Chapter 1181. For the First Time, I Felt the Lag of My Own Immortality

Chapter 1181: 1181. For the First Time, I Felt the Lag of My Own Immortality

For the first time since he had awakened to this second life, for the first time since he had begun his climb through the ranks of gods and monsters, Rex Rexilion faced a problem he could not measure.

The variables were gone, and the math had failed. There was only the terrifying certainty of approaching annihilation.

Apollo moved.

It wasn’t a run; it was a displacement of reality. One moment he was twenty paces away, a pillar of blinding white gold light; the next, he was a streak of celestial fury that tore through the air with a sound like thunder cracking directly overhead.

BOOM CRACK.

The sheer displacement of air created a vacuum behind him, sucking loose debris and blood mist into his wake.

Rex’s mind screamed at him to move. His battered concentration, fraying like a rope under tension, scraped against the limits of his Foresight.

’Move... Now!’

Through a haze of agony and blood, Rex forced his shattered muscles to obey. He triggered what remained of his [Peak Superhuman Physique], attempting to twist his broken torso and roll away from the inevitable impact.

He could see the fist coming not as a limb, but as a comet of condensed divinity aimed directly at his center.

’Too slow... I’m too fucking slow...’

CRUNCH.

The impact was not just a sound; it was a seismic event. Apollo’s fist connected square with Rex’s abdomen.

The force didn’t just bruise; it reconfigured his biology. Rex felt his abdominal wall collapse inward with a wet, sickening squelch as his intestines, liver, and spleen were compressed into a single, traumatized mass of pulp.

His spine groaned under the sudden hydraulic pressure of the blow.

The force of the strike launched Rex off the ground like a projectile. He became a human bullet, tearing through three separate layers of the domain’s ambient light, each layer shattering like glass SHHHH RING! before he slammed into something solid at the far edge of the space.

A barrier of compressed reality, an invisible wall formed by the collapsing structure itself, caught him with the force of a meteor hitting a mountain.

Rex’s body crumpled against the barrier, his blood painting the invisible surface in a grotesque, spreading fan. His vision swam in crimson, and his lungs felt like they were filled with molten lead.

"You said nothing could kill you," Apollo’s voice descended upon him.

It was no longer human. It was a dual-toned roar, the voice of a man layered atop the terrifying, harmonic resonance of a goddess.

It sounded like two tectonic plates grinding together.

Apollo didn’t wait for Rex to breathe. He didn’t give him the mercy of a second of pain.

He was already moving again, a golden blur closing the distance before Rex’s body had even finished sliding down the barrier.

"Let’s find out how true that claim really is," Apollo hissed.

The assault began. It was a punishing, unrelenting combination that defied the laws of combat.

Apollo’s fist came first with a lightning-fast jab that shattered Rex’s left cheekbone with a wet snap, sending fragments of bone piercing through the skin. Before Rex could even register the pain, a follow-up hook caught him in the ribs. CRACK CRACK CRACK—the sound of multiple ribs splintering like dry kindling.

Each strike was delivered with zero recovery time. Apollo was a machine of divine retribution.

A knee to the sternum that forced the remaining air from Rex’s lungs in a spray of blood; an elbow to the temple that sent stars exploding across Rex’s vision; a palm strike to the chest that felt like being hit by a runaway freight train.

’I can’t... adapt...’ Rex’s inner monologue was drowning in the static of pain. ’Every time I try to map the rhythm, the power shifts.’

’It’s not a combo... it’s a continuous avalanche.’

Blood sprayed from Rex’s mouth with every impact, each blow sending fresh arterial crimson across Apollo’s glowing form. Rex was trapped in a cycle of breaking and bleeding, a human punching bag caught between the earth and a god who had decided that mercy was no longer an option.

What followed stopped resembling a fight in any sense Rex Rexilion would have used the word. "Fight" implied two opposing forces, a contest of skill, a back and forth.

This was not a contest; it was a systematic dismantling. It was a slaughterhouse performance where the butcher had been granted the power of a creator.

Apollo did not pace himself. There was no reason to anymore.

The four-minute guillotine had been removed from his neck. There was no clock ticking toward exhaustion, no mana reserves he needed to husband for a potential escape, and no fear of his own body collapsing under the strain.

That absence of limitation manifested in every single strike. He didn’t swing; he detonated.

He didn’t punch; he erupted. The interval between blows shrank until the space between impacts became microscopic, leaving Rex trapped in a continuous, overlapping cascade of violence.

Rex’s mind raced, desperate, clawing for a solution. ’Telekinesis! Now!’

[ACTIVATE: KINETIC INTERCEPTION]

He threw every remaining ounce of his will into his telekinetic field, trying to create a buffer between himself and the golden comet that was Apollo.

But the system couldn’t keep up. He managed to catch maybe one strike in five, redirecting a fragment of the violet floor to intercept a fist or hastily compressing a barrier of air, but the other four landed clean through his defenses as if they weren’t even there.

CRACK THUD. CRACK THUD.

His body began to come apart in ways it had never come apart before. His biology was being asked to perform miracles just to stay in one piece.

A devastating hook caught Rex across his left flank. The force was so concentrated, so impossibly dense, that it exceeded the tensile strength of his skin and muscle entirely.

A section of his torso simply... tore away. Flesh split like overripe fruit under the pressure of Apollo’s divine weight, exposing raw, pulsing muscle and the wet glint of ribs.

[INFINITE REGENERATION: CRITICAL OVERLOAD]

[RECOVERY TIME: 3.8 SECONDS DELAYED BY CATASTROPHIC CELLULAR TRAUMA]

For the first time in his existence, Rex felt the terrifying lag of his own immortality. His regeneration, which had never once failed to seal a wound in less than a heartbeat, struggled to stitch the gaping wound closed while new trauma kept reopening it.

His right leg buckled with a sound like a tree trunk snapping KRA THOOM as a kick shattered his femur in two places. The bone began to knit back together with agonizing heat, but before the calcium could even fuse, Apollo’s boot came down again, breaking the newly formed bone in three different locations.

’Fuck... I can’t... I can’t find the rhythm...’ Rex’s consciousness flickered like a dying bulb. ’He’s not attacking me anymore.’

’He’s... he’s auditing my destruction.’

Through the haze of crimson pain and the metallic taste of blood filling his throat, Rex recognized something terrifying. The raw, screaming rage that had driven Apollo minutes ago was still there, burning like fuel, but underneath it, something far worse had taken over: a cold, surgical methodology.

Apollo was no longer a man drowning in grief; he had become an instrument of precise annihilation.

Every strike was deliberate. A fist to the sternum that didn’t just bruise but cracked the bone straight through, sending splinters inward toward his heart.

An open palm to the temple that rattled his skull with such frequency that his vision didn’t just blur; it shattered into kaleidoscopic fragments of light and shadow.

Then came the grip.

Apollo’s hand shot forward, seizing Rex by the throat. The fingers didn’t just squeeze; they invaded.

The divine pressure focused entirely on the delicate cartilage of Rex’s windpipe. Rex could hear the wet, grinding sound of his own larynx collapsing under fingers that no longer felt like they belonged to a healer.

They felt like heated iron pistons.

"Does it hurt, Rex?" Apollo asked, his voice a terrifying harmony of two souls screaming in unison.

His face was inches away, beautiful and horrific, glowing with a light that promised nothing but the end. "Does it feel like the story is finally ending?"

Rex tried to speak, tried to spit blood in defiance, but all that came out was a wet, gurgling wheeze as his throat gave way under the divine weight.