Chapter 1193. Like a Child Throwing Stones at a Mountain

Chapter 1193: 1193. Like a Child Throwing Stones at a Mountain

The corridor still reeked of scorched stone, ionized air, and the iron-sweet tang of blood, a smell that clung to the back of the throat like poison.

For a long moment after Apollo’s body finally settled into its grotesque stillness, the world seemed to have ceased to exist. Even the demons, creatures born of violence who had spent the last hour fighting for their very lives, stood frozen at the edges of the wreckage.

They were predators who had suddenly found themselves in the presence of something they didn’t understand: a silence that wasn’t peaceful but predatory, as if the very air were gathering itself for a second, a more devastating act.

Evelyn’s scream had already come and gone, a hoarse, broken sound that had drained the last of her strength. What remained was a silence so absolute it felt heavy, the kind of quiet that only follows something that has been irrevocably broken.

Then, Elliot moved.

He didn’t run; he ignited. He tore through the Underlayer’s stunned front ranks at a speed that defied physics, outstripping every display of agility he had shown during the earlier engagement.

Demon soldiers who would normally have intercepted any threat stood paralyzed, their instincts failing them as the white light wrapped around Elliot burned through the air.

FSHHHHHHH.

The heat was so intense that the stone beneath his boots cracked and spiderwebbed with every stride, scorching a path of molten glass through the center of the corridor.

He came to a halt directly in front of Xerollion. The proximity was suicidal.

The heat radiating off Elliot’s body was a physical wall, shimmering in waves that should have been unbearable even to the masked monster standing across from him.

Elliot’s face—the face that had always carried a spark of hope, a gentle smile, and a kindness—was gone. In its place was a mask of pure, undiluted hatred.

Tears cut hot, stinging tracks down cheeks flushed crimson with fury, his chest heaving as if his lungs were filled with liquid fire.

"YOU KILLED HIM!" Elliot screamed, his voice cracking like a whip. "YOU KILLED APOLLO!"

"YOU MONSTER...!"

"YOU FUCKING BASTARD!"

"HE WAS EVERYTHING TO US!"

His hands were shaking, not from terror, but from the sheer voltage of the power coursing through his veins. "MY FRIEND! MY BROTHER! HE GAVE EVERYTHING FOR AETHELGARD, AND YOU JUST TOOK IT!"

"YOU FUCKING TOOK IT LIKE IT MEANT NOTHING!"

Xerollion didn’t flinch. He didn’t even shift his stance.

His masked visage remained impassive, reflecting the white inferno of Elliot’s rage without being consumed by it.

"Yes," Xerollion answered.

His voice was terrifyingly calm, carrying not one trace of regret. It was the same level, almost conversational tone he had used when discussing tactics or weather.

"And now I imagine you intend to try avenging him."

The casual cruelty of the response was the final spark in the powder keg.

"AVENGING HIM...? I’M NOT JUST GOING TO AVENGE HIM!" Elliot’s roar was deafening, a sound that seemed to shake the very foundations of Aethelgard and Underlayer itself.

The white light around him surged upward in jagged, violent pillars, climbing brighter and brighter until it was blinding. Soldiers thirty meters back had to shield their eyes, their boots scraping backward in instinctive retreat from the supernova forming in the corridor.

"I AM GOING TO ERASE YOU FROM EXISTENCE!" Elliot screamed, his voice ascending into something inhuman, something primal. "I AM GOING TO TEAR YOUR SOUL APART PIECE BY PIECE!"

"I AM GOING TO BURN EVERY SHRED OF YOUR BEING UNTIL THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LEFT BUT ASH AND MEMORY!"

"I WILL DESTROY YOU, XEROLLION! I WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU ARE! "

The light became a solid wall of radiance, the air screaming as it was superheated. Elliot’s eyes were no longer human; they were twin suns of incandescent rage, focused entirely on the man who had stolen the light from their world.

Elliot exploded forward. This wasn’t a duel; it was an assassination attempt born of pure, unadulterated hatred.

He channeled every ounce of his grief, every fragment of his shattered hope, into the fundamental mechanics of his power. The white light didn’t just coat his skin anymore; it screamed, vibrating with such high frequency that the air itself began to superheat and hiss around him.

FSHHHHHHH.

He unleashed the full devastating output of Heroic Strike. It was, without question, the most violent display of raw power witnessed during the entire siege.

His fist, encased in a corona of incandescent white flame, tore through the air. The sheer displacement of oxygen created a sonic crack BOOM as he closed the distance.

The strike was aimed square at Xerollion’s sternum, carrying enough compressed kinetic energy to shatter a fortress gate. The launch was so violent that the stone floor beneath Elliot’s rear foot didn’t just crack; it exploded in a spray of granite shrapnel.

Xerollion didn’t move with panic. He moved with the terrifying economy of a god.

With a micro adjustment that seemed almost lazy, he tilted his torso mere inches to the left. The fist whizzed past his ribs, close enough that the heat singed the fabric of his clothes.

Unable to check its momentum, the punch continued its devastating trajectory, burying itself into a massive support column fifty feet down the corridor.

CRUNCH SHATTER.

The column didn’t just break; it disintegrated. The impact shook the foundation, causing half the ceiling to buckle and rain down in a deadly cascade of broken rock and choking dust.

Inside the cold, analytical void of Xerollion’s mind, a flicker of data passed.

[Heroic Strike: catalogued.]

[Light-based physical amplification. No divine signature detected. No further analysis required.]

"An impressive amount of force for anger in a being so freshly born," Xerollion said.

His voice emerged from behind the mask as calm as a scholar discussing a weather pattern. He didn’t even seem winded by the displaced air.

"Unfortunately, little Starlight... raw emotion is a poor substitute for precision."

"It isn’t going to be enough."

Elliot didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

His lungs were burning; his mind was a white-hot furnace of vengeance. He wasn’t concerned about precision.

He wasn’t concerned about technique.

He cared about the sound of Xerollion’s bones breaking.

He attacked again immediately.

Then again.

And again.

It became a relentless, terrifying sequence of violence. Punches, elbows, and knees—each strike driven by a primal rage that bypassed every shred of discipline his instructors had spent years drilling into his bones.

Every time a blow missed or connected with the stone floor, the entire corridor shuddered as if an earthquake were passing through.

THUD. CRACK. WHAM.

But to Xerollion, it was like watching a child throw stones at a mountain. Through the combined haze of his Foresight and absolute Martial Arts Mastery, he saw the attacks before they were even conceived in Elliot’s desperate mind.

He saw the electrical impulses in Elliot’s muscles; he saw the trajectory of the fury. He moved through the storm of white light like a ghost, turning aside strikes with casual deflections that felt deeply, personally insulting.

A wild, desperate overhand swing left Elliot’s ribs exposed for a heartbeat, a fatal opening. Xerollion could have driven a blade through his chest.

Instead, he simply stepped back, letting the sheer momentum of Elliot’s own rage carry the boy two full steps past him.

Elliot spun around, his boots skidding on the debris, and threw a rapid-fire combination of three strikes that possessed genuine technical merit buried somewhere beneath the screaming emotion, but they met nothing but empty air.

Xerollion was already gone, repositioning with fluid grace before each fist could find purchase.

"You were trained well," Xerollion observed, his voice cutting through the sounds of grinding stone.

He ducked beneath a roundhouse kick that would have decapitated any other living being in existence. "I can see the Academy’s foundation underneath all of this."

"The footwork is solid, the weight distribution is correct, but it’s a shame that you’re overshadowing it with so much noise."

The implication stung worse than any physical blow: that Elliot’s grief was making him weak. That his love for Apollo was a flaw in his combat equation.

"SHUT UP!" Elliot spat.

The words were punctuated by a spray of crimson. His lip had split during the last failed impact, and blood ran down his chin, hot and metallic.

"SHUT UP AND FIGHT ME, YOU COWARDLY BASTARD!"

His eyes burned with a light that was no longer heroic. It was the light of a dying star, desperate to take everything down with it.