with muscles and sinew.

Instead, the red gold energy surrounding him seemed to contract the space between them. The distance between twenty meters and Rex’s face didn’t disappear; it collapsed.

One moment Apollo was a distant silhouette of burning rage; the next, he was a screaming comet of divine fury.

Rex reacted instantly. His body twisted, his reflexes honed by centuries of combat theory, but the speed of the attack was beyond his predictive models.

Apollo’s shoulder slammed into Rex’s left side with the force of a falling star.

CRUNCH.

A wet, sickening pop echoed through the domain as Rex’s shoulder dislocated, the bone tearing through the surrounding ligaments.

Rex didn’t scream. In mid-motion, as his body spun from the impact, he reached up with a clawed hand, grabbed his own arm, and violently wrenched the joint back into its socket with a brutal, self-inflicted snap.

But Apollo was already mid swing, a follow-up strike fueled by momentum and hatred. Rex raised his forearm to block, but the impact was catastrophic.

His radius and ulna shattered audibly under the pressure, the bones splintering into fragments that pierced through his own muscle.

’Pain is irrelevant,’ Rex’s inner monologue hissed. ’Counterattack now.’

Using the momentum of his own collapsing defense, Rex drove his knee upward with every ounce of his supernatural strength. The strike connected squarely with Apollo’s ribcage.

THUD CRACK.

The impact was devastating. Rex felt the satisfying give of ribs snapping like dry kindling, followed by the wet squelch of internal organs rupturing under the concentrated pressure.

For a split second, Apollo’s breathing faltered, a momentary lapse where his lungs failed him. But even as Rex prepared to follow up, Apollo’s body reacted with horrifying efficiency.

Somewhere between the second and third seconds of the impact, the ruptured organs began to knit back together, reforming even as Apollo’s fist was already whistling through the air toward Rex’s temple.

Rex ducked, the wind of the punch ruffling his hair, and slid backward across the cracked floor to create distance. His breathing was ragged now, his body a map of fresh trauma.

"That’s twice now," Rex panted, sliding until he regained his footing, buying himself half a second of breathing room. "Whatever you built in that furnace of yours, it’s prioritizing recovery over raw output."

"Your body is fixing itself faster than it can break..."

"That’s either some deep-seated survival instinct, or it’s a very calculated decision..."

"I’d genuinely like to know which one it is."

Apollo stood his ground, his stance wide and unshakable. The red at the center of his eyes wasn’t just glowing; now it was pulsing, bleeding light into the air around him like smoke from a pyre.

"It’s neither," Apollo said, his voice a terrifying harmony of man and monster. "It’s not instinct, and it’s not a choice."

He took another step, the floor beneath him disintegrating into fine violet dust.

"I’m simply not going to stop. Whatever my body has to do to keep me moving is my problem."

"Your problem is what happens when I finally reach you."

The sequence of violence that followed was not a duel; it was an execution attempt. The disciplined, textbook precision that had defined Apollo for twenty-five minutes—the elegant Academy techniques, the measured stances, and the controlled magical flows—was dead.

In its place was something primal, something feral. What emerged from the red gold haze was a combatant who had abandoned all pretense of form.

His punches were thrown from impossible, bone-breaking angles that no instructor would have approved, each strike delivered with a raw, unrefined savagery that had stopped respecting the difference between a martial strike and an act of demolition.

Every blow Apollo landed carried a dual catastrophe.

First came the heat, a searing, white-hot agony that didn’t just burn the skin but bored through flesh like molten lead, chewing through muscle fibers and melting marrow.

But beneath that thermal destruction lay something far more insidious: the old, familiar reverse entropy of Apollo’s original Life affinity.

It ran beneath the burn like a parasitic current, pulling tissue backward into an earlier state of cellular existence while the heat simultaneously destroyed it forward.

It was a temporal paradox made manifest in violence, a wound that was being healed and incinerated at the exact same moment.

Rex’s mind raced, his consciousness struggling to process the anomaly. Full Potential Adaptation whirred at maximum capacity, its neural pathways firing like lightning as it attempted to map this new threat.

In a single night against a god, Rex had mastered seventeen distinct temporal mechanisms, but this was different. His system would acquire the pattern for the thermal burn, only to immediately lose the thread because the life affinity component kept shifting the context beneath it.

He was trying to catch smoke with his bare hands.

For the first time in his second life, Rex lost control of the tempo.

For two brutal minutes, Rex fought back with everything he had. He didn’t unleash his full output, for doing so would be suicidal, but he pushed himself to the level he had utilized against Kaeleth, unleashing a torrent of coordinated magical assault.

SHRAKK BOOM!

Rex’s Telekinesis seized the loose formations of domain light, compressing them into superheated projectiles.

He launched them with the force of railgun slugs. They struck Apollo’s center mass with wet, concussive impacts that should have shattered his ribcage, but the projectiles simply dissipated against the crimson aura, rocking Apollo half a step before he steadied.

Rex pivoted, his eyes glowing with lethal intent.

’Gravity: Forty Gs.’

’Focused Cone.’

"Down," Rex hissed.

The localized gravitational well slammed into Apollo like an invisible hammer, driving him to one knee with enough force to crack the domain’s foundation.

For exactly one and a half seconds, Apollo was pinned, his knees grinding into the violet stone. But then, the red gold energy began to writhe.

Like liquid fire climbing a mountain, the energy surged up the gravitational gradient, defying the crushing weight, and forced Apollo back to his feet. He stood unbowed, his breathing steady despite the impossible pressure.

Desperate, Rex pivoted to a more fundamental attack. He tapped into an original elemental frequency, the same destructive vibration that had annihilated three stacked barrier workings earlier that night.

He channeled it into a concentrated beam of pure molecular disruption.

VROOOOOM ZAP!

The beam washed over Apollo’s torso, searing a path of charred flesh across his chest. But before Rex could even finish the mental incantation to follow up, the wound closed.

The flesh knitted together, the charred edges reforming into smooth skin in a heartbeat.

Apollo took a step forward, the air around him distorting from the sheer intensity of his presence. When he spoke, the dual registers of his voice created a dissonant chord that vibrated in Rex’s very teeth.

"That doesn’t work anymore," Apollo said.

There was something profoundly wrong about hearing such a simple observation delivered with that inhuman cadence. "Whatever you built to get around defenses, it was built to get around defenses."

"This is different, Rex."

Apollo’s eyes burned brighter, the crimson cores expanding until they seemed to swallow his irises.

"This isn’t a defense," Apollo growled, his fist clenching as sparks of red gold energy arced between his fingers. "There’s nothing here for you to get around..."

"There’s only what I can break."

Rex stood his ground, blood dripping from his shattered forearm, his breath coming in measured gasps. He felt the irritation of being outmaneuvered, but beneath that, beneath the adrenaline and the pain, there was something else: a deep, intoxicating fascination.

Apollo wasn’t just fighting him; he was rewriting the rules of engagement in real time.