Chapter 1044. He Told His Grandmother to Shut Up, I Just Lay Down

Chapter 1044: 1044. He Told His Grandmother to Shut Up, I Just Lay Down

Theo hadn’t remained broken. As reality rushed back in, the temporal designation’s recovery enhancement had kicked into a desperate, automated overdrive.

It didn’t heal him; it simply forcibly reanimated his systems, stitching together failing nerve clusters and forcing blood through depleted veins just enough to grant him basic mobility.

He had dragged himself up from the base of the construct, his movements jerky and unnatural, like a marionette being pulled by invisible, cruel strings.

Now, he hovered approximately thirty meters above the street. He possessed no wings, no true flight; he was simply suspended there by the residual temporal enhancement, the designation anchoring his personal timeline to a fixed point in space to prevent him from plummeting to his death.

He looked like a fallen angel bleeding out in midair.

His right hand was pressed against his skull as if trying to hold his thoughts inside his head. His left hand covered his right eye, fingers splayed to catch the crimson stream flowing from the gash above his brow.

The blood was warm and thick, tracing a wet, grotesque path down his cheek, dripping off his chin in rhythmic splatters that seemed to echo in the sudden silence of the street.

He was breathing. But it wasn’t the breath of a living boy; it was the wet, rattling gasp of a survivor who had fought his way through hell only to find nothing waiting for him on the other side.

Each inhale was a struggle, each exhale a shudder that rocked his entire frame.

"Theo."

Morwenna’s voice cut through the ambient noise of the awakening city. It wasn’t the voice of the Nightwing matriarch, the cold, untouchable authority that commanded respect and fear.

This was something else. It was a voice stripped of formality, ancient and raw, carrying the weight of decades of shared history.

It was the register reserved for those who had seen the child before they saw the weapon.

"Theo," she said again, her voice cracking with a vulnerability that seemed almost painful to witness. "What have you done?"

The question hung between them, more devastating than any physical blow Rex had landed. It wasn’t just a question about the broken walls or the cratered Academy building; it was a question about his soul.

Theo looked down at her. His gaze was unfocused, glassy with pain and something far more dangerous: resignation.

In that moment, his entire identity—the anger, the power, the desperate need to prove himself—collapsed. He had entered this confrontation in a state of absolute nihilism, believing that he had nothing left to lose.

But he had been mistaken. He discovered, with the brutal clarity of a blade to the throat, that he did have something to lose: the memory of the woman looking up at him.

He had lost the one tether that connected him to his own humanity.

He squeezed his right eye shut against the blood, the motion sending fresh crimson streaming through his fingers. He couldn’t look at her.

He couldn’t bear to see his own failure reflected in the eyes of the only person who remembered who he used to be.

He said nothing. The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the wet, irregular sound of his failing breath.

"Theo."

Morwenna’s voice shifted. The vulnerability that had momentarily cracked her composure vanished, replaced instantly by something far more dangerous: the razor-edged sharpness of a matriarch whose fear had curdled into rage.

It was the register of a woman who used anger as armor, a familiar, practiced weapon she wielded whenever the world threatened to unravel beneath her feet.

"Answer me!" she demanded, each word striking like a whipcrack. "What did you do?!"

"Why is the Academy’s teaching hall cratered?!"

"Why is the Nightwing wall shattered like it was struck by siege engines?!"

"And what in God’s name are those marks on your skin?" She gestured violently toward the raw, bleeding lacerations and the unnatural pallor of his exhaustion. "Look at me, Theo!"

Theo didn’t look at her. Not at first.

His gaze drifted upward, staring into the empty blue of the morning sky as if searching for a crack in reality where he might slip through and disappear. When his eyes finally descended to meet Morwenna’s, they were cold.

Dead.

"Shut up."

The words didn’t just carry sound; they carried consequences. They landed in the center of the street with the devastating weight of a sacrilege.

For three heartbeats, the entire world seemed to hold its breath. The pedestrians, the construction crews, and Valentina and Morwenna—everyone present— froze, processing the impossible: Theo Morr Nightwing had just spoken to Morwenna Nightwing with the casual venom of a stranger.

The hierarchy of the household hadn’t just been challenged; it had been incinerated.

Rex watched the tableau unfold with detached, analytical precision. His [Divine Perception] mapped the micro expressions spreading across Morwenna’s face: the flash of genuine shock, the whitening of her knuckles, and the way her pupils dilated as her fury mounted.

He looked up at Theo, suspended thirty meters above them, a broken god bleeding out against a backdrop of divine failure. The temporal designation was sputtering now, its energy depleted, barely maintaining the boy’s altitude and forcing his body through a grotesque, automated healing process that looked more like torture than recovery.

Rex felt the adrenaline fading, leaving behind a bone-deep ache and the strange, hollow calm that follows a catastrophe. He decided he had done enough standing for one day.

With deliberate, unhurried movements, Rex lowered himself to the asphalt. He lay down on his back in the middle of the street, staring straight up at the clouds, as if the carnage behind him was nothing more than background noise.

"Good morning," he said.

His voice was flat, eerily even the tone of a man who had just survived a hurricane and decided that the best course of action was to take a nap.

Valentina’s head snapped toward him, her eyes narrowing with lethal suspicion. Morwenna’s fury momentarily wavered as she turned to glare at the boy lying insolently on the ground.

Rex didn’t blink. He kept his eyes fixed on the sky.

"Someone with a new Apostle designation arrived approximately seven minutes ago," he stated, narrating the event like a clinical report.

"They attempted to address certain... specific concerns they had regarding my continued existence." He paused, letting the implication of the near-death struggle hang in the air. "The attempt was not successful."

"The individual in question is currently hovering directly above us."

He shifted his head slightly, looking at Valentina and Morwenna from his horizontal position on the pavement, his expression one of mild, almost bored amusement.

"If I were you," Rex added, his voice carrying a note of genuine warning beneath the nonchalance, "you might want to start a conversation with him that doesn’t involve him telling you to shut up."

"He isn’t exactly in the right state of mind for pleasantries."