Chapter 1041. He Broke My Jaw, I Broke His Whole Worldview, We’re Even (For Now)

Chapter 1041: 1041. He Broke My Jaw, I Broke His Whole Worldview, We’re Even (For Now)

Rex said nothing. His silence was not a refusal to answer but a predator’s assessment, a cold, analytical void that mirrored the emptiness in Theo’s eyes.

He watched the boy, not as a person, but as a phenomenon of collapsing grief and rising divinity.

"You did not even try to hide it," Theo said. The words were clipped and precise. "That is the part that I kept thinking about."

"You weren’t careful... You didn’t pretend to be anything other than what you are."

"You just walked into every corner of my life, and you dismantled it."

"You did it in front of me, and you did it without even bothering to look at me the way you don’t look at furniture when you’re rearranging a room."

Theo’s voice remained terrifyingly level. There was no tremor of rage, no crack of sorrow.

It was the flat, mechanical delivery of a man who had rehearsed his eulogy and his revenge until they became indistinguishable.

"You are a reincarnator," Theo said, the accusation hanging in the frozen air like poison gas. "You have a system."

"You have a patron... You have been operating in this world with every advantage a god touched interloper could dream of."

"And yet, you still felt the need to take mine."

Rex’s gaze remained fixed, unblinking. His mind was already running tactical simulations, calculating the energy output of the amber gold aura pulsing around Theo.

"I know what you’re thinking," Theo continued, taking another step.

The shattered cobblestones crunched beneath his boot with a sound like breaking teeth. "You’re thinking that I’m about to say something that confirms your worldview."

"That I’m the pathetic loser who blames the victor."

"That this entire performance is just my pride refusing to accept defeat."

Theo stopped. He looked at Rex with an expression of absolute, horrifying certainty.

"I am not performing," Theo said, and for the first time, a sliver of something sharp cut through the emptiness—a razor-edged clarity. "I genuinely have nothing left."

"That is the specific state I am operating from. Not anger. Not pride. Nothing!"

"And from nothing, I am going to do the one thing I have not done yet."

Theo’s right hand rose.

Through [Divine Perception], Rex saw it: the temporal designation on Theo’s soul wasn’t just active; it was hemorrhaging power.

The amber gold sigil burned with a blinding, unstable intensity, the divine authority flooding into Theo’s bloodstream like molten sunlight. The boy wasn’t just using power; he was becoming a conduit for a temporal catastrophe.

"I am going to kill you."

The declaration wasn’t a threat; it was a statement of fact.

Theo moved.

He didn’t run; he simply ceased to be thirty meters away and became present in Rex’s space. The temporal designation’s enhancement turned his movement into a blur that defied the frozen physics of the city.

He crossed the distance in less than a second, a golden streak of inevitability.

Rex’s mind screamed for him to move, to dodge, to pivot, but the calculation was incomplete. The strike was too fast, too absolute.

’Absorb.’

Rex’s instinct took over. He didn’t try to escape the impact; he braced for it, channeling his own internal energy to meet the blow.

The fist connected with Rex’s jaw with the force of a falling star.

It wasn’t just a punch; it was a temporal violation delivered through physical mass. The divine amplification didn’t just multiply Theo’s strength; it compressed the moment of impact into an infinitely dense point of force.

Rex felt his jawbone shriek as the pressure threatened to splinter it into powder. His teeth grated together with a wet, grinding sound, blood immediately flooding his mouth as his inner cheek split open like overripe fruit.

The force sent Rex hurtling backward.

He became a human projectile, tearing through the frozen air. He cleared twenty meters of street in a heartbeat, his body a blur of motion as he crashed into the Nightwing household’s outer wall.

The impact was catastrophic. The ancient stone wall didn’t just absorb the blow; it screamed.

A thunderous crack reverberated through the silent district as the wall’s structural integrity failed, sending a spiderweb of deep, jagged fissures racing upward from the impact point toward the crenellated edge.

Dust and ancient mortar exploded from the wound in the stone like shrapnel.

Rex slumped at the base of the wall, the world spinning behind a crimson veil. His breathing was ragged, each inhale tasting of copper and grit.

His jaw throbbed with a white-hot agony that demanded his attention, and blood trickled down his chin, staining his collar.

Slowly, deliberately, Rex pushed himself up.

His muscles burned, his vision flickered, but he sat up against the cracked stone, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes, cold and lethal, locked back onto the golden figure approaching through the haze of dust.

Rex tilted his head back slightly, studying the spiderweb of destruction above him. The crack in the Nightwing wall was deep, a jagged wound in the ancient masonry that wept stone dust like dried blood.

The impact had been more than physical; it had been a statement of intent written in broken granite.

His gaze drifted past the ruined wall, scanning the silent corpse of Aethelgard. The city remained trapped in its amber prison.

A pigeon hung suspended three feet above a rooftop, its wings frozen in a desperate attempt at flight. A fountain’s spray was a sculpture of motionless crystal.

The reconstruction crews stood like monuments to a forgotten civilization. Only two heartbeats disturbed the stillness: his own ragged breathing and the approaching storm that was Theo Morr Nightwing.

Rex reached up, his fingers brushing along his jawline. The skin was swollen, hot, and slick with blood.

Inside his mouth, the metallic tang of copper was overwhelming, and he could feel the grinding discomfort of teeth that had been forced together with enough pressure to shatter steel.

’First contact complete,’ Rex thought, his mind operating with the cold detachment of a surgeon. ’The temporal designation didn’t just hit harder; it compressed the moment of impact to maximize kinetic transfer.’

’The enhancement is a function of divine authority channeled through cellular mass.’

A faint, almost imperceptible hum resonated in his bones, the sound of [Full Potential Adaptation] finishing its work.

The system had already dissected the punch. It had mapped the temporal signature, understood the acceleration curve, and integrated the countermeasure.

The next time that fist connected, it wouldn’t be a violation; it would be a collision between two equal forces.

Rex pushed himself upright. His joints popped audibly in the dead silence.

He stood fully, tall and unbowed, despite the crimson smear running down his chin and the way his jaw throbbed with each heartbeat.

Thirty meters away, Theo had stopped.

The boy’s face had shifted. The hollow emptiness was still there, but it was now layered with something else: a flicker of genuine, startled recognition.

He looked like a child who had thrown a stone at a statue only to watch the statue stand up and turn its head.

Rex ignored the pain. He reached down and casually brushed the dust and stone fragments from his jacket with slow, deliberate motions.

He wasn’t preparing for a fight; he was preparing for an experiment.

His eyes locked onto Theo’s across the wasteland of frozen time. Rex felt that familiar, clinical spark in his chest—the specific intellectual curiosity that surfaced whenever reality failed to follow his calculations.

A variable had appeared. The model needed to be updated.

"You came back," Rex said.

His voice was rough and gravelly from the blood in his throat, but it carried no anger. No accusation.

Just the flat statement of an observer noting a phenomenon.

"Yes," Theo replied.

The word was short, but the flat delivery he had maintained during his monologue had fractured. There was a crack in his certainty, a minute tremor of something that sounded suspiciously like disbelief.

He had expected a corpse; he had found a survivor.

Rex took a half step forward, the broken cobblestones grinding beneath his boot. "You have a temporal designation."

Theo’s jaw tightened, his amber gold aura flaring brighter, casting hellish shadows across the street. "Yes."

"From Kaeleth," Rex said.

The name hung between them like a blade.