Chapter 1322. Gravity Is a Cruel Mistress. Please Leave a Review.

Chapter 1322: 1322. Gravity Is a Cruel Mistress. Please Leave a Review.

Rex didn’t stop. He couldn’t not yet.

The adrenaline was singing in his veins, a symphony of newfound power that demanded more. With a violent upward jerk of his hand, he used Telekinesis to fling Evelyn twenty meters straight into the sky.

She became a broken marionette thrown toward the heavens, her limbs flailing uselessly against the empty air.

"Gravity is a cruel mistress, isn’t she?" Rex called up to her, his voice carrying effortlessly through the wind. "Let’s see how she treats you when she’s angry."

He released the hold. She fell like a discarded doll.

CRUNCH SHATTER.

The paving stones beneath her disintegrated upon impact, but Rex wasn’t done with the choreography of her suffering. As she tried to gasp for air amidst the rubble, he invoked Earthen Divine Authority.

Massive, jagged columns of stone erupted from the ground like the teeth of some subterranean titan, slamming into her from below with bone crushing force, launching her back upward.

Before she could plummet again, two more pillars surged up from either side, closing in on her like the inexorable jaws of a stone trap.

They slammed together, crushing her midair, the grinding of rock against flesh producing a wet, sickening sound.

To add insult to injury, Rex unleashed a new cruelty: a torrent of violet fire, a phenomenon born of his own twisted imagination.

The flames licked at her clothes, searing through fabric to char her skin with a heat that had no name and no end.

Sssssss FROOOM!

But the true terror lay in the hidden venom within his strikes. A thread of wrath, the raw, unadulterated fury he had harvested from Leonidas, ran through his knuckles like liquid mercury.

It was only a fraction, a mere trickle of someone else’s ancient grief and rage poured into the weight of his fist.

Yet, wherever that violet tinged strike landed, the impact defied physics. A simple jab landed with the devastating force of a battering ram.

He was being careful. He was being precise.

He wasn’t trying to end this; he was calibrating a weapon.

He wanted her awake.

He wanted her conscious enough to understand every ounce of her humiliation.

"Speed means nothing if you can’t touch the person you’re hitting," he said, stepping forward as the stone jaws released her, only to catch her with a brutal fist to the ribs.

CRACK.

"You built your whole style on one singular idea that you are untouchable," he continued, his voice conversational, almost conversational, as he drove a knee into her solar plexus.

OOF.

"But you’re fighting someone who spent the last twenty minutes systematically dismantling that idea."

Evelyn was a wreck of blood and scorched flesh. Her breathing came in wet, rattling gasps.

"Go... to... hell..." she rasped, spitting a glob of crimson onto his boots.

"I’ve already been there, Evelyn... I’ve made friends," Rex replied, his eyes glinting with a predator’s amusement.

He moved in closer, his next strike a measured blow to her shoulder that sent sparks of violet flame cascading down her arm. "I’ve read your soul’s register."

"I’ve seen the cracks in the armor... I know what you’re hiding behind that precious little seal of yours."

She fought back with the desperation of the drowning. Every time his fist found flesh, she answered with a curse that burned hotter than his flames.

"You... bastard..." she wheezed.

Then, through the haze of pain and the metallic taste of blood, she forced the names out.

"Elliot..." she coughed, blood spraying between the syllables. "Apollo... Helena..."

Rex’s smile widened. ’Perfect.’

Each name she spat at him was another log thrown onto his internal fire. He didn’t want her submission; he wanted her rage.

He needed that anger to burn white hot, to reach a crescendo that would fuel whatever horrific transformation he had planned for the finale. He needed her spirit to be screaming before he finally broke it.

At the far edge of the plaza, standing behind a protective ring of shattered stone and debris, the family watched in horrified silence.

They saw the goddess of lightning reduced to a bleeding wreck, and they saw the man they thought they knew transform into something far more ancient and terrible.

Behind the protective barrier of shattered stone, the spectators were not merely watching a fight; they were witnessing a vivisection of a soul.

Through the psychic link, Lily was screaming.

It wasn’t a shout; it was a long, hoarse, unrelenting wail, aSTOP.’aw sound of pure agony that reverberated in Rex’s skull: ’STOP, PLEASE, STOP, STOP, STOP. ’

He let the psychic feedback wash over him like acid rain, unheeding, unfeeling. He didn’t answer.

He couldn’t afford to.

Diana was doubled over, her hands pressed so hard against her mouth that her knuckles were white, her shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs.

Cassandra and Gorvasha stood rigid at the front of the Underlayer line, their faces grim and almost disturbingly satisfied with the look of predators who had finally seen the true nature of their alpha.

Lilith stood apart, her fingers knotted so tightly in her sleeves that her nails drew blood from her own palms; she knew, better than any of them, the terrifying depth of the abyss Rex had opened.

He hadn’t even begun to show them the true scale of his hunger.

Valentina watched in deafening silence, tears carving clean tracks through the grime on her face. Elizabeth simply closed her eyes.

Both women understood, in their own fractured ways, that they weren’t watching a duel; they were watching Rex close the final page of an old Chapter and begin writing something far more bloodstained.

CRACK BOOM.

Evelyn was a phenomenon of sheer stubbornness. She lasted far longer than any opponent Rex had ever broken.

She was defiance given flesh.

Every time he thought he had drained her dry, she would snarl a wet, gurgling sound of pure hatred and claw her way back toward her feet.

The lightning inside her refused to die; it erupted in sudden, violent detonations, tiny azure explosions that tore at the fabric of his Telekinesis.

For a heartbeat, the invisible pressure would falter, the grip slipping just enough for her to find purchase.

SHHH THWACK!

In one desperate, suicidal gambit, she tore her left hand free from his psychic vice. Before his brain could even register the lapse in control, she channeled every remaining spark of her essence into a single point.

Her fist, wrapped in a corona of blinding white lightning, drove straight into Rex’s sternum.

THUD.

The impact echoed across the plaza like a sledgehammer hitting an anvil. Rex was rocked backward, his boots skidding two full steps across the cracked stone.

He stumbled, his breath catching for a split second as the lightning burned through his shirt and seared his skin.

Silence fell over the plaza as the family held their breath. Then, Rex looked down at the smoking burn mark on his chest.

He touched it with two fingers, feeling the raw heat, and then he began to laugh. It was a rich, genuine sound the laughter of a man who had just been given the greatest gift in the world.

"There it is," he whispered, his eyes blazing with an unholy light. "That’s what I wanted."

He didn’t wait for her to recover. He moved like a predator closing a distance.

He delivered a devastating roundhouse kick that connected with her midsection.

KRA KOOOOM!

Evelyn was launched like a projectile. She tore through the first wall of a nearby building with a shower of mortar and brick, plowed through a second, and finally came to rest embedded in the twisted rebar and rubble of a third.

Rex didn’t run. He didn’t rush.

He simply began to walk toward the destruction, his footsteps measured and casual, the sound of a man going to collect a prize.

"I was hoping for a long fight, Evelyn," he called out, his voice echoing off the ruined buildings. "Don’t disappoint me now..."

"Give me everything you have left."

When he finally reached the wreckage, he found her. She was lying flat on her back amidst the jagged teeth of broken glass and pulverized concrete.

Her hair was matted with blood and dust. Her chest rose and fell in short, shallow, desperate gasps that sounded like tearing paper.

Her arms were a ruin of red, ragged flesh, scorched by both her own power and his violet flames.

The lightning that had once commanded the sky was now reduced to pathetic, faint blue sparks flickering at her fingertips, the dying embers of a collapsed star.

But when Rex looked down, he didn’t see a victim. He saw a warrior.

Her eyes were open. They weren’t glazed with shock or dimmed by pain.

They were as clear, as hard, and as cold as they had been when she first stepped into the garden. There was no surrender in those azure depths.

There was only the promise of one last, beautiful catastrophe.