Chapter 1195. How Does the Meat Continue to Move When the Spirit Has Been Incinerated

Chapter 1195: 1195. How Does the Meat Continue to Move When the Spirit Has Been Incinerated

Elliot kept coming. He was no longer a soldier; he was a walking wound, a creature of pure, stubborn refusal.

But the arithmetic of the fight was cruel, and the damage was accumulating on his side of the exchange with devastating speed.

When he tried to throw a desperate jab, Xerollion parried at an unnatural angle, twisting Elliot’s wrist mid-strike.

CRACK.

The joint twisted wrong, the tendons straining to their breaking point before the wrist visibly swelled into a purple, throbbing mass.

When Xerollion followed with a sweeping kick that caught Elliot’s support leg, Elliot’s knee slammed into the unforgiving stone floor with a wet THUD CRUNCH.

The impact should have shattered the patella, sending lightning bolts of agony up his thigh that would have paralyzed any normal man.

Yet, he got up. Every single time.

Each time he rose, he looked less human and more like a vengeful specter, driven by the phantom image of Apollo’s face that burned behind his eyelids, a memory so vivid it acted as both a fuel and a curse.

’I can’t fall,’ Elliot’s mind screamed through the haze of pain. ’If I fall, he’s gone forever.’

’If I stop, Apollo dies twice...’

’Breathe... Just fucking breathe...’

Somewhere in the middle of that relentless punishment, amidst the taste of copper and the grinding of bone, Elliot found something else. A final, desperate reservoir of spirit that didn’t come from training or discipline but from the raw, bleeding core of his soul.

He staggered back several paces, putting distance between himself and Xerollion for the first time since the slaughter began. His breathing was ragged, each inhale a wet rattle in his chest.

He planted his feet wide, ignoring the way his left shoulder screamed in protest.

Slowly, deliberately, he began to gather every scrap of Heroic Strike’s remaining output. The white light around his fists didn’t just glow; it condensed.

It became a dense, terrifying corona of pressurized energy, so bright it cast sharp, jagged shadows across the wrecked corridor.

HUMMMMMMMMM.

The soldiers in the distance instinctively recoiled. They didn’t need orders; they could feel the atmospheric pressure shifting, sensing a cataclysm gathering in the hands of a dying boy.

"Absolute Blow," Elliot rasped.

His voice was thick, muffled by a mouth full of blood and broken teeth. The technique was a legend among his class, something he had trained for two years and had failed to execute during a sparring match that had left him humiliated.

But this wasn’t a sparring match.

"This one..." he growled, his eyes igniting with a suicidal brilliance, "...is not going to miss."

Instead of aiming at Xerollion’s torso, Elliot drove both fists downward with everything he had left. He slammed his fists into the stone floor like twin meteors.

BOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!!!

The corridor didn’t just shake; it screamed. A catastrophic shockwave erupted from the point of impact, tearing the floor open in a jagged, volcanic fissure that raced down the corridor’s full length.

Stone shattered upward in chunks the size of human torsos, spinning through the air like deadly shrapnel. The force was so violent that the soldiers thirty meters back were lifted off their feet and thrown backward by the displaced air.

For the first time in the entire engagement, Xerollion’s composure wavered. He didn’t simply lean or step aside.

Recognizing the raw destructive potential of the technique, he crossed both forearms in front of his face in a rigid guard and braced his entire body.

The wave of kinetic energy and debris slammed into him like a physical wall.

CRASHHHHH.

Xerollion was forced backward, his boots skidding across the stone as he fought to maintain his center of gravity. Cracks spiderwebbed outward from beneath his feet as he dug in, holding his ground against the inferno of light and stone.

For several seconds, the world was nothing but chaos—dust, smoke, and the grinding sound of crumbling masonry hung suspended in the air.

Then, slowly, the debris settled.

Xerollion lowered his arms. His mask was streaked with grey dust, and his cloak was tattered at the edges, but he remained otherwise untouched.

He stood in the center of the newly formed crater, looking at the boy who had nearly leveled the corridor.

"That one had some weight to it," Xerollion admitted.

His voice was no longer dismissive; there was a genuine note of recognition in it. "The first attack today that required an actual answer... instead of merely deciding not to bother."

Elliot didn’t have the luxury of feeling pride. He didn’t have the strength to savor the fact that he had finally forced Xerollion to brace.

His vision was tunneling, the edges of his sight fraying into black static as his body screamed a singular, desperate command: ’Die... Make him die.’

Staggering forward on legs that felt less like bone and muscle and more like shattered glass, Elliot threw himself at Xerollion one last time. It was a pathetic, clumsy double strike, a desperate lunge with whatever strength remained in his one functional arm.

He was a wounded animal throwing its last gambit at a predator.

Xerollion didn’t wait for the attack to land. He closed the remaining distance himself, moving with a speed that bypassed human perception.

To Elliot’s failing eyes, Xerollion didn’t run; he simply existed in a new position closer to him.

WHIP.

A single open palm strike caught Elliot square in the sternum. The impact wasn’t a punch; it was a concentrated explosion of force.

THOOM.

Elliot was launched backward, his boots skidding uselessly over the jagged debris of the crater. He slid across the broken stone until his spine collided with the far wall with a bone-jarring CRACK.

The stone behind him spiderwebbed from the impact.

For a terrifying second, his legs simply gave out, and he began to slide down the wall toward the blood-soaked floor, but his fingernails clawed at the masonry, catching grooves in the stone, refusing to let his body collapse completely.

He hung there, suspended between standing and falling, a broken marionette held up by sheer spite.

By the fifth or sixth exchange, any pretense of combat remained. Elliot’s technique had degraded entirely into something primal, a flailing, desperate struggle for survival.

Every strike was thrown with maximum, soul-crushing effort and zero tactical thought. He was swinging at shadows, swinging at ghosts, swinging at the air itself.

Xerollion found himself, briefly, almost bored by the predictable rhythm of the boy’s agony, though something in the sheer, unnatural stubbornness of the human spirit kept a sliver of his analytical attention engaged.

’How?’ Xerollion wondered, watching the boy struggle to lift a bleeding fist. ’How does the meat continue to move when the spirit has already been incinerated?’

There was a specific, haunting quality to fighting someone whose every motion was dictated by grief rather than training. It was a rawness that Xerollion recognized from the deep, buried archives of his own memory from his own earliest days in this world, before the System had granted him the tools to make emotion irrelevant to outcome.

He remembered, distantly, what it had felt like to want something so badly that wanting became the entire strategy. To feel the world burn because it had taken what was yours.

It had been centuries since he had needed to recall that feeling for any reason other than recognizing it in a dying child.

"Why..." Elliot gasped.

Each word was a struggle, punctuated by a wet cough that brought up fresh flecks of crimson. He forced himself upright, his vertebrae popping audibly as he fought gravity.

His one good arm shook violently, while the ruined left arm hung like dead weight at his side. "Why... why did you do this to him?"

"To all of us? What did any of us... ever do to you?"

The question hung in the air, thick with the smell of blood and burnt stone.

Xerollion didn’t answer immediately. He stood motionless in the center of the devastation, the picture of absolute calm amidst the wreckage.

When he finally spoke, there was something almost gentle in his tone, a soft, terrifying compassion that was more insulting than any blade.

"Nothing at all," Xerollion answered. "You were simply convenient."

He stepped forward, the hem of his cloak brushing against the blood-slicked stone. "Both things can be true at once, Elliot."

"You can have done nothing wrong, lived a life of virtue and honor, and still have been exactly what I needed to achieve my objective."