Chapter 1321. Caught You! (Hands in Pockets, Obviously)

Chapter 1321: 1321. Caught You! (Hands in Pockets, Obviously)

The key to everything, the secret to his survival, had been Adaptation.

For forty excruciating minutes, Rex had played the victim. His reflexes had been deliberately late, his movements sluggish.

But it wasn’t just fatigue; it was a tactical sacrifice.

Every time Evelyn’s lightning had connected, his Conduction ability had been forcibly rerouted, that electrical fury going through his own nervous system, scrambling his synapses and dragging his reaction time half a beat behind his own mind.

He had been letting her rewrite his biology, letting her lightning become a foreign language he had to learn to speak.

Now, the lesson was over. Conduction was a closed book.

The lightning no longer scrambled his nerves; it obeyed them. His body was no longer a passenger to his mind; it was its weapon.

He didn’t need to match her god-like speed; he only needed to wait until her speed stopped changing him.

’Now,’ his mind whispered. Now, we dance.’

Evelyn reached the end of her trajectory. The Voltaic Rail screamed beneath her feet like a dying god, a streak of azure light that tore through the salt spray.

Her fist was already drawn back, a fist loaded with enough kinetic energy and electrical voltage to crack a continent. She was a meteor made of hatred, aimed directly at his face.

Rex did not flinch.

He did not duck.

He did not even blink.

Three milliseconds before her knuckles would have pulverized his skull, Rex snapped his right hand shut.

[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: FULL POTENTIAL TELEKINESIS ENGAGED]

[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: GRAVITY MANIPULATION OVERLOAD]

In that infinitesimal slice of time, Rex seized every single molecule of Evelyn’s body simultaneously.

At the exact same instant, he commanded the gravity in a five-meter sphere surrounding her to spike to a hundred times its normal pull.

CRUNCH STOP.

The sound was wrong; it was the sound of physics breaking. Her fist stopped a hand’s breadth from his nose, frozen in midair.

Her body, which had been hurtling forward faster than a launched spear, simply ceased to exist in motion. She hung there, suspended in the air as if embedded in invisible, unbreakable glass.

For one heartbeat, there was absolute, terrifying silence.

Then, gravity claimed its debt.

Evelyn dropped. She didn’t just fall; she was slammed downward by the sheer weight of the compressed space.

She struck the surface of the Convergence Waters with a sound like the world cracking in half.

BOOOOOM SHHHHHHHHHHH!

The ocean didn’t splash; it vanished. A colossal pillar of superheated steam exploded upward from the point of impact, a hundred meters tall, rolling into the storm clouds like a white funeral shroud.

The shockwave was so violent it rattled the very foundations of the floating island above them, sending tremors through the bedrock.

Inside the crushing grip of the gravity field, Evelyn’s power fought back. Rex could feel the desperate, wild arcs of blue fire writhing and spitting like trapped serpents within the sphere, clawing for a way to escape, seeking any crack in his control.

But there was no escape. Every muscle, every spark of mana, every instant of her motion was locked in a grip so absolute it left no room to accelerate, no room to breathe, no room to exist.

"Don’t struggle, Evelyn," Rex murmured, his voice cold as the deep sea. "It only makes the pressure worse."

With a casual flick of his fingers, he tore her upward. He dragged her out of the roiling steam, lifting her broken, convulsing form high above the waves.

He carried her effortlessly through the air, past the cliff edge, and over the ruins of the city.

He brought her back to where it all began: the center of the ruined plaza she had systematically destroyed an hour earlier.

The stones were still warm from her earlier lightning; the air still smelled of burnt stone and her hatred.

Rex hovered above her for a moment, watching her suspended in his telekinetic vice.

Then, he simply let go.

CRASH.

She fell the last few feet. Her body hit the ancient paving stones with the force of a falling star.

The ground groaned and shattered as she slammed into the earth, creating a crater ten meters across that swallowed bone, stone, and debris alike.

Rex descended slowly, his boots touching the edge of the crater. He looked down at her, the unstoppable storm, now broken and bleeding in the dirt.

A genuine, satisfied smile spread across his face.

"Caught you," Rex said.

Rex began to walk. His boots crunched against the debris with a slow, deliberate rhythm.

His hands were shoved casually into his pockets, his shoulders relaxed, looking for all the world like a man taking a leisurely stroll through a park on a pleasant spring afternoon.

But his eyes, those cold, calculating eyes, never left the crater.

At the bottom of that hollowed-out wound in the earth, Evelyn lay shattered. Her eyes were wide, pupils dilated with something far worse than pain: terror.

For a woman who had spent every waking moment since her ascension moving at speeds that defied causality, whose entire identity was built on being the untouchable lightning bolt, the sudden, absolute paralysis was a violation.

She was a prisoner in her own skin.

’Move, damn you!’

’MOVE!’ her mind shrieked.

She strained against the invisible shackles of his telekinesis with everything she had. Blue-white lightning crawled up and down her arms in furious, desperate spasms, seeking to discharge enough voltage to shatter his grip.

But the gravity field Rex had woven around her acted like a physical lid, pressing her down, crushing her electrical fury back into her own bones. Her mouth fell open, her throat working convulsively, until she finally found her voice.

"AAAAAAAGGHHHH...!"

It wasn’t a battle cry; it was a raw, wordless scream of primal frustration that tore at her vocal cords.

The sound reverberated off the crater walls, and the very stones around her cracked from the sheer force of her desperate energy.

Rex did not hurry. He savored the silence that followed her scream.

He wanted her to feel the weight of her helplessness before the weight of his fists.

Reaching the edge of the crater, he didn’t even take his hands out of his pockets. With a lazy, almost bored flick of his wrist, he activated his telekinesis.

Evelyn was yanked upward, her body dragged through the air as if pulled by an invisible hook. She rose until she was suspended directly in front of him, hovering at eye level, her boots dangling uselessly above the jagged debris.

"You wanted to see how fast I could be, Evelyn?" Rex asked, his voice quiet, almost intimate. "Let me show you something else."

WHAM.

He drove his fist into her stomach. This wasn’t just a punch; it was the full expression of Peak Superhuman Physique.

Every muscle fiber in his core, every ounce of his enhanced mass, was channeled into that single point of impact.

CRUNCH.

Evelyn folded over his fist like a sheet of wet paper. The air was punched out of her lungs in a wet spray of crimson that painted Rex’s cheek.

Before she could even register the agony, he delivered a vicious straight right.

THWACK.

Her head snapped to the left with a sickening crack of vertebrae. The world spun for her, a blur of pain and blood. But Rex was already moving.

He was a machine of calibrated violence. His knee came up like a piston into her sternum, BAM,BAM feeling the ribs buckle under the force.

His elbow came down like a hammer across her collarbone, CRACKINGCRACK the bone, splintering audibly in the sudden quiet of the plaza.

Finally, he pivoted on his heel. His entire body rotated in a perfect, fluid arc, putting the full momentum of his supernatural mass into a spinning roundhouse kick.

The impact caught her ribs from the side.

KRA KOOM.

Every strike was guided by Martial Arts Mastery.

There was no wasted motion.

No unnecessary energy.

Each blow was not random; it was surgical.

He wasn’t just hitting her; he was finding the exact structural weak points of her body, striking the nerves, the joints, and the organs with the terrifying precision of someone who knew exactly how to dismantle a human being.