Chapter 1186. There’s Never A Silent Death Other Than A Torturing Death

Chapter 1186: 1186. There’s Never A Silent Death Other Than A Torturing Death

The silence that followed was not peaceful; it was a vacuum, heavy with the copper tang of blood and the acrid stench of burnt divine energy. Rex stood there, motionless, studying Apollo’s ruined, broken expression.

The man was a wreck of shattered bone and punctured organs, yet his eyes remained stubbornly fixed, refusing to cloud with the shame of defeat.

Rex felt something uncomfortable stirring beneath his own calculated detachment. It was an unspoken acknowledgment of the sheer, pathological stubbornness of a man who had lost every tangible thing—his power, his body, his future—and still refused to surrender the one thing. Rex couldn’t touch the core of his soul.

"That’s the part I’ll actually miss," Rex said quietly, almost to himself.

His voice lacked its usual mocking edge; it sounded almost hollow. "Not the friendship..."

"The conviction underneath it... It’s rare, Apollo."

"It’s the only thing about you I never managed to fake for myself."

But as Rex watched Apollo’s steady breathing, something twisted in his mind. That conviction, that quiet, dignified acceptance of death, irritated him.

It was a challenge. It was Apollo winning the only battle that mattered: the one for his own dignity.

Rex didn’t want a martyr. He didn’t want a saint to die with a smile on his bloodied face. He wanted to break the belief itself.

"But then again," Rex’s voice shifted, the warmth evaporating instantly, replaced by something glacial and cruel. "Dignity is such a fragile thing, isn’t it?"

Rex rose to his feet slowly, his shadow stretching over Apollo like a shroud. The violet-black aura around him flared, not in a burst of power, but in a slow, undulating wave of malice.

He didn’t raise his hand to deliver a killing blow. Instead, he reached down and grabbed Apollo by his matted hair, yanking his head back with a brutal JERK to force him to look up.

"Let’s see how long that faith lasts when your body stops belonging to you," Rex hissed.

He didn’t use magic yet. He wanted the tactile reality of it.

Rex drove his knee into Apollo’s sternum with precise, controlled force.

CRUNCH.

The sound of cartilage tearing echoed in the silent domain. Apollo’s mouth opened in a silent scream, blood frothing between his teeth.

"Still believing, Apollo?" Rex whispered, leaning close enough that Apollo could see his own dying reflection in the black visor of the mask. "Still thinking there’s goodness in the universe?"

Rex’s hand moved with terrifying speed. He didn’t strike; he dug.

His fingers, reinforced by Telekinesis, pressed into the open wounds of Apollo’s ribs, twisting with deliberate, agonizing slowness.

SQUELCH.

Apollo’s body convulsed, his back arching off the ground in an involuntary spasm of agony. A wet, choking sound tore from his throat—a sound that wasn’t quite a scream but something far more primal and broken.

’Break the spirit,’ Rex thought, his own inner monologue running cold and clinical as he watched the light in Apollo’s eyes flicker. ’Kill the conviction first. Then kill the man.’

Rex raised his other hand, and the air around Apollo’s legs began to hum with Gravity Manipulation. "I’m going to make you beg for the Goddess to take you, Apollo..."

"I’m going to make you curse her name."

The gravity intensified in localized pockets, twisting Apollo’s already shattered limbs in directions no human joint should move.

SNAP. POP. CRACK.

The sound of Apollo’s femur grinding against itself filled the space. Rex watched with predatory fascination, waiting for the moment when that steady gaze would finally shatter into pleading eyes.

Rex wasn’t satisfied with physical agony. Physical pain was finite; it could be endured through sheer willpower.

But psychological annihilation? That was eternal.

He wanted to reach into the very fabric of Apollo’s memory and tear it apart, strand by strand, until there was nothing left of the man but a hollowed-out shell of shame and grief.

"You think your martyrdom makes you special?" Rex’s voice was a venomous murmur. "You think your suffering sanctifies you?"

Rex’s free hand began to glow with a sickly, chronal gold light, the unmistakable hue of his Time Manipulation. But he wasn’t using it to slow his own movements or accelerate his strikes.

He was weaving something far more insidious. He began to tear at the air itself, ripping open microscopic fissures in reality.

SHHHHH TICK!

The sound of reality tearing was like glass breaking underwater. These weren’t random rifts; they were temporal wounds, bleeding fragments of Apollo’s most sacred memories.

But Rex was corrupting them as they emerged, forcing the past to bend to his sadistic will.

"Look at them, Apollo," Rex commanded, his voice echoing as if from multiple directions at once. "Look at what your ’goodness’ has failed to protect."

Around the kneeling, broken Apollo, the air began to fracture into a kaleidoscope of torment. One rift opened to his left: Talyra.

Apollo’s eyes widened in horror as he saw a memory of her but not as she was. In this temporal distortion, she was draped across a throne of shadow, her eyes glazed with ecstasy as Rex took her with a primal, unholy hunger.

The sound of her moans, distorted and amplified by the rift, tore through Apollo’s mind like a blade.

"NO—!" Apollo gasped, a wet cough spraying blood.

SHHH TICK!

Another rift tore open above them.

Aisella.

The memory played out in high definition the way her body arched, the way she begged for Rex to never stop, and her devotion twisted into a perverse, carnal worship that Apollo had never imagined possible.

"STOP IT!" Apollo shrieked, his voice cracking, his hands clawing weakly at the air as if he could physically push the images away.

Rex didn’t stop. He accelerated.

The rifts multiplied, forming a ring of psychic devastation around the dying Apostle. Nerith appeared in one, her regal composure shattered as she surrendered to Rex’s dominance with a ferocity that defied her nature.

Mireya appeared in another, her lips parted in a breathless surrender that made Apollo feel as if his own heart were being flayed alive.

But the killing blow came from the largest rift, one that opened directly in front of Apollo’s face.

It was Amelia. His mother.

The memory was vivid, cruel, and undeniable. The darkness was claiming the woman who had raised him with tales of light and virtue.

Rex’s hands were all over her, and she wasn’t fighting. She was enjoying it. Her face reflected a pleasure so profound it felt like a betrayal of everything Apollo believed in.

"AAAAAGH!!" Apollo’s scream was no longer human.

It was the sound of a soul being eviscerated. He began to thrash, his broken body convulsing as he tried to escape the visions, but Rex’s Gravity Manipulation kept him pinned, forcing his eyes to stay open, forcing him to witness every obscene detail.

Rex stepped into the center of the ring of rifts, the chronal energy swirling around him like a storm. "See how they respond to real power, Apollo?"

"Not your empty promises, not your platitudes... They crave the truth... They crave me."

Rex grabbed Apollo’s chin again, forcing him to look at the image of Amelia, whose eyes in the rift seemed to meet Apollo’s in a mocking smile.

"Your mother, your friends, your lovers... they didn’t want a savior, Apollo," Rex whispered, his breath hot against Apollo’s ear. "They wanted a master."

Rex’s fist connected with Apollo’s stomach, the blow amplified by a burst of temporal energy that made the impact feel as though it had happened a thousand times over in a single second.

WHAM THUD.

Apollo’s lungs seized; he couldn’t even draw air to scream. He could only gurgle, tears mixing with the blood streaming down his face, as the fractured images of his loved ones being taken by Rex circled him like vultures.

"Does it hurt more than the broken bones, Apollo?" Rex asked, his voice dripping with sadistic satisfaction. "Does the truth hurt worse than the pain?"