Chapter 1308. Everyone’s Crying, Everyone’s Bleeding, and I’m Taking Notes

Chapter 1308: 1308. Everyone’s Crying, Everyone’s Bleeding, and I’m Taking Notes

Each insult Rex hurled was not merely a word; it was a surgical strike. He wasn’t just attacking Leonidas’s pride; he was excavating his guilt, peeling back the layers of the man’s psyche to expose the festering wounds underneath.

These were not petty taunts; they were cold, precise instruments of psychological warfare, designed to ignite the very fuel Leonidas needed to become a monster.

Rex watched with detached fascination as the effect took hold. The red lines etched into Leonidas’s skin began to pulse with an erratic, violent rhythm.

They glowed brighter with every syllable, casting jagged shadows across the ruined garden.

The Crimson Sovereign Edge began to hum a low, subsonic vibration that made the very air tremble and the teeth of anyone nearby ache.

’There it is,’ Rex thought, his mind a calm lake amidst the storm of Leonidas’s fury. ’The breaking point.’

’Feed the fire, Leonidas.’

’Burn everything until there is nothing left but the ash of who you used to be.’

"You think you’re righteous?" Rex taunted, stepping through a spray of blood as he dodged a desperate slash that split a nearby stone pillar. "You think your grief gives you authority?!"

"You’re just a man who lost his grip, clinging to a sword because you couldn’t hold onto your own blood!"

Leonidas let out a sound that wasn’t human—a wet, strangled roar that tore from his lungs like grinding metal. The air around him ignited.

Behind the protective shelter of the shattered stone wall, the tension among the observers was a physical weight, more suffocating than the gravity Rex had summoned earlier.

Cassandra’s breathing was ragged. She had been standing motionless beside Gorvasha at the garden’s edge, but as she watched Rex, her lord, streaming crimson from a dozen different wounds, her composure fractured.

Her fingers curled around the hilt of her sword with such force that her knuckles turned bone white. Her crimson blade rose six inches out of its sheath with a deadly, singing hum.

SHHHH RING.

"I cannot watch this," Cassandra hissed, her voice trembling with suppressed rage. "He is bleeding out like an animal while that snake mocks his corpse!"

She took a step forward, her muscles coiled to spring into the slaughter. But before she could commit to the violence, a massive, scarred hand closed around her forearm.

The grip was gentle, but it possessed the immovable strength of a mountain.

"Stay your hand," Gorvasha commanded.

The half orc’s voice was quiet, almost unnervingly calm, but her own tusks were bared in a snarl of restrained aggression. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her axe, her entire body vibrating with the urge to join the carnage.

"His order has not changed, Cassandra... No one interferes! Not even for him."

Cassandra’s jaw clenched so hard her teeth creaked. "This is madness, Gorvasha! He will die!"

"Let him die on his own terms," Gorvasha growled through gritted teeth. "The contract is sealed in blood."

Cassandra let the blade slide back into its sheath with a frustrated, metallic click. But the violence of the scene had already taken its toll on the others.

Nearby, Lilith stood paralyzed. She had bitten through her lower lip in her anxiety, and a thin, steady stream of blood ran down her chin, dripping onto her collar.

She didn’t seem to notice the pain or the taste of iron in her mouth. Her entire body was tilted forward, her eyes wide and glazed, leaning toward the two titans clashing in the center of the garden as if she were a marionette being pulled toward the fire by invisible, irresistible strings.

At the edge of the carnage, behind the crumbling stone wall, the psychological toll of the battle manifested in raw, unfiltered agony. Lily was collapsed against the masonry, her body convulsing with silent, racking sobs.

But it wasn’t just her physical distress that threatened to break Rex; it was the psychic feedback. Through their unbreakable mental link, her voice tore through his consciousness like shattered glass, rising again and again in a crescendo of desperation.

’Rex, stop, please!’ Her voice screamed inside his skull, each word carrying the weight of her terror. ’He’s my father, Rex!’

’Please, make it stop!’

’I can’t... I can’t bear to watch him break...! Please!’

The mental intrusion was a searing pain, more invasive than any blade, but Rex forced it to the periphery of his awareness.

He couldn’t afford to flinch.

Not now.

A few paces away, Diana stood frozen, a statue of conflicted duty. Her fingers were locked around her bowstring, the enchanted arrow quivering violently in her grip.

Her knuckles were white, the wood of the bow creaking under the strain of her unsteady hands. She tracked the two combatants across the blood-soaked lawn, Rex weaving through crimson sprays, Leonidas a juggernaut of divine fury, her eyes darting between them like a cornered animal.

Her breath came in shallow, ragged gasps that whistled through her teeth. She was hunting for a weakness, a moment of vulnerability, a target she could justify killing, but there was none.

Only two monsters tearing each other apart.

Finally, the tension snapped. The bowstring went slack.

The arrow tip dipped toward the dirt. Diana’s arm sagged as if the bones had turned to water, and she collapsed inward, covering her face with her free hand while her shoulders shook with suppressed heaves.

Beside her, Valentina looked as though she had been drained of all color. Her skin had taken on the sickly, translucent pallor of old parchment.

Her eyes were fixed on Leonidas, not on the man she had once known, but on the terrifying transformation occurring before her eyes. She watched the red lines crawling across his flesh like living parasites, pulsing with each heartbeat.

Her lips moved in a silent prayer, or perhaps a curse, before she finally found her voice.

"I never knew," she whispered, her voice so faint it was nearly lost to the wind. "In all those years of respecting him as my son in law... in all those years of standing by his side... I never knew he carried anything like that inside him."

The whisper pierced through the static of the battle, catching Rex’s attention for a fleeting, razor-sharp second.

For the first time since the first blow was struck, Rex allowed his mind to drift away from the immediate choreography of violence. He pulled back from the fight, hovering above the moment, examining the larger shape of the puzzle.

’The Wrath,’ Rex mused, his inner monologue cold and analytical even as he parried a bone-crushing blow from Leonidas’s sword. ’It’s not just a power... It’s a corruption.’

He knew from his time in Lustia that a mark of the Forbidden Gods could not simply be pressed onto a mortal like a coin dropped into a pocket.

Such power required a gateway.

It required either a consent so deep and subconscious that the victim never realized they had surrendered their soul or a bond so intimate and natural between the marked and the source that the soul opened itself without being asked.

Leonidas had carried this mark for decades. He had lived his entire life without feeling the dormant god stirring beneath his ribs.

That meant the seed had been planted long ago. Perhaps a trauma in his youth, a loss so profound it created a vacuum in his spirit.

A grief or a rage so cavernous that a door in his soul had swung open just a crack, allowing something ancient and hungry to slip a splinter through.

The seed had slept, buried beneath layers of duty, fatherhood, and honor. But today, as he watched his wife broken and as he watched his legacy dismantled piece by piece, the soil had finally become fertile enough for the corruption to sprout.

The pain had watered the seed, and now, the Wrath was blooming in blood.

Rex did not give the source a name. To name it was to give it power, and he refused to grant that courtesy to an unknown entity.

He simply filed the revelation away in a mental vault marked ’ASK LUSTIA.’

The moment of introspection ended as abruptly as it had begun. Leonidas roared, a sound that shattered the remaining windows of the estate, and lunged forward with his sword aimed directly at Rex’s heart.

Rex’s eyes flashed with violet fire as he stepped back into the slaughter.

The fight was far from over.