Chapter 1198. There Is a Difference Between Submission and Revelation

Chapter 1198: 1198. There Is a Difference Between Submission and Revelation

The shift was not merely visible; it was seismic. The ground beneath Evelyn didn’t just crack; it detonated.

CRUNCH BOOM.

Spiderweb fractures spidered outward from her boots as she ignited her mana, sending shockwaves through the ancient masonry. The pale blue aura that had been a soft trail now hardened into a searing, brilliant white, so intense that its edges became razor sharp.

Where her afterimages grazed the corridor walls, the stone didn’t just chip; it scorched, leaving glowing, molten scars in the wake of her passage.

She entered a state of hyperaccelerated violence. The space between one heartbeat and the next was no longer a continuous flow; it was fractured into six, seven, eight distinct positions.

Each position was a deadly proposition.

WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.

She was a hurricane of azure lightning. Her strikes became a coordinated assault on his entire anatomy: a lightning-fast jab at his wrist to break his guard, a devastating roundhouse aimed at his ribs to crack bone, and a vicious kick to the back of his knee to destabilize his stance.

She was hunting for a weakness, testing every possible angle, every infinitesimal gap her earlier, more cautious attempts had failed to exploit.

The exchange stretched on, a brutal ballet of destruction that lasted far longer than any confrontation Xerollion had faced that day.

The already ruined corridor became a slaughterhouse of debris. Dust clouds choked the air, mixed with the copper tang of blood and the acrid stench of burned mana.

For the first time, Evelyn wasn’t just bouncing off him; she was connecting. Two solid strikes landed, one to his sternum and another to his temple, sending a visible shudder through Xerollion’s frame that actually rocked him back on his heels.

’I’m hitting him,’ she thought, her mind screaming over the roar of her own power. ’I’m actually making him move!’

But the triumph was hollow.

Every time her fist connected with a wet THUD, every time her magic tore flesh, his Infinite Regeneration responded with terrifying immediacy.

The wounds would bubble and hiss, the flesh knitting together with unnatural speed. The cycle was maddening.

She was pouring her very soul into every strike, burning through her life force like a candle in a hurricane, while he remained an immovable object.

The frustration began to seep into her bones, a cold, corrosive despair that whispered: ’You are fighting God with a blade of glass.’

Then, it happened.

Evelyn pivoted on one foot, channeling seventy percent of her power into a vicious cross. Her knuckles screamed as they connected with the exposed flesh just beneath the edge of his mask.

SHLICK.

A thin, crimson line opened along Xerollion’s cheekbone. Blood—real, warm blood—sprayed across her knuckles.

For half a second, Evelyn allowed herself to breathe. A spark of hope, fragile and dangerous, ignited in her chest.

’He bleeds... He’s real... He can be broken. ’

It lasted exactly as long as it took for the wound to vanish. Before she could even follow up with the next strike in her combo, she watched in horror as the skin crawled and fused, and the blood reabsorbed into the newly formed flesh.

The wound closed before it had even finished bleeding. The spark of hope died instantly, replaced by a crushing weight of futility.

Xerollion didn’t even flinch. He simply raised the back of his hand, wiping the last crimson smear from his jaw with a casual motion that felt like a deliberate insult to her effort.

"You’re making a tactical error, Evelyn," Xerollion said.

His voice wasn’t mocking; it was worse. It was sympathetic. "You cannot win this by wearing me down..."

"You are fighting an ocean with a spoon."

He stepped forward, forcing her to retreat as his presence seemed to expand, filling the corridor. "There is nothing here to wear down..."

"Every wound closes... Every strike I take only teaches me your rhythm faster..."

"Every second you fight me, you become more predictable."

Evelyn’s teeth were bared in a snarl, blood dripping from her own split lips. Her muscles were twitching with exhaustion, her vision tunneling, but something deeper than strategy was driving her now.

It was the raw, stubborn refusal of a cornered animal. She wasn’t fighting for Aethelgard anymore.

She wasn’t fighting for Apollo. She was fighting because stopping meant admitting that everything they had built was meaningless.

"Then I’ll just have to hit you somewhere that matters," Evelyn hissed through clenched teeth. "I’ll hit you until there’s nothing left to regenerate."

With a scream of pure, unadulterated defiance, she threw herself back into the fray, her body dissolving into a white-hot blur of suicidal intensity.

Evelyn reached for something she had never dared to attempt before, a technique that pushed her mana system to its absolute breaking point.

Desperate to shatter his perfect composure, she didn’t just accelerate; she fractured her own presence. With a wet, tearing sound of displaced air, she split her speed into a cascade of simultaneous afterimages.

FSHHH FSHHH FSHHH!

Suddenly, the corridor was flooded with six, eight, ten versions of Evelyn, each one a perfect, terrifying replica of the other.

They weren’t mere optical illusions; they carried independent, convincing motion, each one weaving through the debris with its own lethal trajectory.

Her goal was simple: overload his processing power, confuse his senses, and find the one microsecond where his godlike perception would falter.

For a heartbeat, the impossible happened. Xerollion hesitated. His head tilted, eyes scanning the chaos as his brain struggled to process the sudden multiplication of threats.

The armies watching from the shadows held their collective breath; a single woman had momentarily stalled the unstoppable force.

But the victory was a mirage.

Beneath the surface of the illusion, Divine Perception and Foresight roared to life in perfect synchronization. They didn’t look at the motion; they looked at the soul of the attack.

They traced the infinitesimal thread of genuine energy signature, the unique, white-hot mana frequency that only the real Evelyn possessed, threading through the web of decoys. With surgical precision, his mind isolated the true body from the ghostly shells.

"A clever trick," Xerollion said, his voice cutting through the chaos like a blade.

Before the real Evelyn could even register that her gambit had failed, his hand shot out. He didn’t grab an afterimage; he seized her actual wrist mid-strike.

CLANK.

The contact was absolute. The surprise that flooded her features was raw and naked—the horror of a predator realizing it has walked straight into a trap.

"But you forget," Xerollion continued, his grip tightening just enough to make her bones creak, "that I read considerably more than physical movement..."

"I read the intent behind the spark."

Without warning, he twisted, using her own momentum against her.

CRACK.

He threw her down onto the unforgiving stone floor with controlled but devastating force. Her back slammed against the debris with a bone-jarring THUD, driving the air from her lungs in a pained wheeze.

Before she could even attempt to roll away, he pressed down, pinning her with a passive layer of telekinetic pressure. It felt like an invisible mountain had been placed on her chest, crushing her into the stone and rendering her limbs useless despite her weakening, desperate struggles.

The adrenaline that had sustained her began to hemorrhage away, leaving only the cold, crushing reality of exhaustion. Her muscles spasmed involuntarily, her breathing coming in ragged, desperate gasps.

Xerollion crouched close, his mask mere inches from her face. The proximity was suffocating.

"You’re stronger than I expected," he murmured, studying her with a detached, clinical curiosity that felt more violating than any blow. "What system do you carry, Evelyn?"

"What manner of power allows you to fracture yourself like that? I’m curious."

Evelyn’s face was pressed against the blood-stained stone, but her eyes remained fixed on his. Even as her strength ebbed, the hatred in them burned brighter than her mana ever had.

"I won’t tell you... anything," she spat, each word a battle against the telekinetic weight crushing her ribs. "Kill me if you want..."

"Break every bone in my body... But I will never bow to you."

Xerollion didn’t need her words. His Emotional Insight began to peel back the layers of her psyche like rotting parchment.

He didn’t need her consent to read her. Beneath the screaming fury and the paralyzing terror, he found something profound, something almost alien in its purity.

It was a loyalty so fierce, so absolute, that it transcended self-preservation. She wasn’t fighting for her life; she was fighting as a bulwark for the broken souls bleeding out around her.

’How fascinating,’ he thought. ’Elliot’s loyalty was a wildfire—chaotic, consuming, and predictable.’

’But hers... hers is a fortress. It is disciplined and even calculated in surrender.’

"I never asked you to bow," Xerollion said, tilting his head.

His tone held something that might have been mistaken for admiration if he weren’t a monster. "I asked what you carry..."

"There is a fundamental difference between submission and revelation, though I understand why the distinction would be meaningless to someone who believes they have already lost everything."

Evelyn’s lips curled into a blood-flecked snarl.

"It doesn’t matter to me at all," she whispered, her voice cracking but her resolve unshaken. "Nothing you ask matters..."

"You could ask me the color of the sky, the name of God, or the secrets of the stars... and I would still give you nothing."