Chapter 1176. I Wasn’t Being Beaten, I Was Being Worshipped by My Own Design

Chapter 1176: 1176. I Wasn’t Being Beaten, I Was Being Worshipped by My Own Design

Rex’s words came out as a wet, gurgling slurry, his tongue struggling to navigate a mouth that had become a ruined landscape of torn flesh and shattered enamel.

Yet, despite the agony, despite the way his brain screamed at him to shut up and die, he pushed forward. He wanted to twist the knife in Apollo’s psyche as deeply as Apollo was twisting the knife in his body.

"You know what I like about this?" Rex wheezed.

The words were punctuated by crimson bubbles escaping his lips. "It’s... it’s the first honest thing you’ve done all year."

WHAM.

Apollo’s fist connected with Rex’s sternum, the shockwave so immense that the energy rippled through the domain floor like a physical wave, spiderwebbing a section of stone forty meters away.

CRACK THOOM.

Rex’s lungs seized, air whistling through a punctured pleura, but he forced the next words out. "Everything else you do... you do because you think you’re supposed to."

"The heroics. The martyrdom. Protecting the city. Leading the network. Standing up in front of four thousand people and telling them they’re fighting for something noble."

Rex coughed, and a molar clattered onto the cracked floor, spinning like a die before coming to rest in a pool of blood. Before the tooth had even stopped bouncing, Rex felt the sickening, itchy pressure of the replacement already pushing through his bleeding gums.

"This is the first time... I’ve seen you do something... because you actually want to."

Apollo’s entire body stiffened. The red gold corona around him flared with such intensity that the air itself seemed to combust.

He stopped mid-strike, holding Rex aloft by the ruined collar of his coat. His breathing wasn’t labored anymore; it was steady, cold, and terrifying.

"Don’t," Apollo said.

His voice had dropped to a quiet, hollow register that was infinitely worse than his earlier screaming. It was the sound of a man who had moved past anger into something far more dangerous: absolute conviction.

"Don’t tell me what I want."

"But it’s true." Rex’s grin returned.

It was a grotesque sight, a mask of gore stretched over a skull that was barely holding together, but the mockery in those bloodshot eyes was unmistakable. "You’ve spent your whole life carrying a role like it was armor, Apollo..."

"You wore that morality like a cage, and you never once asked whether the person underneath actually agreed with it."

Rex leaned into the fist that was pressed against his throat, savoring the burn. "And now?"

"Now you’re finally, genuinely doing what you want instead of what a ’good man’ would do."

"And the only reason you finally found yourself is because I took everything else out of your way."

Rex let out a laugh. It was a wet, rattling sound that tore at his throat, each syllable sending fresh waves of agony through his shattered ribcage.

"You should thank me... Honestly... I gave you the first authentic moment of your entire life."

For three seconds, there was absolute silence. Then, the dam broke.

"DO YOU THINK I’M AFRAID TO KILL YOU?" Apollo roared.

His voice had completely transformed. The human timbre was gone, replaced entirely by that terrifying, doubled dark register, a sound that resonated not in the ears but in the marrow of the bones.

It was the sound of something ancient and merciless.

SHLICK CRUNCH! SHLICK CRUNCH! SHLICK CRUNCH!

Apollo grabbed Rex by the front of his coat with one hand, yanking him off the ground so his toes scraped uselessly against the debris, and unleashed hell with the other.

Each strike was a piston of divine wrath, each fist wreathed in that unstable, crimson gold energy that burned as it broke. He wasn’t just hitting Rex; he was trying to pulverize him out of existence.

BOOM. CRUNCH. SPLAT.

Blood sprayed across Apollo’s face, painting his divine features in a macabre crimson. The impacts were so fast they became a continuous, wet percussion that drowned out the crumbling sounds of the domain.

"I AM GOING TO TEAR EVERY INCH OF YOU APART!" Apollo screamed, each word punctuated by a blow that could have leveled a fortress. "I WILL TEAR YOU DOWN UNTIL THERE ISN’T ENOUGH LEFT FOR ANYTHING TO REGENERATE!"

"I WILL LEAVE NOTHING BUT DUST AND MEMORY!"

Rex laughed. It was a sound that defied biology: a wet, bubbling gurgle that erupted from a chest cavity filled with blood and lungs that felt like they were being shredded by broken glass.

His face was a grotesque ruin. The left side of his skull was a sagging crater where the cheekbone had been pulverized, the bone fragments struggling to knit back together beneath a flap of torn muscle.

His left eye was a swollen, purple slit, half buried behind a ridge of inflamed tissue. Yet, through the carnage, he grinned a wide, crimson smile that stretched the raw edges of his wounds.

He looked less like a man and more like a demon that had been torn apart only to find the experience amusing.

WHAM. CRACK. SPLAT.

The onslaught continued, each of Apollo’s strikes carrying the force of a meteor impact. But Rex was not fighting back.

Not even close.

In the cold, silent sanctum of his mind, Rex watched the data streams. He could have ended this farce in seconds. If he unleashed even a fraction of his true potential, the fight would have been over before Apollo could blink.

Gravity Manipulation, applied with ruthless precision, would have increased the pressure on Apollo’s body by a hundredfold, crushing him into a flat smear of divine flesh against the domain floor.

The Temporal Authority embedded in his soul register could have frozen time itself, suspending Apollo in a static moment of rage while Rex calmly dismantled him piece by piece.

But he held back. He restrained the god-slaying power coiled in his veins for two distinct, equally selfish reasons.

First, there was the tactical necessity. His Adaptation ability was screaming with hunger.

Every time Apollo’s red gold fist connected, every time that alien, divine energy burned through his flesh, Rex’s system ingested the data. His analytical windows were closing faster and faster, and the comprehension was nearly complete.

He needed the contact. He needed the pain.

He needed to experience the full spectrum of Apollo’s wrath to truly own it. He wanted that coverage more than he wanted his own safety.

Second, there was something darker. Something more primal.

For eighteen months, Rex had been an architect of destruction. He had meticulously studied Apollo, learned his triggers, mapped his morality, and systematically dismantled every pillar of his identity.

He had built this rage with more patience and care than he had put into any other project in either of his lives. He had cultivated this hatred like a gardener tends to a poisonous flower.

And now, sitting in the middle of the storm he had created, he felt an enormous, uncomplicated pleasure. Being on the receiving end of Apollo’s murderous fury was the ultimate validation.

The rage pouring out of Apollo was the proof that Rex’s work had been flawless. He wasn’t just being beaten; he was being worshipped by the very hatred he had engineered.

CRUNCH. 𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂

Apollo’s fist buried itself into Rex’s ribs, sending fresh sprays of arterial blood across the violet floor. Rex’s body convulsed, but his eyes remained locked on Apollo’s, bright with a terrifying, lucid satisfaction.

"You can’t kill me," Rex said.

The words were mangled, forced through a mouth that was more wound than flesh, each syllable accompanied by a spray of crimson. His voice was hoarse, wrecked by the blood filling his throat, but the conviction behind it was absolute.

It was the voice of something that had moved beyond the concept of death.

"No matter how hard you try, Apollo," Rex continued, his laughter breaking through the blood again, wet and mocking. "No matter how many bones you shatter... no matter how much of me you spill across this floor... it won’t matter."

He leaned forward as much as his broken body would allow, his bloodied face inches from Apollo’s divine fury.

"I can’t die," Rex whispered through the gore, his grin widening impossibly. "Not anymore..."

"Not the way you’re thinking about it..."

"You’re trying to kill a man, Apollo... but you’re only breaking a vessel."