Chapter 1205. A Masterpiece Painted by Someone Who Had Seen the Subject Once

Chapter 1205: 1205. A Masterpiece Painted by Someone Who Had Seen the Subject Once

The ruined corridor became a stage of impossible stillness. In the center of the carnage, Valentina and Morwenna lay like broken offerings, one gasping for air, the other drowning in pain, while between them stood two titans.

On one side, Rex Rexilion: the picture of heroic defiance, his stance unshakable, his eyes blazing with a righteous fire that seemed to warm even the cold stone.

On the other, Xerollion: a predator wrapped in shadow, his masked face unreadable, studying his opponent with the detached fascination of a scientist examining a new species of insect.

Every remaining soldier held their breath. The silence was absolute, broken only by the distant drip of blood from a cracked ceiling and the ragged, wet coughs of the wounded.

No one could have predicted this standoff. No one could have guessed that this wasn’t a battle between hero and villain but a confrontation between truth and its echo.

Because only one of them knew: the man standing across from him was not a man at all. He was a mirror.

A shadow.

A flawless, incomplete imitation.

THUM THUM. THUM THUM.

The heartbeat of the room seemed to accelerate as the tension reached its breaking point. Then, the silence didn’t just break; it shattered.

SHHHH WHAM!

Rex Rexilion moved. He didn’t just lunge; he exploded forward with a burst of kinetic energy that tore up the stone beneath his boots.

CRACK.

The attack was terrifyingly familiar to anyone who had ever trained alongside the real Rex. It was a flawless execution of the Dragon Strike lunge, a technique that required perfect synchronization between physical momentum and telekinetic acceleration.

WHOOSH BOOM!

As Rex swung his fist, a ripple of invisible force preceded the strike, amplifying the impact tenfold. It was the exact signature of Rex’s fighting style: the precise marriage of martial arts mastery and telekinetic enhancement.

To the watching soldiers, it was a spectacle of divine heroism.

To Xerollion, it was a grotesque parody.

CLANG!

Xerollion didn’t even flinch. With a movement that was almost insulting in its economy, he raised his forearm to meet the blow.

The impact sent a shockwave through the corridor, cracking the floor tiles beneath them, but Xerollion remained unmoved.

VROOOOOM.

The telekinetic energy dissipated against his own superior barrier like water against a cliff face.

Rex didn’t relent. He spun on his heel, the motion fluid and deadly, launching a follow-up kick aimed at Xerollion’s temple while simultaneously manifesting a telekinetic blade to slice at his ribs.

SWISH SHING!

The choreography was perfect, a seamless transition from close-quarters combat to mid-range magical assault.

Xerollion parried each strike with terrifying ease. He moved with a lazy, almost bored grace, deflecting the strikes not with desperation, but with the casual flick of a wrist.

Yet, his body language betrayed him; there was a visible spark of something resembling pleasure in his movements. He was relishing this. He was watching himself fight through another’s eyes.

THUD. CRACK. WHACK.

The sounds of their clashing power echoed like thunderclaps in the confined space. Rex’s strikes were relentless, each one carrying the full weight of a man who believed he was fighting for salvation.

He threw a devastating left hook, reinforced by a burst of psychic pressure that made the very air scream.

KRA KOOOOM!

Xerollion caught the fist. His fingers wrapped around Rex’s knuckles with a sound of grinding bone.

GRRRRK.

The pressure was immense, but Xerollion didn’t push back with anger; he pushed back with curiosity.

As he deflected the next punch, a lightning-fast jab that would have shattered a normal man’s ribs, Xerollion leaned in close, his breath ghosting past Rex’s ear.

His voice was a low, melodic murmur that cut through the ringing violence of the fight.

"Ninety seven point three," Xerollion whispered, the numbers dripping with cold, mathematical cruelty.

He twisted Rex’s wrist aside with a contemptuous flick, sending the ’hero’ stumbling back. "A remarkable performance. Truly."

A dark chuckle rumbled behind his mask as he resettled into his combat stance, his eyes glowing brighter as he prepared to dismantle the illusion.

"I wonder," Xerollion mused, his voice carrying a razor-sharp edge of mockery, "exactly which part of me you couldn’t quite copy."

Rex Rexilion offered no verbal reply. Words were for men; this was a collision of forces. He simply roared a sound that was more of a psychic shockwave than a human vocalization and plunged back into the fray.

BOOOOOM!

The corridor became a vortex of violence. The exchange that followed transcended ordinary combat; it became a spectacle of impossible physics.

Rex launched into a devastating sequence: a spinning crescent kick that tore through the air with a WHOOSH, immediately followed by a telekinetic thrust that aimed to puncture Xerollion’s sternum.

SHHH THWACK!

Xerollion countered with a reverse palm strike that met the kick midair, the impact creating a concussive blast that sent debris spiraling outward like shrapnel.

CLANG! CRASH!

The surrounding battlefield fell into a deathly, hypnotic hush. The war itself seemed to pause.

Soldiers from Aethelgard and the ruthless Underlayer alike lowered their weapons. Blood-soaked blades dripped uselessly to the floor as eyes fixed in terrified fascination on the center of the storm.

It was as if the universe itself had drawn a breath and held it, unwilling to miss a single second of this grotesque mirror match.

They weren’t watching two men fight; they were watching a man fight his own reflection, each strike a perfect, devastating echo of the other.

CRACK THUD!

Rex landed a series of rapid-fire punches, each one reinforced by compressed air. Xerollion parried them with surgical precision, his movements so identical to Rex’s that it created an optical illusion, a blurring of two bodies becoming one.

WHACK. WHACK. WHACK.

The sound was rhythmic, almost musical, punctuated by the wet SPLAT of blood spattering from where Rex’s knuckles grazed Xerollion’s cheek.

In the Underlayer ranks, Cassandra and Gorvasha stood frozen. A profound, unsettling confusion overrode their usual predatory instincts.

"How?" Gorvasha hissed, his voice cracking with disbelief. "How can anyone mimic his rhythm so perfectly?!"

"Not even his own students can anticipate his feints like that."

Cassandra didn’t answer. Her eyes were narrowed, tracking the impossible choreography.

"It’s not mimicry," she whispered, a chill running down her spine. "It’s... recognition."

On the opposite side, among the battered remnants of Aethelgard, hope was a wildfire spreading through the despair. The soldiers, bruised and broken, saw in Rex Rexilion the miracle they had been praying for.

"It has to be him," a young soldier sobbed, her voice breaking as fresh tears carved clean tracks through the grime and dried blood on her cheeks. "Look at him!"

"Look at how he moves! Nobody else could fight like that."

"Nobody else has that soul in their strikes!" Her companion nodded fervently, gripping a broken spear as if Rex’s sheer presence could heal their wounds.

Yet, amidst the rising tide of hope, one pair of eyes saw the cracks in the foundation.

Valentina, slumped against a crumbling wall, her lungs still burning from the near asphyxiation, watched through a haze of pain. Her scholarly mind, trained to detect the slightest anomaly in magical theory, couldn’t help but catalog the details.

She watched the way Rex’s weight shifted during a pivot; it was correct, but the timing was... mechanical.

His movements were a fraction of a second too precise.

Too rehearsed.

’There,’ she thought, her heart beginning to sink as a cold dread replaced the heat of her exhaustion. ’His shoulders.’

In every training yard she had ever observed, Rex’s movements possessed a certain fluid warmth, a spontaneous grace born of human instinct.

But this Rex... this Rex moved with a terrifying, rigid perfection.

There was a stiffness in his shoulders, a lack of the micro adjustments that come from living flesh and blood. He was moving like a masterpiece painted by someone who had seen the subject once but never touched it.

KRA KOOOM!

Another clash of telekinetic force shook the foundations of the corridor, sending a cloud of choking dust between the two fighters.

As the smoke cleared, the two figures emerged again, poised and deadly, the illusion of heroism continuing to dazzle the masses even as the truth began to whisper to those who knew how to listen.