Chapter 1180. For the First Time, I Felt the Current Pulling at My Ankles

Chapter 1180: 1180. For the First Time, I Felt the Current Pulling at My Ankles

Apollo didn’t throw him with the practiced technique of a warrior; he discarded him like refuse. His fingers uncurled, releasing Rex’s mangled frame.

Rex’s body hit the cracked violet floor with a sickening, wet thud, the sound of shattered ribs grinding against stone and organs shifting uncomfortably in a ruined cavity.

Apollo stepped back. His chest heaved in ragged, violent spasms, but the tears had dried.

The raw, bleeding wound of his grief had cauterized itself in real time, leaving behind something far more terrifying: a cold, calcified resolve. The expression on his face had ceased to be human; the sorrow had been hollowed out, replaced by a terrifying, focused emptiness.

The energy surrounding him began to warp. The loose, blazing red gold aura that had been flaring outward like a dying sun began to retract.

It didn’t fade; it condensed. The light pulled inward, clinging to his skin like molten metal, forming a second skin of pressurized divinity that hummed with a low, subsonic frequency that made the very air vibrate.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.

"You said I was only the protagonist of a story that was never mine," Apollo said.

His voice had changed. The tremor was gone, replaced by a resonance so deep it felt as though it were vibrating through Rex’s own shattered bones.

The divine timbre beneath his words thickened, layered like ancient stone. "Fine... Then let me write the ending to yours."

The light began to climb.

This was not the warm, life-giving radiance of his earlier spells. That golden glow had been a gift, a tool of creation and protection.

What was manifesting now was different. It was purer.

It was colder. It was a bleached, terrifying white gold that seemed to suck the color out of the surrounding domain.

Rex, lying in the pooling crimson of his own blood, felt something he hadn’t experienced in decades: a lurch of genuine, visceral concern. His analytical mind, the one that had catalogued every limit of Apollo’s power, began to scream warnings.

’Impossible,’ Rex thought, his inner monologue fractured by the pain of a punctured lung. ’The four-minute ceiling...’

’The mana burn... The inevitable collapse of the mortal vessel...’

’He always hits the wall... He always breaks before the power does...’

But the wall was gone.

The four-minute limit that governed every version of Apollo’s power Rex had ever studied—every skirmish, every duel, and every catastrophic display—simply ceased to exist.

There was no countdown ticking down in the back of Apollo’s mind. There was no warning shiver of magical exhaustion.

Instead, there was only an open channel. A direct, unregulated torrent of power flowing from somewhere far beyond the celestial heavens, beyond mortal designation, pouring through Apollo’s body like water through a dam that had been completely demolished.

The light wasn’t just surrounding him now; it was consuming him, burning through his flesh and spirit without any apparent limit on duration, transforming the man into something that could only be described as a walking apocalypse.

"What... what are you doing?" Rex wheezed, a crimson bubble of blood popping on his lips as he stared up at the silhouette of a god.

Apollo didn’t answer with words. He simply raised his hand, and the space between them began to scream.

Somewhere beyond sound and physical vibration, Rex Rexilion sensed physical vibration; Rex Rexilion felt it as an adjustment in the fundamental pressure of reality. It wasn’t the arrival of a presence; it was the sudden, terrifying shift in the atmosphere that precedes a cataclysmic storm.

The air didn’t just feel heavier; it felt occupied.

With the cold, razor-sharp clarity that only surfaced when death was no longer a threat but an immediate certainty, Rex understood.

This was not the Goddess of Life acting as a passive observer, granting Apollo a trickle of healing light as she had earlier. This was different.

This was the Goddess choosing. She was deliberately, with full awareness of the mortal cost, authorizing a portion of her own divine essence to flood through a vessel she had judged worth the catastrophic risk.

’Fuck,’ Rex thought, the word echoing like a death knell in the private chambers of his mind. This isn’t an extension of his power. ’This is her touching the world.’

A distant, almost abstract realization flickered through his pain-addled consciousness. For months, following Lustia’s cautious counsel, he had treated the upper tiers of the divine framework as abstract threat variables to be managed and categories to be studied from a safe remove.

He had treated them like weather patterns. He had not understood, until this exact heartbeat, what it actually felt like to have one of those tiers lean down and press a single finger directly onto the scale of his existence.

The sensation was like standing at the edge of an abyss and feeling, for the first time, not just the drop, but an actual, crushing current pulling at your ankles, threatening to drag you into something endless.

Inside his mind, his Divine Perception screamed as it strained against the incoming tide.

[WARNING: SENSORY OVERLOAD]

[SOURCE: GODDESS OF LIFE DIRECT CHANNEL ESTABLISHED]

[DURATION: INDETERMINATE]

[MAGNITUDE: EXCEEDS INSTRUMENT CEILING ERROR: DATA NON-QUANTIFIABLE]

Lying in the gore-soaked wreckage of his own body, feeling the wet squelch of his punctured lung with every labored breath, Rex felt something he hadn’t experienced since the dawn of his second life: a small, icy thread of genuine alarm threading through his calculations.

This wasn’t an Apostle drawing on granted authority. This was a direct conduit.

There was no ceiling to locate, no magical clock counting down toward a merciful exhaustion. There was only an open tap, a celestial floodgate held open by a divine will that would keep flowing for exactly as long as she chose to let it.

[INITIATING: FULL POTENTIAL ADAPTATION]

The system roared to life but immediately struck resistance unlike anything in its recorded history.

[ERROR: ADAPTATION PROTOCOL STALLED]

[REASON: LOGIC INSTABILITY DETECTED]

The mechanism refused to resolve. Every previous opponent Rex had ever faced, from Kaeleth’s seventeen shifting temporal variations to Apollo’s own earlier red gold states, had possessed edges.

They had shapes, patterns, and limits that could be mapped, dissected, and eventually covered.

This thing had no edges.

It was a shapeshifter of pure causality. One moment, the pressure expressed itself as raw, overwhelming physical force that threatened to crush Rex’s bones into powder; the next, it shifted into something that pressed directly against his soul register, a metaphysical weight that made his very essence feel like it was being flayed.

Then, it would pivot again, becoming a pure disruption of reality itself, a chaotic energy that operated by no law of physics or magic that Rex could isolate.

The analysis window, which had been compressed to a desperate four seconds during the earlier brutality of their clash, suddenly stretched ten seconds, fifteen seconds, twenty, then snapped back to zero.

The system was caught in an endless loop, attempting to begin its work from nothing each time Apollo’s power mutated into a new form of divinity.

Rex watched through blood-blurred vision as Apollo stood up. The man was gone.

What remained was a silhouette carved out of white gold annihilation, a walking violation of every natural law Rex knew.

’Come on,’ Rex thought, his teeth grinding against the copper taste of his own blood as he braced his failing body. ’Show me your shape.’

’Let me see you...’

’Let me find the edge so I can cut through it.’