Chapter 1296. I Laughed While Getting Burned. In Hindsight, Questionable.

Chapter 1296: 1296. I Laughed While Getting Burned. In Hindsight, Questionable.

Rex did not retreat from the electrical storm; he tore through it.

"Wind Blade: Tiered Execution!" he roared.

From his palms, dozens of razor-thin crescent blades spun outward in ascending tiers. The lowest blades swept through the air inches above the ground with a vicious whirr, while the highest sliced upward through the cloud cover.

Where these wind blades intersected Helena’s mirror labyrinth, the effect was catastrophic.

CRASH SHATTER!

The wind blades acted like diamond-tipped saws, grinding twelve of the largest ice panels into glittering powder before the lightning could even claim them.

But Rex wasn’t done playing defense. He threw his head back, his eyes glowing with an unnatural intensity.

"You want to play with lightning, Helena?!"

"Let’s see how you handle something real."

"Void Bolt!"

From a sky that should have been clear, a bolt of lightning, not blue, not white, but a deep, bruised violet, tore downward. It struck the dead center of the maze with a sound so violent it felt like the world itself was splitting apart.

KRA BOOOOOOOM!

The windows of the Academy rang like funeral bells. In the center of the sky, the two magical currents collided and refused to separate.

Helena’s electric blue lightning tangled with his strange, abyssal purple, weaving together into a burning, writhing braid of pure energy that hissed and crackled like a dying star.

Helena didn’t wait for the smoke to clear. She struck from above, her desperation transforming into something primal.

"You think you’re untouchable?!" she screamed through the wind.

"Gale Scythe Rain!"

A dozen crescents of compressed air fell from the heavens like guillotine blades, each one tearing the clouds into bloody ribbons. Rex moved through them with terrifying fluidity, his body twisting and bending with the loose ease of a man walking through falling leaves, the wind whistling past his ears like angry hornets.

Fshhhhhh, fshhhhhh!

Seeing her aerial assault failing to pin him, Helena pivoted. She slammed her hands toward the ground.

"Break!"

A Stone Colossus erupted from the roof of the east wing, a monstrosity of bound earth, twisted rebar, and shattered masonry the size of a cathedral tower.

The construct roared with the sound of grinding boulders as it swung a pillar-sized fist upward from the garden to crush Rex against the sky.

Rex’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t dodge.

He reached out, fingers splayed as if grasping the very bones of the world. "Earthen Authority: Core Piercer!"

The ground didn’t just shake; it convulsed. From a distant, impossible angle rising from a cloud bank miles away, as if the sky itself were made of stone, a spear of solid granite launched upward.

It moved faster than sound.

THWACK CRUNCH!

The spear impaled the Colossus directly through its earthen heart. For a heartbeat, the giant froze mid swing, its rocky face twisted in a silent scream.

Then, with a sound like a mountain collapsing, it disintegrated into a torrential rain of gravel that rattled across the lawn like gunfire.

"Is that all you have left?" Rex taunted, though his own breath was beginning to come faster.

Helena’s response was beautiful and terrifying. "Aurora Prism!"

The sky above the estate began to ripple as if the atmosphere were liquid. The sunlight itself was bent, fractured, and broken into seven searing bands of rainbow radiance.

These weren’t mere colors; they were solid blades of light that swept down toward Rex like the ribs of a great, burning fan.

The first beam caught him.

Sssssssst!

A smoking red line carved across his shoulder, the smell of charred flesh filling the air. The second beam burned a hole through the space where his head had been milliseconds before.

Rex took the third beam directly on his forearm. He felt his skin bubble and pop, the agony searing straight to his nerves.

Instead of screaming, Rex laughed. It was a sound that was wrong, strange, thrilled, and hungry, echoing through the burning air.

"Magnificent!"

Using the last of the moisture from the shattered pond’s spray, he spun a mirror of his own midair, bending the searing light back toward Helena in a lazy, mocking arc.

For several minutes, they passed each other in the sky a dozen times, a dozen different ways. At times, it looked like a dance, two lovers circling in a pattern too complex for mortal eyes to follow.

At other times, it looked like murder. Each exchange left fresh wounds: blood spattered across the clouds, torn fabric, and the metallic tang of blood mixing with the scent of ozone.

Helena was flying on nothing but raw, bleeding willpower. Her wind wings flickered at the edges like dying candles; her breath came in short, ragged sobs that she refused to acknowledge.

Yet, every spell she threw remained crisp, unwavering, and lethal. Rex found himself, to his own mild surprise, admiring her.

She was a dying star, burning brightest just before the collapse.

Then, through the haze of blood and magic, Helena saw it. A gap in his rhythm.

A single heartbeat where his guard faltered.

Helena didn’t hesitate. She saw the opening not as a flaw in his magic but as a microsecond delay in his breathing as he recovered from the Aurora Prism.

Her eyes, bloodshot and wild with magical exhaustion, locked onto his position.

"FINISH HIM!" she shrieked, her voice breaking into a raw, desperate howl that tore through her throat.

She flung her arms outward in a violent arc, yanking at the very fabric of the mana around them. She wasn’t just casting; she was commanding the atmosphere to collapse.

The remaining ice shards in the sky swarmed toward Rex like starving predators, reforming into a Frost Mirror Labyrinth with terrifying speed.

This time, it wasn’t a grand maze; it was a cage.

Five massive, razor-sharp panels of enchanted ice snapped into place around him in a perfect, suffocating pentagram, each one angled to trap everything inside.

Then came the killing blow.

"TEMPEST OBLITERATION!"

Helena poured every remaining drop of her magical essence into a single, concentrated lance of violet lightning. It wasn’t a chain this time; it was a guillotine.

The bolt slammed into the first mirror with a deafening CRACK THOOM!

The ice didn’t shatter; it acted as a perfect conductor. The lightning was caught, redirected with inhuman precision, and hurled at the next mirror.

It bounced from face to face, accelerating with each ricochet until five separate bolts of pure, concentrated annihilation converged on the center of the ring from five directions simultaneously.

ZAP CRACK! ZAP CRACK!

For the first time in the entire confrontation, Rex was caught off guard.

For the first time, he was helpless.

The world didn’t just go white; it ceased to exist.

The simultaneous impact was less like lightning and more like being struck by five sledgehammers made of sunfire. Rex’s scream was ripped from his lungs before his brain could even register the pain—a raw, guttural sound of agony that echoed across the entire city.

Sssssssssssssssst!

The sound of flesh cooking was audible even to those standing hundreds of feet below. The lightning tore through him with sadistic hunger.

Half of his face was instantly blackened, the skin curling away from his cheekbone in smoking strips, exposing the wet gleam of muscle beneath. The enchanted mask he wore groaned under the thermal stress before spiderwebbing with a cascade of hairline fractures.

His left shoulder didn’t just burn; it exploded outward in a ragged, wet tear as the electrical discharge cooked the muscle from the inside out, spraying hot, arterial blood across the pristine ice mirrors.

The force of the combined strikes was catastrophic. Rex was launched from the center of the ring like a broken marionette, a blackened, smoking rag of a man hurled sideways through the sky.

He tumbled through a bank of clouds, spinning end over end in a nauseating blur of pain and smoke, trailing a streak of crimson droplets that looked like blood raining from the heavens.

The world became a rushing, kaleidoscopic green blur as his altitude plummeted. Then came the impact.

CRUNCH.

He hit the Starlight garden with the force of a falling meteor. He slammed into the earth on his back, the impact driving the air from his lungs in a wet wheeze, before rolling through the manicured lawn in a long, violent furrow of torn grass and pulverized soil.

When he finally came to a stop, he lay motionless in the dirt, steam rising from his ruined body.

Silence fell over Aethelgard.

A silence so heavy it felt like it would crush the lungs of everyone watching.

Then, from the distance, came a sound that broke the spell.

A thin, ragged cheer.

It started in the eastern square among the broken remnants of the defeated soldiers, a few dozen voices at first, rough and startled, as if the people making them had forgotten they were still alive.

"Helena!" someone screamed, the name cracking with desperate relief.

"Helena won! She did it!" another voice took up the cry.

Hope small, bright, and dangerously foolish flickered through the broken ranks of Aethelgard’s army like a spark in a powder keg.

On the walls, several Underlayer soldiers instinctively gripped their weapons, their eyes darting between the cheering civilians and the broken man in the garden.

Cassandra’s mouth tightened into a thin, grim line of warning; she saw the shift in the air, the potential for a riot, a rebellion. But she didn’t give the order to suppress them.

No one gave the order.

Because everyone was still staring at the crater in the garden, waiting to see if the monster would rise again.