Chapter 1318. Not This City! (It’s Not Mercy, It’s Property Management)

Chapter 1318: 1318. Not This City! (It’s Not Mercy, It’s Property Management)

Rex didn’t retreat; he exploded.

"Fine then," he growled, his voice dropping into something primal as he shoved his palm toward the earth. "Let’s see how fast you can run through hell!"

He tapped into Elemental Magic Creation, but he didn’t reach for the predictable flames of a novice. He reached deeper, twisting the fundamental frequencies of mana until he birthed something alien.

A wave of violet flame rolled out of his palm in a flat, roaring sheet that swept across the entire front garden.

This wasn’t orange or red; it was a sickly, beautiful amethyst that hummed with a sound like grinding glass.

The fire tore across the rose bed, incinerating the petals into ash in milliseconds, and screamed toward the iron fence, melting the metal into glowing slag.

The heat was so intense it created a vacuum, sucking the oxygen from the air. Rex braced himself, expecting to see the charred corpse of the girl who had just broken his ribs.

But when the violet haze dissipated, Evelyn stood on the far side of the yard. She was untouched.

Not a single strand of her hair was singed; not a speck of ash clung to her clothes. Rex’s eyes widened as the realization struck him like a second blow: she hadn’t dodged the fire.

She had moved through it. She had threaded her body through the microscopic gaps between the tongues of flame, moving in the nanoseconds of space between the fire’s expansion.

She was moving in the spaces between moments.

’God damn it,’ Rex thought, a surge of genuine adrenaline drowning out the pain in his shattered knee. ’I’m not fighting a person...’

’I’m fighting a ghost... A rumor of a human being.’ Frustration boiled in his blood.

"Stay still, damn you!" he roared.

He slammed both fists into the ground, invoking Geokinesis. The earth groaned in protest as he shaped jagged spears of compressed stone, sending them erupting from the soil along the path she had taken.

Whole rows of stone lances each six feet long and sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel shot upward like a trap snapping shut. But as each spear pierced the air where she had been, it rose a fraction of a second too late.

Each one struck only empty air and disturbed dirt.

"You’re slow," Evelyn’s voice said.

Rex froze. She wasn’t twenty meters away.

She was right there. Her voice came from somewhere near his left ear, cold, clear, and utterly devoid of the tremor that should accompany such violence.

She was close enough that he could feel the static electricity from her Conduction stage making the hair on his arms stand up.

Rex turned his head sharply, blood spraying from his split lip as he laughed a wet, delighted sound.

"I know I am!" he barked, his eyes blazing with manic hunger. "That’s what makes this fun!"

"Keep going, Evelyn! Push me harder!"

The fight was spiraling into something beyond mortal comprehension, but amidst the chaos of crumbling stone and violet flames, a small, fragile thread of connection pulled at his mind.

Through the telepathic link, he felt her.

Lily.

Behind the protective stone ring that had followed him across the property, Lily stood frozen. Rex could sense her terror as if it were his own.

Her face was ghostly white, her pupils blown wide with horror. He felt the sharp sting of her biting through her own lip in her distress; a bright thread of crimson ran down her chin.

Then, her voice pierced through the psychic static, small, shaking, but laced with a fierce, desperate courage.

’Don’t die.’

’Please, Rex... don’t die.’

Rex felt a pang of something almost like tenderness before his predatory instincts slammed back into place. He answered her mentally, his tone deliberately casual even as his ribs screamed in agony.

’I’m not even serious yet, little bird,’ he told her.

He felt her flinch through the link, her fear momentarily replaced by a stunned disbelief at his arrogance.

But there was no time for sentiment. The air pressure around them suddenly dropped. The temperature plummeted.

The blue sparks dancing around Evelyn’s fingertips stopped flickering and began to glow with a steady, terrifying intensity that turned the night sky white.

The erratic, chaotic energy of her previous attacks vanished, replaced by something focused, something singular, something absolute.

Evelyn Astralight stopped moving like a sprinter. She began to move like the storm itself.

She changed the shape of the fight.

Evelyn didn’t just attack; she rewrote the physics of the battlefield.

She lunged forward, delivering a flat-footed kick to Rex’s sternum. There was no thunderclap this time; there was only a terrifying, vacuum-sealed silence as her foot connected.

The impact didn’t just hurt; it erased his sense of equilibrium. The world didn’t spin; it slid away in a nauseating, long streak of motion.

Rex was hurled backward like a ragdoll, his body tearing through the wrought iron gates of the estate with a screech of rending metal.

He plowed through the cobblestone street, his spine grinding against the stones, before smashing through the brick storefront of a bakery.

Flour dust exploded into the air like a white cloud, mingling with the blood spraying from his nose.

Before he could even register the taste of drywall and yeast, she was there.

A streak of cobalt blue light hooked into the collar of his shirt. Evelyn wasn’t just following him; she was dragging him.

She moved with the inexorable momentum of a freight train, pulling him out of the ruins of the bakery and into the open, gasping streets of Aethelgard.

The private war of the garden was over.

The city itself had become her weapon, her playground, and her anvil.

Shhhhh BOOM!

She tore across the rooftops, each footstep less of a stride and more of a controlled detonation. Slate tiles exploded upward in showers of ceramic shrapnel.

A line of ancient chimneys toppled one after another as she passed, their collapse echoing through the narrow alleys like distant artillery.

Below, the nightly patrols of demons and orcs creatures that usually struck terror into the hearts of men were scattered like dead leaves in a hurricane.

One orc was flung bodily into a stone doorway with a wet thwack, its ribs collapsing instantly; another’s spear spun end over end into the night sky as it was tossed aside by the mere displaced air of her passing.

Terror gripped the city. Civilians scrambled beneath overturned tables; shopkeepers barricaded themselves behind barrels, their faces pale masks of horror.

Children pressed themselves against their mothers’ skirts, hands clamped over their ears to block out the supernatural cacophony.

Rex saw a group of terrified shoppers frozen in the middle of a plaza as Evelyn prepared to pivot for a devastating strike. Instinct took over.

"Not this city!" Rex roared.

He slammed his palms against the cobblestones.

KRA KOOM.

A massive wall of reinforced stone erupted from the ground, forming a makeshift shield between the civilians and the impending shockwave.

Two streets later, as she prepared another lightning-laced lunge, he did it again, tearing earth from the depths to create a barrier. Then again, a block after that.

It wasn’t mercy he told himself fiercely. It was ownership.

The more of Aethelgard that crumbled under her heels, the less of it he had left to rule. He wanted to dominate a kingdom, not a graveyard.

Evelyn didn’t acknowledge his intervention. She simply turned, her eyes fixed on the highest point in the district.

With a burst of speed that cracked the pavement beneath her, she ran straight up the face of the Grand Academy.

Fifteen stories of pale, ancient stone rose before her. To any other being, it was a vertical cliff; to Evelyn, it was a highway laid on its side.

She sprinted upward, defying gravity with every impossible step. Glass exploded outward from every window she passed, raining down in glittering deadly showers that caught the moonlight.

Rex refused to be left behind. "You want to play god, Evelyn?! Then let’s fly!!!"

He didn’t use Telekinesis. He didn’t manipulate gravity.

He tapped into his Peak Superhuman Physique, pushing his muscles to the literal breaking point where tendons screamed and bones groaned under the strain.

He coiled his legs like massive industrial springs and launched himself off the cobblestones. His body cut through the air in a long, desperate arc, a human missile aimed at the climbing storm.

He caught her on the ninth floor.

The collision was seismic. They met beside the shattered windows of the Academy, suspended in midair.

For several heartbeats, the world became nothing but a brutal, staccato rhythm of violence. It was a frantic choreography of desperation: fist against forearm, knee against shoulder, elbow against ribs.

Each exchange sounded like a relentless drumroll of bricks being hurled against a concrete floor. Thud crack, thud crack.

Blood sprayed from Rex’s split lips as he traded blows with the girl who had become a force of nature.

Between each impact, their eyes locked, his blazing with a manic, defiant joy, hers cold with the singular, focused intent to destroy everything in her path.