Chapter 1190. Your Numbers Won’t Accomplish What a God-Touched Hero Could Not

Chapter 1190: 1190. Your Numbers Won’t Accomplish What a God-Touched Hero Could Not

On the opposite side of the corridor, among the ranks of the Underlayer, the atmosphere was starkly different. There was no horror here, no paralyzed disbelief.

Instead, there was something far more unsettling: satisfaction.

Cassandra Vexmoor stood with her arms crossed, her pale features illuminated by the intermittent violet flickers of the dying corridor.

Beside her, Gorvasha Bloodtusk let out a low, rumbling sound that might have been a chuckle if the situation weren’t so grim. Their expressions were open, undisguised displays of triumph.

They watched the culmination of months of infiltration, manipulation, and bloodshed unfold exactly as their architect had promised. Neither spoke.

Words would have only cheapened the moment. The silence between them carried the quiet, predatory pride of soldiers watching a grand campaign reach the precise, bloody conclusion their master had designed.

DRIP. DRIP. DRIP.

The corridor was filled with a silence so absolute it felt physical, a weight pressing down on the lungs of every living being present.

The only sounds that dared to puncture it were the scattered, broken sobs of the wounded and the low, ragged breathing of thousands of soldiers who no longer knew whether they were witnessing a battle or a public execution.

Somewhere in the shattered wreckage of the Aethelgard formation, a young soldier began to weep openly, a high, keening sound of pure terror, and no one moved to comfort him. No one even dared to ask him to stop.

Xerollion, sensing the moment had reached its peak of psychological torment, moved with terrifying deliberation. His free hand reached up, fingers tangling roughly into Apollo’s matted, blood-soaked hair.

With a brutal jerk that forced Apollo’s neck to crack audibly, CRACK, he lifted the hero’s head. He forced the ruined, barely conscious face upward, positioning it like a grotesque offering so that both armies could see the extent of the devastation.

When Xerollion spoke, he didn’t shout. He didn’t need to.

His voice carried across the entire length of the corridor with a cold, commanding clarity that seemed to vibrate through the very marrow of every soul present.

"Look at him," Xerollion commanded, the words dripping with venomous contempt. "Look closely at your hero."

"Look at the golden paragon of your faith... The one you trusted to shield you from the dark..."

"The one you believed would carry Aethelgard to salvation this day..."

He paused, letting the silence stretch like a tightening noose. His violet black eyes, cold and unblinking behind the mask, swept slowly across the frozen ranks of Aethelgard’s soldiers.

He drank in their reaction: the way their eyes flinched away from Apollo’s mangled features, the way their knuckles whitened on their sword hilts, and the visible tremors of terror that rippled through the formation like wind through dead grass.

He fed on their despair.

"You came down here believing you carried justice in your hands," Xerollion continued, his voice growing harder, each syllable cutting deeper than any blade. "You believed you could descend into our domain and punish the Underlayer for sins you imagined we committed."

"You came with the bloated, rotting arrogance of conquerors, never once stopping to ask yourselves the only question that mattered..."

He leaned forward slightly, the shadow of his mask falling over Apollo’s unconscious face.

"...whether you were actually prepared for what truly waits for you beneath the foundations of your own city."

Xerollion raised Apollo’s shattered frame higher, muscles in his arm coiling with effortless strength as he displayed the full, gruesome extent of the devastation to every witness gathered in that corridor.

He turned slowly in place, performing a methodical and deliberate rotation to ensure that no section of the assembled armies, on either side, could later claim they had not witnessed the truth with their own eyes.

The light from the dying corridor glinted off the wet blood coating Apollo’s exposed ribs and the twisted metal of his broken armor.

"This is the result of your arrogance," Xerollion declared.

His voice began to climb, gaining volume and power, echoing off the ancient stone walls with such force that the corridor itself seemed to shrink, the ceiling pressing down under the psychological weight of his words. "Your Apostle of Life, Aethelgard’s last hope, the beacon of your salvation is nothing more than a broken toy to me."

A wet SQUELCH sounded as Apollo’s head lolled to the side, his jaw hanging at an unnatural angle.

"I did not need my army to do this," Xerollion continued, his gloved hand tightening around Apollo’s hair until the scalp audibly stretched. "I did not need the corridor, or the trap, or any of the thousand advantages this ground has given me today."

"I did this alone, with my own two hands, while your finest soldiers stood four hundred meters away, watching the light in the sky and praying, praying that it meant something other than what it truly meant."

He leaned forward, his masked visage casting a shadow that seemed to swallow the light. "And if this is what your strongest can suffer, if this is the limit of your divine protection, then I want every one of you to imagine to truly feel in your bones exactly what waits for the rest of you."

The effect was catastrophic. A wave of raw, unadulterated terror rippled through the Aethelgard ranks like a plague.

The formation didn’t just waver; it began to dissolve. Soldiers began edging backward instinctively, their boots scuffing against the stone in a desperate attempt to create distance between themselves and the monster.

Field commanders, men who had survived countless siege battles, exchanged panicked, hollow glances, their hands frozen on their sword hilts, their minds screaming that there was no tactical solution for what they were seeing.

In the third rank, the sharp CLATTER of a young soldier’s spear hitting the floor rang out like a death knell. Nobody moved to retrieve it. Nobody dared to breathe.

"This isn’t finished!"

A captain near the front, one of the few officers who had maintained his composure through the entire duel, his armor still relatively intact, stepped forward on legs that visibly shook.

He raised his voice in a desperate attempt to reclaim authority, though it cracked halfway through the sentence, betraying his terror. "We still outnumber you three to one!"

"We still have our formation! We can still—"

"Can you?"

Xerollion turned his masked face toward the man with unhurried, terrifying interest. He didn’t move to attack; he simply observed, as though genuinely curious about the captain’s delusions rather than threatened by the interruption.

The silence that followed was heavier than before, more intimate, more deadly.

"Your Apostle of Life just spent the better part of an hour trying to erase me from existence," Xerollion said, his voice dropping to a conversational whisper that somehow reached every ear in the corridor. "He fought with a portion of his goddess flowing directly through his veins, a power that should have incinerated anything in its path."

"And he failed... He fucking broke."

Xerollion took a single step toward the captain, the violet energy at his feet pulsing like a heartbeat.

VROOOOM.

"Tell me honestly, Captain," Xerollion asked, tilting his head with a predator’s curiosity. "With all that righteous fury and those three to one odds... what exactly do you believe your numbers are going to accomplish that a god-touched hero could not?"