Chapter 1309. We Have Both Forgotten How Magic Works and Are Now Just Punching

Chapter 1309: 1309. We Have Both Forgotten How Magic Works and Are Now Just Punching

The fight ground on, relentless and merciless, until the very concept of a garden had been erased from existence. What had once been a sanctuary of manicured beauty was now a wasteland of apocalyptic proportions.

The lawn had been plowed into a hellish field of craters, scorched furrows, and deep trenches carved by magical discharge. The remaining trees stood as blackened, twisted stumps, their leaves incinerated mid-fall.

The decorative pond was gone, evaporated or drained away, leaving behind nothing but a desiccated pit lined with cracked, blood-stained clay.

Acrid smoke rose from a hundred small fires that fed on the scattered debris, creating a choking haze that blurred the line between earth and sky.

In the center of this devastation, the two men stood face to face, two dying stars refusing to collapse. They were drenched, not in water, but in a thick, copper-smelling slurry of their own blood.

Leonidas had paid a catastrophic price for his supernatural resilience. A jagged, wet gash ran from his temple down across his jaw, exposing the white gleam of teeth through torn flesh.

His left arm hung at a sickening, unnatural angle, the bone clearly snapped somewhere near the elbow, swaying limply with every movement.

One leg dragged behind him, leaving a crimson trail across the dirt with every labored step. His breath came in wet, whistling gasps through ribs that had been shattered into splinters.

Yet, he was terrifying. The red lines of the Mark did not merely glow; they burned like molten wire stitched into his very soul.

Where the wounds should have bled out, the Mark acted as a grotesque surgeon; the crimson light seamed the torn edges of muscle and skin together with threads of pure energy.

He did not sway. He did not falter.

He stood like a monument of hatred that refused to acknowledge the concept of death.

’Come on then,’ Leonidas thought, his mind a storm of red static. ’Break me...! Break me so I have nothing left to lose but your life.’

Rex was not the same. The detached curiosity that had defined his earlier movements had hardened into something sharper, more primal.

His eyes burned with a cold, focused intensity as his body fought a losing war against entropy. He was a walking map of carnage: deep lacerations, third-degree burns, and bruises that turned purple before the blood could even clot.

His Infinite Regeneration was working at its absolute limit, the magical cells screaming as they tore themselves apart to rebuild what Leonidas kept destroying. The pain wasn’t an interruption; it was a constant, deafening roar in the back of his skull.

’Adapt,’ Rex commanded himself, his teeth grinding until they felt like they might crack. ’Find the pattern. Find the ceiling.’

[Six point four seconds Full Potential Adaptation engaged], his own power whispered in the back of his mind.

His nervous system seized as it recalibrated to the third escalation of Leonidas’s power the moment the Mark began to warp the air around the warrior.

Rex’s muscles tightened, his reflexes sharpening to meet the new threat. But the moment the adaptation locked in, Leonidas roared, his aura exploding outward in a shockwave of crimson heat.

The Mark surged. The power didn’t plateau; it climbed.

Leonidas rose to a fourth level of escalation, his physical presence becoming something more akin to a force of nature than a human being.

It was the shape of the thing that unsettled Rex most—the terrifying mathematics of their duel. Every time Rex constructed a perfect defense, Leonidas found a way to shatter it.

Every time Rex mastered a level of Leonidas’s power, the man in front of him ascended to the next. It was a ladder with no top rung, a game where the rules changed the moment Rex learned them.

Leonidas was always one step ahead, always shifting the ground beneath Rex’s feet, ensuring that even as Rex climbed toward perfection, the terrain remained uneven, treacherous, and deadly.

The finality of their collision shattered the remaining silence of the wasteland. There was no preamble, no tactical retreat, and no measured breathing, only the raw, desperate need to annihilate.

They collided in the center of the cratered garden with the force of two collapsing stars. Rex drove his right fist forward in a piston like strike, his knuckles connecting with Leonidas’s shattered jaw with a sound like a cannon blast.

BOOM.

Simultaneously, Leonidas swung his good arm in a vicious, desperate arc, his fist connecting with the side of Rex’s skull. The impact was wet and sickening CRACK as bone met bone.

The shockwave of their simultaneous impact rippled outward. The earth beneath their feet didn’t just tremble; it surrendered.

A jagged fissure tore through the soil, splitting the garden floor down the middle in a violent earthquake that screamed all the way to the rusted garden gates.

Both men reeled back, their bodies staggering as if struck by invisible sledgehammers. For a heartbeat, they both blinked through blood-soaked lashes, their vision swimming in crimson.

Then, with a primal snarl that sounded more like tearing metal than human speech, they charged again.

They abandoned all pretense of technique. They abandoned guards.

They abandoned magic. This was no longer a duel of sorcerers or warriors; it was two animals drowning in each other’s blood.

They traded punch for punch in a nauseating rhythm.

THUD. CRUNCH. SPLAT.

Rex buried a fist into Leonidas’s solar plexus, feeling the ribs give way like dry kindling beneath his knuckles. Leonidas answered by driving his elbow into Rex’s temple, sending a spray of brain matter and crimson across the dirt.

Neither man flinched.

Neither man blocked.

They simply walked through each other’s violence. The only sounds left in the ruined garden were the wet, guttural grunts of air being punched out of punctured lungs, the rhythmic thwack of flesh hitting flesh, and the faint, eerie hiss of Rex’s flesh knitting itself back together over fresh, gaping wounds even as they were reopened by the next blow.

’Why won’t he fall?’ Rex wondered, his mind fracturing under the relentless assault. ’His bones are powder.’

’His organs should be pulp.’

’So why does he still move?’

’You think you’ve won?’ Leonidas’s eyes screamed through his rage. ’I will drag you into hell with me before I let you walk away from this!’

There was no clear winner anymore. The concept of victory had been burned away by the heat of their hatred.

They were trapped in a perfect, horrific feedback loop: Every time Rex landed a devastating strike that should have ended a life, Leonidas’s Mark surged, his body forcibly adapting to the trauma and growing stronger in its agony.

And every time Leonidas unleashed a new level of divine fury, Rex’s Full Potential Adaptation recalculated his cellular structure, making him faster, harder, and more resilient.

It was a contest between a man who could not be killed and a man who could not be stopped, an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Rex stood there for a split second between exchanges, blood streaming from a deep gash in his forehead into his left eye, making the world a blurry, crimson haze. His knuckles were split to the bone, raw and weeping.

His breathing was a ragged rasp. In that moment of horrific clarity, he realized the futility of the stalemate.

He could let this go on. His regeneration would hold.

His adaptation would continue. He could stand in this graveyard of a garden and trade blows with this furious, broken father until the sun burned out and the stars fell from the sky.

At the end of it, he would still be standing, and Leonidas would still be fighting, and nothing, absolutely nothing, would have changed.

But the stalemate wasn’t what occupied his mind. His thoughts weren’t on the pain, the exhaustion, or the endless loop of violence.

His mind was elsewhere.