Chapter 1320. I Was Not Losing for Forty Minutes. I Was Doing Home Improvement

Chapter 1320: 1320. I Was Not Losing for Forty Minutes. I Was Doing Home Improvement

The great floating plateau of Aethelgard did not simply end; it terminated in a jagged, impossible precipice.

Below that cliff lay nothing but the howling void of the sky and the terrifying, distant mirror of the Convergence Waters, an endless, abyssal ocean with no visible floor, a liquid grave that stretched into infinity.

Evelyn didn’t just push him; she delivered a final, decisive fist to his sternum that acted like a piston, launching him into the abyss.

For three heartbeats, there was only the terrifying whistle of wind rushing past Rex’s ears as he plummeted toward the churning darkness.

Then, the sky became a warzone again. They fell, then they flew, then they fought two desperate blurs of light and shadow plummeting toward the sea in a deadly dance of gravity and mana.

SPLASH BOOM!

Evelyn hit the surface of the running water. She did not sink.

Her feet struck the ocean with the force of meteors, and instead of drowning, the sea itself rose to meet her.

She sprinted across the waves at a velocity that defied every law of fluid dynamics, splitting the ocean down the middle in a massive, frothing white trench.

Behind her, she left a wake of superheated foam and crackling lightning that hissed against the salt spray.

Every punch she threw while running was a catastrophe. When her fist connected with the air inches from Rex, the displaced pressure sent fifty-meter walls of seawater exploding upward into the storm clouds.

These liquid monoliths hung suspended for a heartbeat, trembling like glass before collapsing back down in thunderous sheets of crushing weight.

CRACK THOOM!

Rex wasn’t passive.

"Mine!" he roared, his voice lost in the gale.

He reached for the fundamental forces, invoking Elemental Mastery with a desperate, primal scream. He grabbed the very fabric of the ocean and twisted.

A vast, terrifying whirlpool erupted beneath them, a spinning funnel of black water that swallowed the horizon, designed to drag her down into the crushing depths.

But she was too fast. Evelyn ran through the maelstrom like smoke through a keyhole, her momentum unbothered by the vortex.

FWHIP CRUNCH.

A strike caught him in the center mass. Rex felt the impact as a wet, devastating explosion.

His vision flashed white as her fist punched clean through his abdomen, exiting through his spine in a spray of viscera and bone fragments.

For a moment, he was suspended in the water, watching a bloom of crimson blood spread outward from his body like a grotesque flower against the deep, bruised grey of the Convergence.

[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: SUPREME HEALING ENGAGED]

The pain withdrew as quickly as it had come, replaced by that eerie, numb pressure. The hole in his torso sealed with a wet, knitting sound, muscle weaving back over bone as if the damage had never occurred.

Rex hung suspended just above the heaving waves, coughing up blood that tasted like copper and salt. He wiped his mouth with the back of a shaking hand and looked up at her across the broken sea.

Evelyn stood atop the water as if it were solid marble. Her breathing was unnervingly steady and even and controlled as a marathon runner after a short jog.

A long, dissipating line of foam still trailed behind her like a ghostly ribbon, and arcs of lightning played over her arms like a living coat of quicksilver. She looked less like a girl and more like a storm given human form.

"You’re slow, Rex," she said.

Her voice wasn’t loud, but it carried across the water with terrifying clarity. There was no sadistic cruelty in her tone that would have implied she cared enough to enjoy it.

There was only cold, mathematical certainty. Her eyes burned with a hatred so pure it felt more dangerous than her lightning.

"I can do this all day."

Rex stared at her, blood dripping from his chin into the ocean. He felt the exhaustion in his marrow, but something else was happening.

Something deeper.

Inside the fortress of his mind, the silent, grinding gears of his consciousness had finally finished their calculations.

The data was complete.

The model was built.

The notifications began to flood his mind, cascading down through his thoughts like heavy raindrops from a leaking roof, each one announcing the birth of a new godhood.

[Full Potential Adaptation: Swift Step Coverage 100%]

[Conduction (Lightning Impact) Coverage 100%]

[Afterimage Clones Coverage 100%]

[Thunderclap Barrage Coverage 100%]

A slow, dangerous smile spread across Rex’s face. It wasn’t the grin of a survivor; it was the smile of a gambler at a high-stakes card table who had just realized he held every ace in the deck.

His eyes, bloodshot and wild, suddenly crystallized with a terrifying, lucid calm.

He straightened his posture in the empty air above the churning Convergence Waters. His bones creaked as they realigned, and despite the blood streaming down his neck, he tucked his hands casually behind his back.

He looked less like a dying man and more like a king observing a minor inconvenience.

"Thank you, Evelyn," he called out.

His voice didn’t strain or shout; it carried across the vast, salt-sprayed expanse with the unnatural clarity of a bell tolling in the night. "I have everything I need now."

Evelyn didn’t pause to consider his words. She didn’t care for philosophy or theatrics.

To her, he was a problem that needed to be erased.

VROOOOOOOM!

She ignited.

She crossed the water in a single, devastating streak of cobalt fury. Her silhouette stretched into a thin blue line, distorted by the sheer velocity of her movement.

The Voltaic Rail she had manifested earlier acted as her railgun track, a thread of lightning pulled taut between the sky and her fist. This wasn’t just another strike; this was the culmination.

This was the killing blow. Every ounce of her mana, every spark of her hatred, was compressed into the knuckles of her right hand.

Her intent was singular: to punch through his skull and vaporize whatever lay behind it. If this landed, there would be no regeneration, only ash.

But what she had not seen, which no mortal eye could possibly have perceived, was the true nature of Rex’s ’defeat.’

She thought she had been hunting a wounded animal. She didn’t realize she had been walking into a web.

For the last forty minutes, while his ribs had been shattering and his organs had been failing, Rex had been playing a different game entirely.

He hadn’t just been enduring her violence; he had been weaponizing it.

Every time she struck him, every time she tore through a street or shattered a building he happened to be occupying, he had been leaving behind invisible traps.

’I see you, Evelyn,’ he thought, his mind humming with the cold precision of a supercomputer. ’I see every micro movement.’

’Every twitch of your muscle before the bolt fires.’

Tucked beneath the cobblestones she had crushed, he had planted knots of Gravity Manipulation, each one as small and compact as a pebble but dense enough to collapse space itself.

Strung across every doorway and alleyway she had sprinted through were fine threads of Telekinesis, thinner than spider silk but stronger than steel cable.

He had been planting them while taking her blows, while pretending to stagger, while pretending to lose his grip on reality.

He had been laughing, yes, but he had been laughing at the beautiful irony of her power feeding his trap.

They stretched across the entire island like an invisible net laid beneath a rushing river, patient and deadly.

Furthermore, his Earthen Divine Authority had been working in silence, reading the vibrations of every single one of her footsteps against the island’s bedrock.

He possessed a perfect, granular record of her gait, her weight distribution, and her acceleration. And his Emotional Insight had done the rest.

He had read her anger like a book, pulse by pulse, measuring the spike in her adrenaline and the specific pattern of her rage.

He knew her temper.

He knew exactly where a woman with her particular brand of focused fury would strike when she finally decided to end a threat.

The trap was set.

The prey was charging. And Rex was finally ready to spring it.