Chapter 1070. To Fight Him Here Is to Fight the Concept of Now
Rex stared at Kaeleth through the crimson haze of his own blood, his pupils dilated with the intoxicating rush of forbidden authority. The power of the Forbidden God designation wasn’t just a title; it was a corrosive acid eating through the logical constraints of the universe.
He felt his bones grinding against each other as his enhanced physiology pushed past human limits, each heartbeat a wet thud that echoed in the hollow space between seconds.
"The asymmetry," Rex said, his voice carrying a jagged edge that seemed to tear at the very air, "is more than notable, Kaeleth... It’s absolute."
Kaeleth’s entire divine presence underwent a catastrophic transformation. The amber glow didn’t just dim; it curdled.
The symbols that had once flowed with the grace of celestial music now stuttered and screamed like dying stars. Rex watched as the God’s expression performed that singular, terrible divine function: the soundless collapse of a two millennium-old worldview.
Every law Kaeleth had upheld, every principle of the framework he had guarded, was being rendered irrelevant by the mere existence of the man standing before him.
"You didn’t come here to prevent a transgression," Kaeleth said, his voice dropping to a register so low it felt like grinding stones. "You didn’t come here merely to stop my operation from spreading."
"No," Rex countered, a droplet of blood falling from his chin and suspended in midair by the domain’s fractured gravity.
"You came here to claim it," Kaeleth declared, the words dripping with divine fury. "You came to seize the authority of Time itself."
"Yes," Rex said, and the word was a challenge, a vow, and a death sentence all at once.
The cooperative phase didn’t just end; it was obliterated. Kaeleth’s form began to shift, his divine mass expanding until he seemed to fill every crack in reality.
The air itself began to scream as the god prepared to erase the anomaly that dared to stand in his light. The temporal symbols around them accelerated from a flow to a hurricane, spinning with such velocity that they became blades of pure causality.
But Rex was already moving.
He didn’t wait for the God to strike; he anticipated the very concept of the strike. In the domain of the God of Time, fighting was not about reflexes; it was about understanding the medium.
The floor beneath Rex’s boots wasn’t stone; it was solidified seconds ago. The air wasn’t gas; it was compressed moments.
Every shard of floating amber debris was a crystallized fragment of an event that had already happened or was about to occur.
’Every breath he takes is a weapon I can steal,’ Rex thought, his mind racing at speeds that would have liquified a mortal’s brain. ’Every symbol he throws is a piece of his own body.’
’To fight him here is to fight the very concept of... Now.’
Rex leaned into the violence. As Kaeleth unleashed a wave of temporal distortion meant to age Rex’s flesh to dust in nanoseconds, Rex didn’t dodge.
He used his adaptation to synchronize his own timeline with the distortion, turning the attack into a propulsion system. He felt his skin crack and peel as the temporal shear tore at his epidermis, but he pushed through the agony, using the pain as an anchor.
He dove into the storm of golden glyphs.
Rex grabbed a passing shard of crystallized time, a fragment that contained the memory of a thousand years of stillness, and twisted it. He didn’t just swing it; he forced his Forbidden Authority into it, corrupting its temporal signature.
The shard screamed as it transformed from a passive object into a weapon of chaotic causality.
He wasn’t just fighting a god; he was weaponizing the god’s own home against him. Rex plunged into the heart of the amber hurricane, a blood-soaked predator hunting through the gears of eternity.
Rex didn’t just fight; he dissected. His mind was no longer thinking in terms of punches or kicks; it was calculating vectors, mass, velocity, and divine resonance.
He reached out with his telekinesis, not as a blunt instrument, but as a surgical tool. He seized the ambient debris, the floating shards of shattered epochs, and the solid architectural pillars that formed the spine of Kaeleth’s domain.
’These aren’t just rocks and light,’ Rex thought, his teeth gritted as his brain burned with the effort of processing divine calculus. ’Each fragment is a syllable in Kaeleth’s language.’
’And if I speak them back to him fast enough, I can scream in his face.’
He understood the fundamental physics of this nightmare: a fragment of temporal authority moving at relativistic speeds carried the god’s own power in direct proportion to its mass and velocity. He wasn’t just throwing debris; he was firing loaded bullets of causality.
Kaeleth struck first. The God of Time didn’t throw a punch; he rewrote the rules of the space Rex occupied.
A sphere of shimmering amber light erupted from Kaeleth’s center, temporal acceleration field. Temporal Acceleration Field.
The effect was immediate and nauseating. Inside the sphere, time screamed forward.
Rex felt his own biology betray him. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird; his lungs burned as they demanded oxygen that his bloodstream couldn’t deliver fast enough.
His cells were dividing, consuming energy, and aging at a rate thousands of times faster than the space around him. It was the biochemical equivalent of being forced to sprint a marathon while your muscles were being frozen in ice.
’Adapt...’ Rex’s consciousness growled through the haze of exhaustion. ’Adapt the mechanism.’
’Don’t fight the speed; own it.’
His Adaptation flared, recognizing the acceleration not as an attack, but as a resource. Rex reached into the heart of the field, his telekinesis seizing several massive, jagged chunks of the domain’s foundation.
As they entered the acceleration field, they didn’t resist; they ignited. The fragments caught the temporal slipstream, their velocity multiplying exponentially until they became streaks of lethal amber light.
Rex hurled them outward. He didn’t throw them away from Kaeleth; he threw them through the field’s edge, using the acceleration field itself as a railgun.
The fragments carried the field’s own frequency with them, weaponizing the very distortion meant to kill him.
"Impossible—" Kaeleth’s divine composure finally shattered.
The god was struck from three directions simultaneously. Three projectiles of hyperaccelerated temporal force slammed into his divine form.
The impact wasn’t clean; it was a temporal paradox made flesh. For a microsecond, Kaeleth’s own body existed in three different time streams at once, his form blurring as if he were a corrupted video file.
Panicked, Kaeleth did the only thing a rational god could do: he forcibly collapsed the acceleration field.
The field didn’t just stop; it imploded. The sudden contraction of spacetime created a vacuum of causality, a violent, sucking implosion that drew everything toward the center.
It was a moment of perfect, terrifying vulnerability.
Rex saw the opening. He didn’t hesitate.
He poured every ounce of his Earthen Authority into a single, concentrated mass of telekinetic force. He didn’t just send a rock; he sent a geological catastrophe—the crushing weight of a mountain compressed into a single point of impact.
The collision was catastrophic.
When Rex’s concentrated mass slammed into the implosion point, the result was not a clean clash of powers. It was a messy, wet explosion of incompatible energies.
Reality screamed.
The sound was like grinding bones amplified to the volume of a supernova. The domain’s floor, the very foundation of time, fractured with a sound like a world breaking apart.
Spiders of white light spiderwebbed across the ground as molten amber bled from the cracks.
Kaeleth was thrown backward, his divine radiance flickering like a dying candle, his form staggering as the shockwave tore through his essence.
Rex didn’t pause to breathe. He couldn’t afford to.
His muscles screamed, his ribs felt like they were splintering under the strain, and blood leaked from his ears from the sheer pressure of the temporal shift. But his eyes were fixed on the God.
The predator had found the wound. Rex lunged forward through the smoke and the fractured light, following the God into the chaos he had created.