Chapter 1307. Parenting Critique From the Guy Who Stabbed Your Family

Chapter 1307: 1307. Parenting Critique From the Guy Who Stabbed Your Family

What followed was not a duel; it was a sustained apocalypse. A symphony of destruction performed by two beings who had long since transcended the limits of mortal suffering.

Rex threw everything into the fray, his movements becoming a blur of calculated violence.

"If you want to play God," Rex screamed over the howling wind of their clashing energies, "then let’s see how you handle a real catastrophe!"

He lashed out with Violet Ruin, summoning bolts of concentrated purple lightning that tore through the air like serrated glass. The lightning didn’t just strike; it hunted.

Five separate arcs of crackling energy leaped between the ruins of the estate, forming a lethal web that converged on Leonidas from five different directions simultaneously. The impact was deafening.

CRACK BOOM!

Leonidas’s body convulsed as the magical current cooked his flesh. His skin began to steam as the electricity danced across his muscles, but he didn’t fall.

Instead, the red veins on his arms pulsed with a nauseating light.

In the very next heartbeat, Leonidas retaliated. A bolt of crimson lightning, jagged and wrong in its color, lashed out from his sword’s tip.

It moved faster than Rex could think. The bolt struck Rex’s extended arm, and the sound was sickening—the sizzle of meat meeting superheated energy.

The lightning didn’t just burn; it bored through him, searing through muscle and sinew until Rex could see the white gleam of his own radius bone through the smoking wound.

Rex gritted his teeth against the agony, his Infinite Regeneration already knitting the charred flesh back together even as it burned.

"Not enough!" he roared, twisting his hand to summon the earth itself.

With a guttural command, Rex commanded the ground to revolt. A massive spear of compressed stone and soil erupted from the lawn like a breaching whale.

THWACK SQUELCH.

The spear punched through Leonidas’s abdomen, emerging from his back in a spray of dark blood and viscera. Leonidas froze, impaled mid-stride.

For three terrifying seconds, he simply stared down at the stone shaft protruding from his gut.

Then, he laughed a wet, broken sound that chilled Rex to his core.

Leonidas wrapped both blood slicked hands around the shaft, his knuckles whitening. With a primal roar that shook the remaining walls of the estate, he wrenched the spear free from his own body.

Blood geysered from the hole in his belly, soaking his clothes in crimson. But as he pulled it out, the red lines on his skin burned with a blinding intensity.

He twisted the spear midair and hurled it back at Rex with the fury of a thrown comet.

WHIZZZ SHLUCK!

Rex twisted his body in midair, but he wasn’t fast enough. The stone spear tore through his thigh, grinding through bone with an audible CRUNCH, and buried itself deep into the stump of an ancient oak tree behind him.

Rex landed hard, blood pooling beneath his leg as he fought to maintain his balance.

"You’re insane," Rex panted, blood dripping from his split lip. "You’re literally feeding on your own death."

"And you’re feeding on nothing but arrogance," Leonidas replied, his voice a gravelly whisper of impending doom.

Desperate to change the tide, Rex reached into the darkest corners of his soul.

"Rise," he commanded, invoking Sovereign Necromancy. "Rise and claim your vengeance!"

He couldn’t summon the elite soldiers from the corridor; they were too far, their souls too distant, but the estate itself was a graveyard. The night’s collapse had claimed dozens of servants and guardsmen.

In the shadows of the ruined walls, corpses began to twitch. Pale hands clawed at the dirt; broken bodies dragged themselves upright with wet, clicking sounds.

A dozen shambling undead puppets rose from the rubble, their eyes hollow, their fingers outstretched toward Leonidas.

Leonidas didn’t even pause his advance. He didn’t even look at them.

As he stepped forward, a shockwave of crimson anger rolled off his body like a physical tide. It wasn’t just mana; it was a wave of pure, unfiltered rejection.

When the aura touched the undead, the necromantic strings holding them together didn’t just break; they shattered. The corpses collapsed instantly, falling back into the dirt as empty husks, their borrowed animation snuffed out by the sheer pressure of his Wrath.

Rex saw the opening. He saw the momentary lapse in Leonidas’s focus as the mage processed the dead.

’Now.’

Rex’s body flickered. Using a burst of enhanced speed and spatial manipulation, he vanished from sight.

Rex activated Presence Manipulation, folding his magical signature inward until it collapsed into a singularity of nothingness. He didn’t just hide; he erased himself from the fundamental fabric of reality.

His scent vanished from the wind, his heat signature faded from the air, and his heartbeat became silent to even the most divine of senses.

For one suspended, terrifying heartbeat, the garden was empty. Leonidas stood alone in the center of the churned, blood-soaked lawn, his sword hanging at his side like a dormant guillotine.

Then, Leonidas’s head jerked. Just a fraction.

An instinctive twitch of a predator sensing a change in air pressure.

WHOOSH.

In one fluid, impossible motion, Leonidas spun, his sword carving an arc through the empty space.

SHHHH TICK.

The blade stopped dead. It hung suspended in midair, the razor-sharp edge hovering precisely one finger’s width from Rex’s Adam’s apple.

Rex stood frozen, invisible to every sense the universe possessed, feeling the lethal kiss of cold steel against his jugular. Leonidas wasn’t looking at a man; he was looking at the void, his eyes burning with a terrifying, supernatural recognition.

His voice came through his clenched teeth, raw and grinding like stone on stone.

"I can feel your hate," Leonidas rasped, the blade trembling slightly from the sheer psychic pressure. "It moves my sword... It tells me exactly where you breathe."

’It isn’t hatred,’ Rex thought, his mind cold and analytical even as sweat beaded on his forehead. ’Hatred is emotional... Hatred has heat...’

Rex threw himself backward with desperate force.

SHLICK.

The blade missed his throat by a hair’s breadth, shearing off a single lock of hair that fluttered to the ground like a dying moth. Rex rolled to his feet, his breathing shallow.

He didn’t hate this man. He didn’t hate anyone.

What he felt was something far more dangerous: the settled, glacial intent to erase an obstacle. And Wrath divine, primal Wrath could read that cold intent as clearly as a hand reads the grooves of a lock.

"Then let’s see how much more you can read," Rex spat.

They collided again. The violence escalated from a duel to a slaughterhouse.

The sound of steel meeting magical barriers produced wet, thunderous cracks that echoed through the ruined estate.

Leonidas was no longer a man; he was a dam that had finally broken, a flood of decades of suppressed agony pouring out in every bellowed word and every devastating strike.

"Apollo!" Leonidas screamed as Rex’s fist glanced off his enchanted guard, sending a spray of sparks and crimson blood across the grass. "I put a sword in his hands when he was six years old!"

"I taught him how to stand straight!"

"I stood next to his bed through every fever and every nightmare, and you put a hole in his throat on a stage!"

"You were a good teacher, Leonidas," Rex countered.

He ducked under a horizontal slash that would have severed his torso, surging forward to drive his knee into Leonidas’s ribs with the force of a battering ram.

CRUNCH.

The sound of ribs snapping was unmistakable.

"He died knowing exactly what he was capable of."

"Elliot is lying in a bed of blood because of you!" Leonidas’s roar was primal.

His sword came around in a flat, vicious arc that forced Rex to twist his body midair, the blade catching his ribs and leaving angry, burning furrows in his flesh.

"My daughters stand behind a wall of stone because they can’t bear to look at me!"

"You pulled them into your games, you worthless, grinning snake!"

"They chose me, Leonidas." Rex’s voice remained unnervingly calm, a sharp contrast to the carnage.

He thrust his palm forward, releasing a bolt of purple fire that lanced through the air. Leonidas took the hit directly on his shoulder, the violet flames clashing against his crimson aura in a spectacular, deadly display of light.

"That’s what you can’t forgive...! Nobody dragged them anywhere!"

"They saw the truth you were too weak to face."

"Helena!" Leonidas’s voice cracked, breaking under the weight of a father’s grief. "You beat my wife in front of her own children!"

"And Valentina taught me how to lead, how to be a man, and you made her kneel before you like some common whore!"

"You failed to watch your family," Rex said flatly, his eyes devoid of remorse.

He drove a palm into Leonidas’s chest, the impact sending a shockwave that cleared the dust around them. "You were gone for weeks, chasing glory and distant battles!"

"People who want to protect things do not leave them undefended."

Rex leaned in closer, his face inches from the blood spattered mask of the other man. "Mercy was never a part of any plan for those who wish to rule this world!"

"I told you the truth from the beginning, and you refused to hear it!"

"The anger you feel right now?! The rage that makes you stronger?!"

"That’s a gift, Leonidas!"

"You just didn’t know you needed it until I took everything else away!"