Chapter 1326. Refund Request: Please Return My Own Punches With Interest

Chapter 1326: 1326. Refund Request: Please Return My Own Punches With Interest

Rex had barely finished the syllable before the air itself seemed to rupture.

There was no thunderclap, no dramatic warning of displaced air. Evelyn had bypassed the physical limitations of sound entirely; she had become a phenomenon of pure velocity.

One moment she was twenty paces away, a golden specter amidst the rubble; the next, she was simply there, occupying the space directly in front of Rex’s sternum.

Her fist was already a blur of white gold energy, drawn back with the coiled tension of a siege engine. When her knuckles connected with the center of his chest, it wasn’t just a punch.

It was a cosmic transaction.

CRACK BOOM.

The Scales of Retribution activated with terrifying, mathematical precision. In that singular microsecond, the universe balanced the ledger.

Every ounce of agony she had endured in the last hour, every violation of her flesh, was forcibly extracted from her body and detonated inside his.

The recoil was instantaneous and catastrophic.

The sternum Rex had shattered at the beginning of their confrontation didn’t just break again; it exploded inward like glass under a sledgehammer.

The jaw he had twisted with such casual cruelty snapped sideways with a wet, grinding sound as bone fragments shredded through muscle. The ribs he had systematically kicked in succession collapsed into his lungs like crushed soda cans.

But the worst was the core: the devastating hole he had punched through her stomach during their battle at sea roared back into existence within his own torso.

Thirty-seven distinct impacts each one a precise, calculated echo of his own brutality detonated inside his ribcage simultaneously.

Rex didn’t have time to scream. The air was punched out of his lungs in a spray of crimson mist.

He didn’t feel himself leave the ground; he only felt the impossible reality of his body becoming a projectile.

The first thing his consciousness registered was the bone-jarring impact of passing through a solid stone wall.

Then came the second.

Then a third.

CRUNCH. SHATTER. SPLINTER.

He became a human cannonball of meat and malice, tearing through the district like a wrecking ball. He punched through the front of a merchant’s house, the wooden support beams disintegrating around him like brittle parchment.

The world became a nauseating kaleidoscope of splintering timber, cascading plaster, and the screams of startled civilians.

He tore through five buildings in rapid succession; each impact was followed by a wet thud and the shriek of collapsing architecture. The debris cloud followed him like a storm.

Finally, the momentum ran out against something immovable.

Rex’s back slammed into the massive, ancient marble pillar at the entrance of the Grand Academy with the force of a meteor strike.

KRA KOOOM!

A sound like a thunderclap rang across the entire plaza as the pillar spider webbed from its base to its capital, a hairline fracture racing up its surface. Dust and ancient stone particles rained down from the wound in the monument.

For three seconds, there was only the ringing silence of shock.

Then, slowly, Rex’s broken form began to slide down the cracked marble, leaving a thick, dark smear of blood behind him as he crumpled onto the cobblestones.

Rex collapsed against the cobblestones, his body convulsing in involuntary spasms. His mouth was a flooded reservoir of copper-tasting blood; every ragged breath he drew sent arterial spray painting the cracked marble.

The damage was beyond conventional injury; it was anatomical desecration. Three jagged shards of his own ribs had punched through his pectoral muscles, gleaming white and wet against his torn flesh.

Inside his torso, his organs felt like they had been liquified and stirred by a hurricane. Most horrifying was his left eye: the internal pressure of the impact had ruptured the globe, leaving it a ruined, crimson crater hanging grotesquely in its socket.

Deep within his soul, the twin engines of his godhood ignited.

[Supreme Healing] and [Infinite Regeneration] roared to life simultaneously, flooding his circulatory system with a searing, desperate warmth.

But something was wrong.

For the first time in his existence, the healing stumbled.

The divine blessing of the Scales wasn’t just healing tissue; it was enforcing a state of injury.

At every point of impact, the blessing acted like an invisible hand pressing down on a flame, holding his flesh in its broken, mangled shape, refusing to let the cells knit back together.

The retribution was still active, still weighing, still denying him the comfort of recovery.

A cold, mechanical voice flickered across his consciousness, his own system struggling to process the impossible.

[WARNING: Divine Authority detected. Standard adaptive protocols failing.]

[Full Potential Adaptation: First contact with Scales of Retribution.]

[Analysis running... Estimated completion: 11.2 seconds.]

[First contact with Judgment Lightning. Estimated completion: 9.6 seconds.]

’Eleven seconds,’ Rex thought, his mind reeling through the haze of agony. ’Eleven seconds to survive a god.’

The numbers felt agonizingly slow. He understood why his systems were choking.

Every enemy he had ever faced—every mage, every warrior, every monster—had operated on the laws of physics. They used energy, they used force, and they used patterns.

There was always a shape to study, a frequency to mimic, a weakness to exploit.

But this? This wasn’t energy.

This was a Ruling.

This wasn’t a spell he could unravel or a technique he could counter. The blessing didn’t need to hit him with a specific angle or a certain magical frequency.

It simply required that the pain be true.

And how do you analyze something that possesses the absolute authority of truth?

You cannot dissect a fact.

You cannot adapt to the inevitable.

Gack cough!

Rex lurched forward, pushing his broken body up against the cracked marble pillar. He spat out a glob of blood and bone fragments, his fingers clawing at the stone for purchase.

The regeneration finally began to win the war against the divine pressure, knitting his ribs back into place with audible, wet clicks and grinding pops, though his face remained a grotesque mask of half-healed tissue and raw nerve endings.

He forced himself upright. His legs shook, but he stood.

He wiped a crimson smear from his chin with the back of a blood-slicked hand and turned his ruined gaze toward the center of the plaza.

There she stood. Evelyn.

She looked less like a girl and more like a cataclysm incarnate. The golden fire dancing across her fists cast long, flickering shadows across the destruction she had wrought, and the symbol of the scales burned on her chest with a steady, unblinking light.

A sound began to build in his chest, a wet, tattered noise that scraped against his throat like broken glass.

Then, he began to laugh.

It was a low, rasping chuckle that carried the weight of a madman’s ecstasy.

In that moment, beneath the pain, beneath the shattered bones and the ruined eye, Rex felt something he hadn’t experienced since the fall of Kaeleth.

It wasn’t fear. It was something far more dangerous.

It was pure, unadulterated respect.

"Finally," he rasped, his voice cracking as he stared at the golden flame in her eyes. "That’s exactly what I wanted."