Chapter 1313. It Never Landed (Neither Did I, for a While)

Chapter 1313: 1313. It Never Landed (Neither Did I, for a While)

For one agonizing, suspended second, Rex held the strike above him. The sphere of swirling violet and crimson energy hummed with a predatory hunger, casting grotesque, dancing shadows across Leonidas’s dying face.

This was not a display of cruelty; it was pure, cold calculation. Rex didn’t hesitate because he didn’t feel the need to.

A dead Leonidas would be a clean, undeniable message to Aethelgard, a lesson written in blood that no court could ignore.

Moreover, it would remove the final obstacle between him and Helena. He could already envision the path ahead: the broken man removed, the grief fresh, and the woman left vulnerable to the kind of seduction that required a predator’s touch.

Rex drew his arm back. The muscles in his shoulder coiled like steel cables.

Then, he let it fall.

’It never landed.’

The world didn’t just change; it shattered.

Something struck Rex from his peripheral vision with a force that defied every law of physics he had internalized. It wasn’t a punch, and it wasn’t a spell; it was an impossibility.

A crack of thunder tore through the air, arriving a split second after the impact, as if sound itself had been too slow to keep up with the violence.

BOOOOOOOM!

The impact felt like being struck by a falling moon. Rex’s entire body was instantly converted into a projectile.

The force was so absolute that his ribs didn’t just break; they pulverized. His vision went white as he was launched backward in a screaming arc of displaced air.

CRASH! CRUNCH! SHATTER!

He tore through the first garden wall like it was made of tissue paper. He plowed through a second wall, the masonry exploding around him in a deadly storm of stone shards.

He tore through a third wall at the edge of the estate, his body a living wrecking ball. He flew across the neighboring lot, a tumbling mass of blood and broken momentum, until he reached a massive, ancient oak tree.

THWACK CRACK!

He hit the trunk spine first. The ancient wood didn’t just crack; it exploded.

A fountain of splinters and bark erupted as the tree buckled under the supernatural kinetic energy of his flight. Rex disappeared into the wreckage of wood and earth.

Silence descended, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the distant crackle of settling debris.

Rex lay motionless in the twisted wreckage. A thick, dead branch lay across his chest like a macabre trophy, and his ears rang with a high-pitched, piercing whine that drowned out the world.

His breathing came in ragged, wet gasps.

’Everything hurts.’

The thought was primal, almost animalistic. The blow had carried something more than just kinetic force; there had been a sting to it, a bright, crackling bite that felt like lightning made flesh.

It had bypassed his defenses and sunk deeper than any physical strike should have. Inside his mind, he could feel Full Potential Adaptation screaming, scrambling like a thousand frantic hands to analyze the unknown variable, to understand a force that shouldn’t exist.

[Warning: Structural integrity compromised.]

[Infinite Regeneration: Overdrive initiated.]

His healing factor kicked in with violent intensity. He could feel his bones grinding against each other as Infinite Regeneration poured every ounce of his cellular energy into knitting his shattered frame back together.

But even with the god tier healing, the ribs on his left side refused to settle immediately; they twitched and popped as they fought to realign.

Rex coughed, spraying a thick stream of arterial blood across the grass. With a snarl of pure frustration, he shoved the heavy branch off his chest.

His muscles screamed as he forced himself upright, each movement a battle against the trauma still coursing through his nerves.

His vision cleared. His pupils dilated as he focused, ignoring the pain that threatened to black him out.

His gaze didn’t linger on his own injuries. His eyes went straight back to the garden.

The world rushed back to Rex in agonizing waves of sensory overload. The ringing in his ears began to subside, replaced by the distant, haunting sounds of the garden: the crackle of burning embers, the wet drip of blood from broken stone, and the low, urgent murmurs of women.

He forced himself to stand, his legs unsteady as Infinite Regeneration worked at a fever pitch. His left ribs still felt like jagged glass shifting beneath his skin, and every breath tasted like copper.

But he didn’t care about the pain. His mind was already cataloguing the tactical shift.

The battlefield had transformed in the mere seconds he had been airborne.

A good deal had changed. The chessboard had been flipped, the pieces rearranged with impossible speed.

Leonidas and Helena were gone from their original positions. In their place, two bodies lay side by side on the grass near the collapsed stone wall, huddled together in a desperate parody of the intimacy they had once shared.

They were now enclosed within a defensive ring of protection, a living fortress of steel and magic.

Rex’s enhanced vision cut through the chaos. He saw Lily, her small frame shaking with restrained terror, pressing both palms against her mother’s bruised and blood-streaked face.

Elizabeth was a blur of motion beside them, her hands working with mechanical precision to wind a bandage around Leonidas’s ruined, mangled arm, trying to stem the crimson tide that refused to stop flowing.

Then there was the light. A warm, pulsing green glow emanated from Aisella’s open palms as she bent over Helena’s chest.

The healing magic poured into the woman like liquid emerald, but Aisella’s face was tight with a concentration so fierce it looked like pain. She was fighting something—a wound that didn’t want to close.

Rex’s eyes scanned the perimeter, noting the new threats.

When he had been thrown, the garden had been occupied by demon and orc soldiers who had been poised to exploit the carnage.

Now, the dynamic had shifted completely.

Talyra stood like a statue of vengeance just paces away, an arrow nocked and drawn to her ear, her breathing shallow and deadly. Flanking her were Nerith and Mireya, forming a triangular killing zone.

Nerith’s bare hand glowed with the sickly, beautiful amber light of conjured leaves that swirled like razor blades around her wrist; Mireya held a blade carved from pure white frost that seemed to drink the very light from the air.

They weren’t attacking. Not yet.

They stood in a silent, lethal line that said nothing but warned of everything.

A clear message to the Underlayer forces: ’Cross this line, and you die.’

The demons and orcs had frozen, their savage instincts warring with the obvious supernatural lethality of the women before them. None dared to take a step forward.

’Someone moved them,’ Rex thought, his mind racing through the implications. ’Someone carried them across this entire section of the garden in the time it took me to be hurled through three walls.’

’That level of speed... that level of coordinated intervention...’

His gaze traveled past the defensive circle, past the healers and the archers, toward the space between himself and the wounded.

His heart stuttered.

There, standing alone on the churned, blood-soaked grass, positioned between Rex’s advancing fury and the fragile sanctuary of the women, stood a lone figure.

She wasn’t part of the defensive ring, and she wasn’t part of the demon horde. She was something else entirely.

Evelyn Astralight.