Chapter 1207. You’re Starting to Think for Yourself, Aren’t You, Little Echo?

Chapter 1207: 1207. You’re Starting to Think for Yourself, Aren’t You, Little Echo?

"That one almost had something new in it."

Xerollion didn’t pull away.

Instead, he maintained the palm-to-palm lock, the grinding pressure between their hands creating a high-pitched whine of displaced air.

He leaned forward, his masked face inches from the construct’s, studying the way the simulated light flickered in Rex’s pupils.

"Tell me, little echo," Xerollion purred, his voice dripping with a sadistic fascination. "Did you improvise that variation on your own?"

"Or is that still something I taught you how to do before you were even conceived?"

For a heartbeat that felt like an eternity, something impossible happened. The construct’s expression didn’t just shift; it fractured.

The heroic mask slipped, revealing something raw, something dark, and something unmistakably frustrated.

It wasn’t a programmed response; it was a flicker of genuine, impotent rage that burned through the data.

SHHH THWIP!

The construct broke the lock with a violent, unnatural twist of its wrist, the motion so sudden it sounded like a whip cracking. Before Xerollion could reset, Rex launched into a vicious low sweep.

WHOOSH!

The leg swept across the stone, sending sparks flying where it grazed the floor. When Xerollion hopped back to avoid the sweep, the construct didn’t pause; it flowed.

KRA KOOOOM!

Rex exploded upward. His fist came screaming from the ground in a devastating uppercut, but this wasn’t just muscle.

At the moment of impact, he triggered a micro burst of Gravity Manipulationgravity manipulation. The gravitational field around his fist didn’t just push; it imploded, doubling the kinetic energy in a fraction of a second.

The air itself seemed to shatter around the punch.

Xerollion didn’t dodge. He didn’t parry.

He simply... let it happen.

CRACK THUD!!!

The sound was sickening. It was the sound of a sledgehammer hitting a concrete pillar.

Xerollion’s head snapped sideways with such violent force that his vertebrae audibly shifted CLACK and he was launched backward.

His boots skidded across the debris-strewn floor, carving two deep trenches in the stone as he fought to maintain balance. A thin, crimson line of blood split the corner of his mouth, stark against his pale skin.

"NO!" a soldier from Aethelgard screamed, a sound of pure, desperate hope. "He hit him! He actually hit him!"

The corridor erupted in a wave of audible gasps. For one electric, terrifying moment, the entire war stopped.

The soldiers, the Underlayer rebels, and the wounded—they all saw it. They saw the monster bleeding.

They saw the hero winning. The tide hadn’t just turned; it felt as though it had been torn away by force.

Xerollion came to a halt, his chest rising and falling in slow, measured breaths. He reached up with two fingers and wiped the blood from his lip.

Then, he did something that sent a new chill through the onlookers: he smiled.

"There it is."

Xerollion worked his jaw experimentally. With a wet, grinding sound, CRUNCH, CRUNCH,CRUNCH the bone snapped back into its perfect alignment.

His voice came out not angry but almost delighted, like a child who had just seen a new trick from a favorite toy.

"I wanted to see how hard you’d commit once you thought you had an opening," Xerollion said, stepping forward again, his aura beginning to darken, the shadows around his feet twisting like living things. "I needed to see if you possessed the desperation of a living creature when the prey thinks it has won."

His eyes burned through the mask with a newfound hunger.

"Good... That’s excellent data."

"Now I know exactly how much pressure it takes to make you try."

The construct could not comprehend irony. It could not understand that its greatest triumph, the blood on Xerollion’s lip, was nothing more than a data point in a controlled experiment.

To the construct, the staggered monster was a weakness to be exploited.

VROOOOOM WHACK!

Rex lunged. He closed the distance with terrifying speed, launching a relentless barrage of strikes designed to overwhelm.

THUD. CRUNCH. WHACK.

Xerollion deliberately lowered his guard, allowing the construct to land two devastating blows. A fist sank into his ribs with the sound of grinding stone, GRIND CRACK, followed by a spinning kick that connected squarely with his shoulder with a bone-jarring THWACK.

But there was no recoil.

No pain.

No stumble.

The wounds closed instantly, the flesh knitting back together with an obscene, supernatural speed that made the violence feel hollow.

Xerollion didn’t just absorb the blows; he fed on them.

Each impact was a tactile lesson: ’How much force? How fast? What is the exact decay rate of the energy behind the strike?’

"Impressive," Xerollion muttered through the blood that still stained his teeth. "Your aggression spikes when you perceive vulnerability... Fascinating."

From her position against the crumbling wall, Valentina watched, her breath shallow and ragged. The hope that had briefly ignited in the Aethelgard ranks was flickering like a candle in a hurricane.

Her eyes, sharp with decades of academic and tactical observation, refused to blink. She wasn’t looking at the spectacle; she was looking at the rhythm.

’Something is wrong,’ she thought, a cold, poisonous seed of doubt taking root in her gut. ’The cadence... it’s too perfect. Too rehearsed.’

She had spent years watching students spar, watching them hesitate, watching them flinch, and watching them make mistakes born of fear or exhaustion.

But this? This was a performance.

The way Rex’s attacks landed felt less like a desperate struggle for survival and more like a series of predetermined outcomes being executed with flawless timing.

She filed it away in the vault of her mind, the same vault that had saved her through countless political assassinations and magical coups. She said nothing, but her hand trembled as she gripped her robes.

KRA KOOOOM!

The fight spiraled into a frenzy of escalating devastation. The two identical figures became blurs of motion across the wreckage of the corridor.

SHHHHH BOOM!

Elemental bursts of searing flame and freezing ice collided, scorching fresh black scars into the already charred stone. Gravitational distortions tore loose massive chunks of the ceiling, which fell like meteors around the combatants.

CRASH! THUD!

Neither fighter acknowledged the debris; they were locked in a private hell of their own making.

Then, the construct unleashed something that made the Underlayer soldiers freeze in genuine terror.

WHIRRRRR CRACKLE BOOM!

Rex didn’t just use fire or wind; he fused them. He drew both hands together, spinning them in a complex, overlapping pattern that tore the very air apart.

A compressed storm of hurricane-force wind and jagged lightning began to spiral upward, layering itself into a single, screaming column of elemental annihilation.

It was a technique that shouldn’t exist: a spontaneous synthesis created by the construct extrapolating fragments of Rex’s own repertoire, weaving them into a lethal new hybrid without ever being taught the formula.

The column of storm roared toward Xerollion, lightning arcing off the stone floor and sending sparks dancing across the debris.

ZZZZZT KRAK!

Xerollion didn’t retreat. He didn’t brace.

He simply stood there, his cloak billowing in the unnatural wind, his eyes locked on the swirling vortex of death approaching him.

For the first time since the battle began, the predatory amusement died down. In its place came something else: something almost resembling genuine, childlike curiosity.

"Oh?" Xerollion whispered, his voice barely audible beneath the howling storm. "So you’ve learned to synthesize."

"You’re starting to think for yourself, aren’t you, little echo?"