Chapter 1196. She Didn’t Know Who I Was, But She Knew What I Represent

Chapter 1196: 1196. She Didn’t Know Who I Was, But She Knew What I Represent

Elliot spat a thick glob of crimson onto the stone, the blood frothing between his lips. He said nothing further.

There was nothing left—no anger to fuel his lungs, no words to bridge the chasm between his grief and Xerollion’s indifference.

The silence that followed was worse than any scream; it was the sound of a soul finally breaking under the weight of inevitable defeat.

But the body has a stubbornness that the mind cannot control.

With a primal, guttural sound that was more animal than human, Elliot gathered every remaining spark of his life force. He focused on the core of his being, drawing on the last reserves of the Heroic Strike.

The white light didn’t just glow; it screamed. It condensed around his fist into a sphere of pure, pressurized radiance so dense it began to distort the air around it like heat rising from asphalt. VROOOOOOOOM.

With a final, desperate roar that tore his vocal cords, he threw it forward. It was everything he was: every memory of Apollo, every drop of blood spilled, and every ounce of his broken pride condensed into a single point of annihilation.

Xerollion didn’t flinch, and he didn’t dodge. He simply reached out.

THWACK.

The impact stopped dead against Xerollion’s open palm. The momentum didn’t dissipate; it was simply arrested, as if the laws of physics had been forcibly suspended.

For one suspended, horrifying moment, the entire corridor held its breath. The dust motes froze midair.

The distant soldiers stopped breathing. Elliot’s eyes widened, pupils contracting as disbelief washed over his face.

The strongest thing he had ever produced was the culmination of his life’s training, and his deepest agony had failed to even push the man’s hand back an inch.

Then, Xerollion pushed back.

It wasn’t a punch; it was a dismissal. A simple flick of force.

BOOM.

The reversal was catastrophic. Elliot was launched backward like a ragdoll caught in a hurricane.

He flew several meters through the air before slamming into the far corridor wall with a wet CRUNCH of ribs against masonry. He slid down the stone, leaving a crimson streak behind him, before collapsing into a heap at the base of the wall.

His body finally gave out, the fire in his eyes flickering into dim embers. He lay there, a broken marionette with its strings severed, unable to even twitch a finger.

Evelyn was there within a heartbeat. Her speed was a blur of desperation, closing the distance before the settling dust had even begun to clear.

She collapsed to her knees beside him, gathering his battered frame into her arms. "Elliot!"

"Elliot, look at me!" she sobbed, the sound raw and ragged, echoing off the shattered walls.

Her fingers trembled as she pressed them frantically against his neck, searching for the pulse.

There. A shallow, stuttering rhythm.

Thump... thump...

It was weak, like the wings of a dying bird, but it was there. A fragile sliver of relief broke through the horror etched into her features, though her tears continued to fall freely onto his bloodied face.

Xerollion stepped forward, his boots crunching on the fragments of the corridor. He stood over them like a monument to inevitability, studying the scene with an analytical detachment.

Behind the impassive stillness of his mask, his mind was already moving past this moment, already calculating the next variable.

What he said next contained an element that, to a sentimental observer, might resemble mercy, as, to a sentimental observer, resemble mercy if mercy could be engineered with the cold precision of a mathematical equation.

"I’ll let you live," Xerollion announced.

His voice didn’t need to be loud; it carried with unnatural clarity across the wreckage, reaching every soldier still frozen in terror further down the hall. "Not out of compassion..."

"Your death would provide no tactical advantage... It would be a waste of resources."

He looked down at the broken boy, then up at the terrified survivors, his gaze making them feel exposed, as if he were reading their very heartbeats.

"Let him live," Xerollion commanded, his voice dropping to a cold, echoing timbre. "Let him live to remember today."

"Let him remember the day Aethelgard learned exactly how far its arrogance could carry it before it finally meets the ground."

Evelyn looked up at him, her gaze a volatile cocktail of raw hatred and paralyzing fear. She pulled Elliot’s unconscious, broken form tighter against her chest, cradling his head as if she could physically shield him from the reality of their defeat.

Around them, the corridor settled back into a suffocating, tomb-like silence. The only sound was the distant drip of blood from a cracked pillar and the ragged, wet breathing of the dying boy in her arms.

Both armies, the proud defenders of Aethelgard and the inexorable force that had dismantled them, stood frozen, watching the last threads of hope unravel. No one could guess what would come next in a war that had already, unmistakably, tipped entirely to one side.

Slowly, with hands that refused to shake despite the adrenaline coursing through her veins, Evelyn lowered Elliot to the ground.

She positioned him carefully against the wall, her fingers lingering one last time on his pulse point to confirm the shallow rise and fall of his chest. When she finally straightened, something fundamental had shifted within her.

The tears that had streaked her face had dried, leaving salt tracks in the dust. Her grief hadn’t vanished; it had simply crystallized.

In its place was a stillness so absolute it was unnerving the kind of calm that precedes a lightning strike.

She rose to her feet, turning to face Xerollion directly. The suspicion she had carried like a quiet ember for the better part of an hour suddenly roared into a cold, deliberate flame.

"I suspected it from the beginning," Evelyn said.

Her voice was eerily steady, cutting through the stale air as she stepped past Elliot’s fallen body. "The way you move that economy of motion..."

"The way you speak that detached, almost bored cadence..."

"All of it felt familiar... Every instinct I have has been screaming at me, and I kept lying to myself, telling myself it was only coincidence."

Xerollion regarded her, tilting his head slightly. His interest was genuine now.

Of everyone he had systematically dismantled during this engagement, she was the only one who had arrived at this conclusion without a single shred of concrete evidence.

She hadn’t read his technique or heard his name; she had simply felt him. It was an instinctive wariness, a primal recognition that he found rare enough to warrant genuine respect.

"You’re perceptive," Xerollion answered, his voice carrying effortlessly across the debris. "More than the others..."

"Unfortunately, perception is a luxury of the living, Evelyn..."

"Suspicion alone won’t save you from what happens next."

He watched her closely.

She didn’t posture. She didn’t scream or weep.

Her weight was balanced evenly on the balls of her feet, her hands loose rather than clenched in fists. This wasn’t the flailing desperation of Elliot’s grief-driven assault; this was something far more dangerous.

She had already accepted the likelihood of her own death, and she had chosen to face it not out of madness, but out of a cold, analytical need to prove her theory before she became another casualty of history.

’She knows,’ Xerollion thought, a flicker of something almost like amusement stirring behind his mask. ’She doesn’t know who I am, but she knows what I represent.’

Evelyn didn’t offer a rebuttal. She didn’t waste breath on accusations or pleas.

She simply shifted her stance, the air around her beginning to ripple and distort as her mana reserves surged toward the surface. The temperature in the corridor seemed to drop as she drew everything inward.

Without another word, she activated her full superhuman speed.

FWOOOOOM.

The sound barrier didn’t just break; it shattered. In an instant, she vanished from her position, leaving nothing behind but a shockwave that kicked up a cloud of stone dust and blood.