Chapter 1327. Court Is in Session, and My Entire Skill Menu Is Muted

Chapter 1327: 1327. Court Is in Session, and My Entire Skill Menu Is Muted

The atmosphere in the plaza had shifted from the chaos of a massacre to something far more terrifying: the focused stillness before an execution.

Rex stood twenty paces from Evelyn, his body still knitting itself back together with wet, grinding sounds. His left eye had reformed into a pale, unnatural orb, but his face remained a patchwork of scar tissue.

He watched her, really watched her, and realized that the girl who had been cowering in the rubble was gone.

In her place stood something ancient, something that didn’t care about anger.

Evelyn’s breathing was unnervingly rhythmic. Her shoulders were level, her stance wide and grounded.

When she finally spoke, her voice didn’t carry the shrill edge of rage or the tremor of trauma. It carried the terrifying, hollow quiet she had discovered in the white void—the quiet of a judge passing sentence.

"I won’t kill you today, Rex, if that is the choice you make," she said.

The words were flat, devoid of venom, which made them infinitely more threatening. "But I will weigh you... And the scales do not lie."

"Open Court."

The command wasn’t shouted; it was declared as a fundamental law of reality.

From beneath her boots, a shockwave of golden radiance erupted. A ring of pure, sanctified light tore across the cobblestones, expanding outward in a perfect circle a hundred meters in diameter.

Where the light touched the stones, the symbol of the scales burned themselves into the earth, blazing with a celestial intensity.

The effect on Rex was instantaneous and violent.

He instinctively reached for [Sleep Manipulation], attempting to flood her mind with the numbing fog that had ended countless lives.

But as the power surged from his core, it didn’t flow outward; it shattered. The magical working exploded in his mental grasp like a crystal struck by a hammer, sending feedback through his nerves that tasted like copper and electricity.

He tried to reach for [Dream Manipulation] and then [Shapeshifting], but his powers felt sluggish and muffled, as if he were trying to move through waist-deep molasses.

Then came the most humiliating blow: his illusions.

The shimmering, hypnotic veil of [Presence Manipulation] that normally made him appear as whatever his victim needed to see—a friend, a savior, a shadow—simply peeled off his body in a single, cascading sheet of dying sparks.

He was stripped bare.

While the deeper, more insidious layers of his soul remained shielded by his own will, his surface reality was laid bare for every horrified witness in the city.

The golden light of the Court acted like a divine spotlight, revealing two unmistakable stains upon his existence: the violet sigil coiled around his wrist like a parasite, and the deep, pulsing red emblem etched over his heart.

At the edge of the plaza, Cassandra and Gorvasha froze.

They had glimpsed the crimson mark through the smoke of the garden, but seeing it now in the unforgiving clarity of daylight, beneath the gaze of Justice, made the blood run cold in their veins.

The truth was no longer a suspicion; it was a visible fact.

’Damn it,’ Rex thought, his jaw tightening.

For a heartbeat, the temptation to invoke [Domain Creation] flared. He could tear open a pocket dimension, a private theater of war where he could rewrite the rules, where her Court would mean nothing.

But he hesitated. He felt the invisible weight of the Goddess’s gaze pressing down from the heavens.

Opening a domain now would be like stepping into a trap; it would give her a fixed point to anchor her judgment. Lustia’s warning echoed in his mind like a funeral dirge.

’Better to fight on a board where everyone can see the pieces,’ he decided. ’Let her have her truth.’

’I’ll show her that truth can still bleed.’

Evelyn moved first.

She didn’t run; she launched. The ground beneath her cracked as she accelerated, leaving a trail of gold sparks in her wake.

Her fist was wreathed in white gold lightning, a concentrated bolt of divine wrath designed to shatter bone and soul alike.

Rex met her halfway. He didn’t retreat.

He leaned into the storm, his own power flaring crimson as he braced for the collision.

The first exchange was spectacular.

Evelyn did not merely move; she became a streak of divine calligraphy written across the plaza in lines of molten gold.

The old blue sparks of her past were gone, replaced by something that felt less like electricity and more like the wrath of a collapsing star.

Mid stride, she snapped her left hand upward.

"Fall," she commanded.

The sky above Rex didn’t darken; it ignited. Five bolts of Judgment Lightning tore through the atmosphere without warning.

They didn’t strike randomly; they descended with the unerring accuracy of guided missiles, each bolt seeking out a vital coordinate on Rex’s body.

One aimed for his shoulder, one for his thigh, one for his solar plexus, one for his hip, and the final for his skull.

They stabbed down in a perfect pentagram of white gold fury, each impact accompanied by a bone-rattling CRACK BOOM that shook the foundations of the nearby buildings.

Rex didn’t flinch. His eyes burned crimson.

"Too slow," he growled through gritted teeth.

"Gravity Manipulation: Absolute Crush."

The air around Evelyn suddenly became liquid lead. Rex layered the spell, stacking force upon force until the gravitational constant in a ten-meter radius around her skyrocketed to sixty times its normal weight.

The cobblestones beneath her feet screamed as they surrendered, buckling and pulverizing into a deep, circular crater. The pressure was enough to collapse a human lung instantly.

Evelyn’s knees buckled. Her breath came out as a pained wheeze.

But she did not fall.

’I am the scale,’ she thought desperately, her muscles screaming as if molten metal were being poured through her veins. ’And the scale must remain level.’

The blessing of Justice acted as an invisible exoskeleton, holding the crushing atmosphere off her shoulders with the same stubborn refusal that a righteous man holds his ground against slander. Each step she took toward him was a battle against physics itself.

CRACK.

Each footfall sent spiderweb fractures of gold light racing across the sunken stones.

Rex’s lips curled into a sadistic sneer. "Let’s see how much truth you can carry."

He twisted his wrist, flooding the zone with more power. The weight spiked to one hundred times Earth’s gravity.

THUD.

Evelyn dropped to one knee in the center of the crater, the force nearly driving her into the bedrock. Her vision blurred, her bones groaning under the impossible burden.

But even as she knelt, her hand pressed flat against the shattered stone, she channeled everything she had left.

"Now... JUDGMENT!"

She didn’t just call the lightning; she commanded it to converge. The five bolts that had been circling him suddenly imploded toward the center, dragging Rex into the vortex.

A sphere of blinding white light erupted, incinerating the air. When the radiance faded, Rex’s skin was charred black where the bolts had kissed him, and he was hurled backward twenty meters, his body skipping across the cobblestones like a stone across water.

Inside Rex’s mind, the system screamed warnings.

[First contact with Open Court.]

[Analysis running... Estimated completion: 14.0 seconds.]

[Scales of Retribution: Coverage 100%.]

[Synchronization confirmed.]

The gap between those two notices told the entire story of their impossible duel. Eleven point two seconds ago, she had landed a blow that could have ended him.

Now, the Scales were still calibrating, still trying to map the divine authority she wielded. The retribution could no longer send his wounds back to him with perfect accuracy because she was changing the rules faster than he could learn them.

Every few seconds, a new mechanism arrived, a new way she twisted the light, a new way she manipulated the gravity of her own soul.

He was always one lesson behind, chasing the ghost of her power. And she was always one step away from being overwhelmed by his sheer malice.

’Enough games,’ Rex thought, his pupils contracting to pinpricks. ’I’ll stop adapting to you and start breaking you.’

"WRATH."

The red emblem over his heart didn’t just glow; it bled light. Rex deliberately fed his own injuries into the mark, offering up the pain of his charred skin and broken ribs as fuel.

A cold, terrifying surge of power flooded his limbs, transforming his pain into pure, kinetic violence.

His speed exploded. He became a red blur of murderous intent.

His fists no longer just moved; they carried the momentum of a falling mountain.

Evelyn saw him coming. She raised her guard, her gold eyes tracking his trajectory.

"Come then, monster!!!"

Rex tore through her defenses like a wolf through silk. His [Martial Arts Mastery] took over, every micro movement of his body optimized for maximum lethality.

He ducked under a sweeping strike of her lightning, the heat singeing his hair, and drove a fist upward in a vicious uppercut aimed directly at her jaw.

The close fight had begun.