Chapter 1317. Foresight Update: Warnings Now Arrive Half a Second After Impact

Chapter 1317: 1317. Foresight Update: Warnings Now Arrive Half a Second After Impact

Evelyn didn’t scream. She didn’t weep.

She didn’t even curse his name. The shock of his revelation had burned through her fear, leaving behind something colder than any storm, a vacuum of pure, focused intent.

She lowered her body into a runner’s crouch, her center of gravity shifting until she looked less like a girl and more like a weapon primed for discharge.

Her voice, when it finally came, was terrifyingly quiet, stripped of all inflection. Her anger had passed the volatile stage of rage; it had crystallized into something absolute.

"I don’t care what your system is," she said, each word cutting through the charged air like a scalpel. "I don’t care what world you came from or what mark you carry!"

"You killed Apollo...! And you tore Elliot’s family apart...! MY FAMILY!"

"That is the only truth that matters."

Rex’s laughter was a low, guttural sound that rumbled from the depths of his chest.

"Good," he said, spreading his arms wide in an obscene gesture of invitation. "Don’t hold back, Evelyn."

"Use the whole city if you have to... Burn every soul in Aethelgard to ash if it gives you enough strength."

"I want to see it! I want to find exactly where your limit lies before I break you!!!"

Then, she vanished.

There was no warning. No displaced air, no crackle of energy, no visual distortion.

One moment she was ten meters away, and the next, there was only a hole in reality where she had stood.

The first thing Rex experienced was not sight or sound, but the raw, overwhelming agony of impact.

His foresight, that divine sixth sense that usually screamed warnings seconds before danger, remained eerily silent, hanging in the back of his mind like a bell whose rope had been severed.

There was no premonition, no shiver down his spine.

CRACK THUD.

A blow struck his chest with the force of a falling meteor. His sternum didn’t just break; it shattered inward with a wet, sickening snap that reverberated through his entire skeletal structure.

Before he could even gasp, a second strike caught him square in the jaw. The force was so disproportionate that his head spun violently to the side, vertebrae grinding against each other as his vision fractured into kaleidoscopic shards of pain and white light.

Then came the third.

A kick, delivered with the terrifying precision of the Conduction stage, slammed into his left flank. His ribs gave way in rapid succession, crack, crack, crack, crack, sounding like a grotesque rendition of piano keys being played by a madman.

The physics of the impact launched him backward. He became a human projectile, tearing through the space between them at impossible speeds.

A thunderclap rolled across the garden; a full heartbeat later, a delayed reaction from the displaced atmosphere, as if the sky itself was struggling to comprehend the violence that had just occurred.

Rex was a blur of motion as he plowed through the environment. He smashed through the marble colonnade, sending stone fragments exploding like shrapnel.

He tore through the garden wall as if it were made of parchment, plowed through the side of a neighboring house with a thunderous crash of splintering wood and crumbling brick, and finally erupted out the far side.

He skidded across the debris of the formal rose bed in the front yard, his body carving a furrow through the dirt and crushed petals before coming to a halt, face down in the blood-soaked earth.

His mouth filled instantly with the hot, copper taste of blood. His chest felt like it had been hollowed out with a sledgehammer, a bright, searing ruin of agony that made breathing an impossibility.

Through the haze of pain and the ringing in his ears, blue translucent windows began to scroll across his vision, steady and clinical.

[Full Potential Adaptation: First contact with Swift Step. Analysis running. Estimated completion: 2.7 seconds.]

[First contact with Conduction (lightning impact). Analysis running. Estimated completion: 3.4 seconds.]

Rex rolled onto his back with a groan that sounded more like a purr of satisfaction. He laughed a wet, choking sound that ended in a spray of crimson across the crushed roses.

He spat a thick glob of blood into the dirt, watching it soak into the soil with a detached curiosity.

’This is it,’ he thought, his mind racing even as his body screamed in protest. ’This is the beautiful problem.’

As he forced himself upright, his bones grinding together like broken glass, he began to analyze the failure. His Foresight was a god-tier ability, but it wasn’t clairvoyance in the traditional sense; it was hyperaccelerated pattern recognition.

It read the future by reading intent. It mapped the micro twitches of an opponent’s muscles, the subtle shift of their center of gravity, and the minute dilation of their pupils.

From those data points, it constructed a prophetic image of what they meant to do three seconds ahead, ten seconds ahead, or sometimes forty.

It worked flawlessly against anyone who existed within the realm of human thought—those who prepared, who hesitated, who breathed before they acted.

But Evelyn Astralight didn’t think. She simply was. Her intent didn’t precede her movement; it was fused to it.

Her will only crystallized at the exact moment her body crossed three meters of ground, and by the time the Foresight could interpret that intent and project the warning to his conscious mind, the strike had already landed.

Every warning arrived half a second late—a fatal delay. In a fight at this velocity, half a second might as well have been an eternity.

’I could end this now,’ he admitted to himself, feeling the raw power coiled in his soul register.

He could tap into Kaeleth’s authority, the power over the very foundation of Aethelgard itself. It sat there, dormant and terrifying, one door among countless others in the endless hallway of his power.

But he refused to open it. He had forged a rule with himself: the people who needed to use such overwhelming force were those who were uncertain of their position.

He was not uncertain.

He wanted this fight to be witnessed.

He wanted the whole city to see what happened when they tried to chase a god.

He dragged himself out of the ruined rose bed, blood streaming from the corner of his mouth, a feral grin splitting his face.

"Come on then, Evelyn!" he roared. "Show me what you’re worth!"

She answered with violence.

She didn’t just attack; she shattered the concept of direction. She came at him from five directions simultaneously.

Rex recognized the afterimage trick he had seen in the corridor, but this was a technique that had evolved into something predatory and vicious. Five glowing silhouettes spread across the lawn in a perfect circle, each one trailing a lethal streak of cobalt lightning.

They were no longer mere optical illusions; they were physical manifestations of her speed.

Rex reacted instinctively, lashing out with a fist charged with Telekinesis to crush the nearest silhouette.

BOOM.

The afterimage burst in a flash of white light, but it was a trap. The displaced energy triggered a counter reaction: a bolt of concentrated lightning slapped across his face with the force of a whip, searing his skin and blinding his left eye in a cascade of blue sparks.

CRUNCH.

Before he could recover, a second silhouette tore through his blind spot, driving a lightning-enhanced elbow directly into his kidney.

The pain was white hot, a jagged blade of agony that made his vision swim. He spun, desperate to rebalance, but the third silhouette was already there.

A hooked heel slammed into the back of his knee with the precision of a guillotine.

Rex’s leg gave way. His kneecap cracked audibly under the force, sending a shockwave of pain up his thigh.

He collapsed onto one knee in the dirt, his breath coming in ragged, bloody gasps. He spat more blood into the grass, his head hanging low as the five blue streaks of light closed the circle around him once more.