Chapter 1042. I Got Slow-Mo’d, Time-Stopped, and Ribcage-Cracked Before Breakfast

Chapter 1042: 1042. I Got Slow-Mo’d, Time-Stopped, and Ribcage-Cracked Before Breakfast

Theo’s expression fractured. For a heartbeat, the hollow void in his eyes flickered with something dangerously close to terror—the raw, primal recognition that the physics of his reality had just been rewritten without his permission.

"I read it," Rex said, stepping forward into the amber glow.

His voice was unnervingly calm, cutting through the oppressive silence of the frozen city like a scalpel. "The divine signature."

"The specific harmonic frequency of the temporal domain’s authority invested in a mortal vessel... I can see the way your soul bleeds gold."

Rex studied Theo with the flat, patient attention of a scholar examining a rare specimen. There was no malice in his gaze, no righteous fury, only a terrifyingly detached curiosity.

"I have been waiting for Kaeleth to make this move since I became aware of his operation... I simply did not predict he would choose you as his scalpel."

"Does it matter?" Theo spat.

The words were wet, choked by the grief that still sat like lead in his lungs. "Does it matter who gave me the power to erase you?"

"Yes," Rex said, tilting his head. "It matters significantly."

"Because you are not Kaeleth’s Apostle in the conventional sense."

"An Apostle is a chosen partner; an instrument is something owned, something used until it breaks."

"There is a fundamental difference in how the power responds to your will, and that difference is what will determine how this ends."

Theo didn’t answer with words. His right hand rose again, but this time the energy wasn’t just a blunt force; it was a shimmering distortion in the air.

Through [Divine Perception], Rex saw the mechanism engage. This wasn’t the absolute cessation of the Time Stop; this was something more insidious.

A temporal deceleration is a field designed to drag the target’s subjective experience through molasses, reducing their reaction time to near zero while leaving them conscious enough to feel every second of their own helplessness.

The working struck Rex like an invisible wave of viscous liquid.

For seven tenths of a second, Rex’s world turned to sludge. He felt his own synapses fire with agonizing slowness, his limbs feeling as though they were encased in cooling concrete.

His heart beat once, a thunderous, delayed sound that seemed to take an eternity to complete.

But in that same span, [Full Potential Adaptation] was screaming through his nervous system. It seized the temporal distortion, dissected its mathematical framework, and rewrote Rex’s cellular resistance in real time.

By the eighth tenth of a second, the sludge evaporated. Rex’s movement snapped back to full velocity as if the universe had suddenly remembered he existed.

Rex looked at Theo.

The boy stood frozen mid-gesture, his face twisted in a mask of horrified confusion. He had thrown what should have been an inescapable prison, only to watch Rex walk through it as if it were nothing more than morning mist.

"The Time Stop worked on the first contact," Rex said, his voice carrying across the cobblestones with deadly clarity. "The Slow worked on the first contact."

"The mathematical certainty of your designation means that everything you possess will work perfectly exactly once."

Rex’s eyes darkened, locking onto Theo’s with the inevitability of a guillotine blade. "You have one of each... And you’ve already spent them."

"AAAAAAAGGHH!"

The scream that tore from Theo’s throat wasn’t a battle cry. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated psychological collapse.

It was the sound of a dam breaking the uncontrolled release of three years of grief, loss, and humiliation that had been held at bay by nothing but sheer, brittle willpower. The dam had failed, and the flood was consuming him.

Theo lunged. He abandoned all technique, all finesse, and all restraint.

He came at Rex with both hands blazing with amber gold light, his entire body transformed into a living weapon of temporal fury. He wasn’t fighting a man anymore; he was trying to murder a concept.

Rex didn’t retreat. He didn’t dodge.

[Martial Arts Mastery] took control. As Theo’s first strike screamed toward his skull, Rex’s hand shot upward.

There was no wasted motion, no hesitation. His fingers closed around Theo’s wrist with the crushing precision of a hydraulic vice.

The sound of Theo’s bones groaning under the sudden pressure echoed off the silent buildings.

Rex didn’t just stop the blow; he seized the momentum.

With a fluid, violent twist of his hips, Rex pivoted. He used Theo’s own desperate, overextended force against him, converting the boy’s divine acceleration into a devastating leverage point.

"Too much force," Rex whispered.

In the microsecond before Theo’s body could react, Rex’s free hand slammed into the ground. [Earthen Authority] responded instantly to Rex’s command.

The cobblestones erupted, stone grinding against stone as the earth itself rose to meet the threat. A wall of hypercompressed granite shot upward from the street’s substrate.

Theo’s own momentum, redirected by Rex’s grip, carried him past Rex’s shoulder and directly into the rising monolith.

CRACK.

The sound of Theo’s ribs shattering against the stone wall was wet and sickening, followed immediately by the dull thud of his body collapsing against the unforgiving mass.

Theo didn’t fall. He didn’t even stagger. The recovery enhancement of the temporal designation is a backup feature that quickly brings a vessel back to the correct time after it has been used forcefully.

His body jerked away from the stone wall with a supernatural spring, his bones snapping back into place with audible clicks.

Before Rex could even finish processing the speed of that recovery, Theo was already airborne again, a golden blur of renewed fury.

’Second contact: Physical enhancement.’

Rex’s mind catalogued the incoming threat. The [Full Potential Adaptation] roared to life, weaving a protective lattice of reinforced cellular density around Rex’s organs and bones.

The blow landed a thunderous crack that would have liquefied a normal man’s ribcage, but Rex simply absorbed the shockwave, his body vibrating like a struck tuning fork.

’Third contact: Temporal acceleration.’

This was different. Theo wasn’t just moving fast; he was forcing his own personal timeline to accelerate, creating a localized pocket of hyper speed.

He was moving faster than the universe around him was permitted to move.

Rex made a conscious, calculated decision. He didn’t dodge and he didn’t counter.

He stood his ground and allowed the third contact with the temporal acceleration to wash over him. He needed to feel the exact interface where Theo’s accelerated timeline scraped against the world’s standard rate.

He needed the raw data on the friction.

’There.’

Rex felt it: a nauseating, reality-warping shear. For a fraction of a second, his body felt like it was being pulled apart by two different speeds of existence.

But the [Full Potential Adaptation] was faster. It didn’t just resist the acceleration; it seized it.

It mapped the frequency of Theo’s hyperspeed and integrated it into Rex’s own neurological pathways.

Before Theo’s accelerated strike could even complete its arc, Rex was already moving at Theo’s exact rate. The gap between them closed in a heartbeat.

Rex struck.

It wasn’t a flurry. It was a single, devastatingly precise application of force.

[Martial Arts Mastery] identified the exact anatomical weakness in Theo’s current posture: the vulnerable hinge where his accelerated momentum met his weakened center of gravity.

Because Rex had already integrated the physical enhancement parameters from the first two contacts, his fist carried the same divine weight as Theo’s own.

The impact sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a wet sack of concrete.

Theo’s body was launched backward. He flew through the air, a broken streak of gold, and slammed into the Earthen Authority construct Rex had raised earlier.

But the construct wasn’t passive. Rex commanded the stone to tighten, the earth itself lashing out with telekinetic force to pin Theo against the granite face.

Theo was trapped. His limbs were splayed, his chest pressed painfully against the cold stone, held there by a crushing pressure that made every breath a desperate struggle.

Blood leaked from his nose and mouth, dripping down his chin to stain the amber glow of his aura. His breathing was ragged, wet gasps that echoed off the silent walls of the district.

Through the haze of pain and the ringing in his ears, Theo lifted his head. His eyes, bloodshot and wild, found Rex’s.

Rex stood a few paces away, unruffled, the monster who had just dissected a god’s gift with clinical indifference. The silence between them was heavier than the stone pinning Theo to the wall.

"Where did you find Kaeleth?" Rex asked. His voice was quiet, almost conversational, which made the question feel like a death sentence.

Theo’s expression shuttered. The raw vulnerability of the moment retreated behind a wall of defensive numbness.

"He found me," he rasped, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips.

"At the cliff," Rex said.

A statement of fact. A confirmation of a pattern.

Theo’s face flickered. For the first time since the beginning of this nightmare, the flat, hollow emptiness cracked.

A flash of something—recognition, pain, perhaps even a sliver of shame—rippled across his features before he could suppress it.

"Yes," Theo whispered.

"He gave you the designation at the cliff," Rex said, his eyes narrowing as he read the confirmation written in the boy’s dilated pupils.

"Yes," Theo said.