Chapter 1194. You Almost Became More Than a Disappointment

Chapter 1194: 1194. You Almost Became More Than a Disappointment

Something in that exchange—the clinical, detached insult to his training—struck a nerve deeper than his grief. It pierced through the static of his rage and touched something colder: his pride.

Elliot didn’t scream this time. He didn’t roar.

Instead, he did something far more terrifying. He stopped.

He planted his feet with a deliberate, bone-deep solidity. He drew a ragged breath that whistled painfully through his split lip and bloodied teeth.

In that moment of stillness, the wild, supernova-like bloom of white light around his body began to collapse inward. It stopped flickering erratically and started to compress, spinning tighter and tighter around his limbs until it looked like molten diamond rather than fire.

The air around him stopped hissing and began to hum with a deadly, focused frequency.

HUMMMMMMMMM.

When he moved again, it wasn’t the desperate lunge of a grieving boy; it was the calculated strike of a predator.

He moved with the precise, lethal rhythm his instructors had spent years carving into his muscle memory. Weight shifted seamlessly from heel to ball of foot. His hips rotated with mechanical perfection.

He threw a low, testing jab not to kill, but to measure the distance, and the strike snapped out like a whip.

Xerollion noticed the shift immediately. The small, almost imperceptible tilt of his masked head was the only outward sign that the game had changed.

For the first time since the slaughter began, Xerollion actually engaged his feet, sliding half a step to the left with liquid grace as Elliot’s jab hissed past his jaw.

But the follow-up was already there. A cross came faster than the jab, aimed to catch Xerollion while his center of gravity was still adjusting.

Xerollion didn’t dodge this time; he braced, catching the blow against his forearm with a wet THWACK. The force was so concentrated that the impact drove a faint, smoking groove into the stone beneath Xerollion’s boots.

"There it is," Xerollion said.

His voice remained calm, but there was something almost approving buried beneath the surface—the interest of a scientist seeing a specimen finally show its true nature. "That is the fighter your family paid good coin to build."

"Hold on to that discipline for just a moment longer, and this conversation might last a few minutes more."

Elliot didn’t grant him the satisfaction of an answer. He became a storm of controlled violence.

He pressed the advantage with terrifying fluidity. He chained a vicious low kick aimed at Xerollion’s knee into a rising elbow that aimed for the mask, followed immediately by a compressed palm strike aimed directly at the sternum.

Each motion flowed into the next with zero telegraphing, no wasted energy, and no screams of rage, just pure, lethal execution.

WHAM. CRACK. THUD.

For three full, heart-stopping exchanges, the dynamic shifted. Xerollion was no longer simply watching a performance; he was actively defending against a threat.

A palm strike that he had to redirect with force rather than ignore; a knee that he actually had to block with his forearm rather than simply sidestep; a feint that forced him to commit his weight.

By any honest measure of combat, it was the finest sequence Elliot had ever produced, the culmination of years of sweat, blood, and discipline, weaponized by the desperate need to kill.

’I can do this,’ Elliot thought, his mind racing with cold calculation. ’I can find the opening...’

’I can break him... For Apollo... For everything...’

But it lasted for exactly as long as his composure could hold.

The discipline was a dam, and the grief was the ocean pressing against it. The moment Apollo’s blood-soaked face surfaced behind his eyes again, the image of that severed head rolling across the stone, the dam didn’t just leak; it shattered.

The cold calculation evaporated, replaced instantly by the screaming, white-hot agony of loss. The discipline cracked straight down the middle, and the rage came flooding back in to fill the void like molten lead.

His next strike, a powerful hook that should have been devastating, was thrown with too much shoulder and too much emotion.

It was sloppy, and it was telegraphed like it was exactly the kind of predictable, emotional attack Xerollion had been reading since the first second of the fight.

Xerollion didn’t even need to use Foresight this time. He simply stepped inside the arc of the swing, his movement so economical it seemed to defy the chaos surrounding them.

"Unfortunate," Xerollion said.

The approval was gone.

The interest had vanished.

His voice returned to that flat, soul-crushing assessment that made Elliot feel smaller than the dust beneath their feet. "You almost had something there..."

"You almost became more than a disappointment."

Xerollion didn’t escalate. He didn’t need to.

He simply began to answer with measured, surgical strikes of his own. These weren’t the city-leveling blows he had unleashed against Apollo; these were the precise applications of force required to dismantle a human body.

He was beginning the slow, methodical work of grinding down a young man who had never once, in his entire life, faced anything that did not eventually yield to enough determination.

The first strike came like a lightning bolt. A straight punch caught Elliot across the jaw with a wet CRACK.

Elliot’s head snapped sideways with such violence that his neck vertebrae groaned under the strain, sending a crimson spray of saliva and blood across the scorched stone floor. Before Elliot could even register the pain, Xerollion was already in motion.

A follow-up roundhouse kick buried itself deep into Elliot’s solar plexus.

THUD.

The air exploded out of Elliot’s lungs in a pained wheeze. He doubled over, his body convulsing as he staggered backward several steps.

He came up coughing thick, metallic ropes of blood spattering his chin, but his eyes remained twin suns of hatred. Without a single second of hesitation, without even pausing to catch his breath, he threw himself back into the inferno.

Elliot’s desperation manifested as a wild, haymaker swing. It was pure fury, uncalculated and raw.

It caught nothing but empty air. Xerollion didn’t hesitate; he exploited the opening instantly. He stepped inside the arc of the swing and drove a short, brutal elbow directly into Elliot’s left shoulder.

POP CRUNCH.

The sound was the unmistakable noise of a joint being forced from its socket. Elliot screamed through clenched teeth, a sound that was half agony, half defiance.

He staggered sideways, his left arm suddenly hanging useless at his side, the limb twitching involuntarily. Yet, he kept his footing.

He stayed upright purely through a stubbornness so profound it bordered on insanity. His right arm kept rising anyway.

A moment later, he threw another punch using that same ruined left arm. He either forgot or simply refused to acknowledge that the shoulder was shattered.

The strike arrived half a second slower and considerably weaker than it should have been.

Xerollion didn’t even move his feet. He simply reached out and caught the fist in his open palm.

The impact was pathetic compared to the earlier exchanges.

"That arm doesn’t function anymore," Xerollion said.

His voice was intimate, almost conversational, as he held the fist still without any visible effort. "You felt it separate..."

"I watched you feel it. The nerves screamed, didn’t they?"

"I DON’T CARE!" Elliot roared, his voice cracking. "I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE PAIN! JUST DIE!"

Xerollion released the fist rather than breaking it further, stepping back with fluid grace to let Elliot collapse into a defensive stance that was now fundamentally broken, a stance that no longer had two working arms to hold it.

Desperation drove Elliot to one final, suicidal gambit. A spinning hook kick came next, thrown from his good leg with every remaining shred of strength in his body.

Xerollion ducked under it entirely, the wind of the kick rustling his hair as it passed overhead. As Elliot overextended, Xerollion drove a palm strike into Elliot’s exposed chest with the force of a battering ram.

CRACK SHATTER.

Elliot was launched backward, skidding across the debris-strewn floor until he slammed into a collapsed section of a support column. The impact was catastrophic.

His ribs cracked audibly, splintering against the stone. His breath left him in one long, involuntary gasp that sounded more like a death rattle.

For several agonizing seconds, he simply lay there in the dust, staring up at the cracked, uncaring ceiling, blood pooling beneath his head.

’Move,’ his mind screamed. ’Move or you’re dead.’

’Move or Apollo dies for nothing.’

With a wet, grinding sound of bone against bone, he forced himself back onto unsteady, shaking legs.

"You cannot beat me with rage alone," Xerollion said.

He moved with terrifying calm, sliding beneath a white-hot slash that Elliot had launched from his bare knuckles—a desperate, improvised technique born of pure instinct that Elliot would likely never be able to replicate.

"Anger makes the attack stronger, yes."

"But it also makes the mind loud... And a loud mind is a predictable one."