Chapter 1175. I Offered Myself as a Sacrificial Lamb to My Own Curiosity

Chapter 1175: 1175. I Offered Myself as a Sacrificial Lamb to My Own Curiosity

The beating that followed was not a fight; it was a systematic dismantling. For five agonizing minutes, Rex Rexilion endured a level of one-sided, relentless violence that he hadn’t experienced since the moment his own heart had stopped beating during his first death.

The world became nothing but a strobe light of crimson pain and the wet, nauseating sounds of impact.

Apollo had abandoned all pretense of martial arts. The Academy training, the measured breathing, and the tactical positioning it had all evaporated, consumed by a furnace of pure, unadulterated rage.

He wasn’t fighting Rex anymore; he was simply erasing him. His fists descended in an unbroken, mechanical rhythm, each strike carrying the weight of a collapsing star.

THUD CRUNCH.

THUD CRUNCH.

THUD CRUNCH.

Every time Apollo’s fist connected, Rex’s body was hammered into the domain floor like a spike being driven into wood.

The fractures spread outward in overlapping, spiderweb patterns across a fifty-meter radius. Whole sections of the pulsing violet surface began to flicker and die, the domain’s magical integrity hemorrhaging as Apollo’s power tore holes in the fabric of reality itself.

Blood was no longer something Rex coughed up; it was something he wore. It flowed freely from a shattered nose, leaked from his parted lips, and poured from a ragged gash above his left eye that refused to seal.

For the first time in two lifetimes, Infinite Regeneration, the absolute constant of Rex’s existence, was visibly failing to keep pace.

The wounds were being opened faster than the cellular knitting could close them. His body was a roadmap of fresh trauma, a mosaic of purple bruises, blackened burns, and split flesh.

After the first minute, a horrific new cadence emerged. It wasn’t the frenzy of a berserker; it was the methodical rhythm of an executioner.

Apollo would seize Rex by the collar of his coat, yank his broken form upright, and unleash four or five devastating blows to his face in rapid succession.

CRACK SPLASH.

Then, with contemptuous strength, Apollo would hurl him. Rex would become a ragdoll, hurtling through the air to crash into the darkness beyond the immediate circle of light.

But before Rex could even stagger to his hands and knees, coughing up chunks of lung tissue and saliva, Apollo would already be there.

The red gold energy wasn’t just powering his strikes; it was propelling him across the distance in instantaneous, blurring leaps that defied Rex’s ability to track.

Rex couldn’t commit to a full read he couldn’t afford to because by the time his brain processed Apollo’s trajectory, the fist was already connecting.

The domain itself seemed to recoil from the violence. Each iteration of the cycle left behind another patch of dead floor, a silent, dark crater where the violet pulse had been permanently extinguished.

SHRAKK BOOM!

In one particularly brutal moment, Apollo grabbed Rex with both hands, interlacing his fingers like a guillotine, and drove him downward with terrifying force.

Rex didn’t just hit the floor; he was buried a full meter deep into the stone.

Silence fell over the crater for a heartbeat, broken only by the ragged, wet gasps of the two combatants.

Apollo stood over the hole, his chest heaving, his entire body wreathed in a corona of murderous light. Steam rose from his skin where the heat of his power met the cooling air.

With a snarl of disgust, he reached down, fist clenching into Rex’s hair, and violently hauled him back up to eye level.

Rex’s head lolled back, his face a mask of crimson gore, his eyes half-lidded and unfocused.

"Say something else," Apollo hissed, his voice cracking with the strain of his fury.

The dual registers sounded like grinding metal. "You’ve had a great deal to say for the last hour..."

"You’ve mocked me, analyzed me, dissected me!"

"Say something now, Rex!"

"Say something while you still have a tongue!"

Rex’s throat worked convulsively as he swallowed a mouthful of blood. A slow, terrifyingly calm smile spread across his ruined features.

Even with his skull fractured and his ribs grinding against one another, the defiance in his eyes remained unquenchable.

"Your left hook drops," Rex croaked, blood streaming down his chin in a steady rivulet.

He didn’t flinch from Apollo’s grip; instead, he leaned closer, his grin widening. "You’re carrying your weight too far forward on it."

"You’re overcompensating for the burn."

Rex’s eyes gleamed with a manic, predatory intelligence. "If I were actually trying, Apollo... if I stopped playing with you..."

"I would have taken your arm off at the shoulder four exchanges ago."

Apollo didn’t answer with words. He answered with the wet, grinding crunch of bone meeting divine fury.

His fist connected squarely with Rex’s jaw, the impact so violent that the mandible shattered into three distinct pieces before Rex’s head could even snap sideways.

CRUNCH SQUELCH.

But instead of a scream of agony, there came something far more unsettling: a laugh. It was a wet, broken sound—the noise of air escaping through shattered bone and blood-filled lungs.

Rex laughed through the fracture, the sound echoing unnaturally in the dying domain. His Infinite Regeneration struggled to compensate, the magical knitting process stuttering as it attempted to repair the jawbone while Rex’s own muscles were still spasming in the throes of a hysterical mirth.

It took nearly six agonizing seconds for the bone to reestablish its structure around the continuing laughter.

Deep within the neural pathways of his consciousness, Rex’s analytical mind remained terrifyingly detached. Somewhere around the third minute of this relentless torment, he had performed a genuine assessment.

He wasn’t calculating his chances of winning; he was calculating the limits of his own existence.

’Interesting,’ Rex thought, his inner monologue cool and clinical even as his vision swam in crimson. ’If this escalation continues... if his output scales exponentially with his rage, there is a non-zero probability that he will eventually produce enough destructive energy to vaporize my cellular structure faster than Infinite Regeneration can rebuild it.’

’He could literally outpace my immortality.

It was a slim probability. A sliver of mathematical doubt.

But it was not zero.

That number, that terrifying, beautiful number, was something he hadn’t seen attached to his own survival since the day he had purchased Avatar Creation.

The novelty of true mortality was almost... pleasant. It made the pain feel real. It made the fight feel like it mattered.

So, he let the beating continue. He offered himself up as a sacrificial lamb to his own curiosity.

THUD. CRACK. SPLAT.

Every impact was not merely trauma; it was data. Every broken rib, every ruptured organ, and every scorched patch of flesh fed his Adaptation ability.

He was touching a mechanism that defied every known taxonomy of magic in the world. He was sampling the divine.

[Analysis windows: 7 seconds... 5 seconds... 4.2 seconds...]

He could feel the coverage building. The system was no longer just reacting to individual strikes; it was beginning to map the underlying grammar of Apollo’s transformed state.

He was learning the language of a god through the medium of his own agony. Another four or five minutes of this, another few dozen shattered bones and hemorrhaged organs, and he would own it.

He would walk out of this collapsing hellscape with a capability the Apostle of Life had invented, only to have Rex steal it permanently.

’That is worth a broken face,’ Rex thought as his vision flickered. ’It is worth a dozen broken faces.’

’Give me more.’

Then came the final stretch. The descent into true hell.

Apollo stopped throwing him, and the distance was gone. The rage had become too focused, too intimate.

Now, Apollo held him. One fist was locked like a vise into the front of Rex’s coat, anchoring him in place, while the other fist became a piston of pure destruction.

WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.

The sound filled the failing domain with a terrible, steady regularity. The empty space around them no longer absorbed the noise; the acoustics of the crumbling reality seemed to amplify every wet slap of flesh and every splintering crack of bone.

Rex’s head became a pendulum of pain, snapping back with each impact only to be hurled forward again to meet the next one. His healing was failing catastrophically; his features were no longer fully reassembling before the next strike tore them apart again.

He was caught in a perpetual cycle of being destroyed and partially rebuilt, a marionette of meat and bone.

SHLICK.

Somewhere in the chaos, his left eye socket collapsed. The orb ruptured, vision plunging into darkness on one side.

For two seconds, there was only blackness.

Then, the regeneration dragged the eye back into alignment.

CRUNCH.

Then came the worst of it. His left cheekbone and orbital bone both disintegrated under a concentrated burst of divine pressure.

For nine agonizing seconds, there was simply a gaping hole in the side of his face, a raw crater of exposed muscle and teeth where his skeletal structure should have been.

Nine seconds—the longest single interval Infinite Regeneration had ever failed to close a wound.

In those nine seconds of raw, exposed vulnerability, Rex didn’t scream. He didn’t beg.

Even as his brain teetered on the edge of shock, and even as the blood loss threatened to drag him into the abyss, he kept talking.

Between the blows, through the blood and the broken bone, the mockery remained.