Chapter 1071. A Hole in His Timeline
For fourteen agonizing minutes, reality itself became a meat grinder.
The exchange that unfolded was not a duel; it was a brutal, systematic dissection of causality. Kaeleth fought with the terrifying precision of a master sculptor working in marble, each strike a perfect expression of temporal authority.
He threw waves of accelerated decay, pockets of frozen stasis that could shatter steel like glass, and razor-thin shears of time that could sever a soul from its body.
But Rex was the perfect countervirus. His Adaptation was a ravenous thing, a black hole of learning that consumed Kaeleth’s mastery.
Each time a temporal wave slammed into Rex’s defenses, his body didn’t just endure it; it evolved.
His nervous system rewired itself to process hyperaccelerated stimuli; his bones became denser, interlaced with mineral deposits drawn from the domain’s own shattered floor to resist temporal shearing; his very blood began to flow with a rhythm that matched the stuttering pulse of the domain.
’Faster, you bastard,’ Rex roared internally, his mind a storm of pain and calculation. ’Give me more!’
’Every hit makes me more of what you hate!’
’Every wound makes me more dangerous.’
He could feel his own body breaking even as it healed.
He heard the wet crack of his ribs resetting under the pressure of a stasis field; he felt the searing agony as a temporal shear grazed his thigh, leaving behind a wound that didn’t just bleed but bled time, the flesh flickering between youth and rot in a nauseating cycle.
But he kept moving, a blood-soaked engine of adaptation, turning Kaeleth’s divine elegance into raw, crude fuel for his own survival.
Then came the four-minute mark.
Rex noticed the shift before his conscious mind could even articulate the danger. It wasn’t a change in Kaeleth’s stance or a flash of light.
It was a change in the soul of the room. The ambient quality of the domain, the divine ’temperature’ that reflected Kaeleth’s processing load, didn’t just drop; it collapsed.
The warm, controlled hum of a god managing his territory vanished, replaced by an absolute, soul-crushing cold.
It was the cold of a tomb. The cold of a star dying.
Kaeleth had stopped acting like an administrator. The two thousand years of careful, measured governance—the restraint of a deity who expected to still be ruling tomorrow—were gone.
In its place was something far more primal and terrifying: the reckless, self-destructive fury of an entity who had decided that if he could not maintain order, he would simply erase the anomaly at any cost.
He was no longer running his workings through controlled channels; he was flooding the system, burning his own divine essence as fuel to achieve total annihilation.
"You think you can adapt to everything, Rex Rexilion?!" Kaeleth’s voice didn’t come from his mouth; it echoed from the very fabric of space, distorted and hollow. "You think you can survive the end of the script?!"
Rex felt the hair on his arms stand up. His instinct, the raforbidden god nature,al part of his Forbidden God nature was screaming at him to flee, to run until his lungs burst, to get away from the epicenter of the coming storm.
The air felt thick, not with pressure, but with finality. The fight had ceased to be a contest of skill or power; it had transformed into an extinction event that Rex just happened to be standing inside of.
The God of Time raised his hands, and the golden light of the domain didn’t shine; it bled. The symbols stopped spinning; they began to unravel, stretching into infinite, screaming lines of raw causality that tore at the edges of Rex’s vision.
Rex braced himself, his telekinesis coiling around him like a second skin, his muscles locked in a state of hyper tension that threatened to snap his own spine. His eyes widened as the first working at full commitment manifested.
It wasn’t a blast. It wasn’t a blade.
It wasn’t even a wave.
It was something Rex’s mind couldn’t even begin to categorize.
Kaeleth did not throw force. He did something infinitely more cruel: he rewrote the rate of existence itself.
The God of Time didn’t aim at Rex; he aimed at the concept of the space Rex occupied. The domain’s floor beneath Rex’s boots, the very air molecules filling his lungs, and the jagged shards of reality still drifting from the earlier fracture—all of it was seized and dragged into a localized temporal compression.
This wasn’t the acceleration field from before. This wasn’t about speed; it was about exhaustion.
It aged the specific patch of reality. Rex stood in through several subjective centuries in the heartbeat it took Kaeleth to close his fist.
Rex’s Adaptation screamed in confusion. It had no prior mechanism to draw from.
How do you adapt to the universe simply deciding you have already lived your entire life?
Rex felt his skin do something skin was never meant to do. A papery, ancient brittleness seized his flesh, then receded in the same half second the nauseating sensation of a body being shown the full, horrific spectrum of its own death by age, only to be yanked back from the brink before the preview finished.
His Infinite Regeneration fired reflexively, a desperate, panicked response that began patching cellular damage that hadn’t even fully manifested yet. It was a biological paradox: his body was healing wounds that were still in the process of being imagined by time.
’Fuck...’ Rex’s mind clawed through the vertigo. ’My body doesn’t know what to fight.’
’It’s fighting itself.’
He didn’t have time to process the wrongness. He couldn’t afford to think; he could only act.
"You want to age me?" Rex roared through gritted teeth, blood spattering from his gums as his own jawbone creaked under the temporal strain. "Then age the ground beneath me first!"
With a guttural scream of exertion, Rex unleashed his telekinesis at full, uncontrolled output. He didn’t aim at Kaeleth; he aimed at the medium.
He drove his force straight down through the compressed patch of floor beneath his own feet, forcing his power into the structural level of the domain’s reality. He sought to punch through the very fabric of the accelerated moment.
The result was catastrophic. The localized compression sheared away from the rest of the domain’s temporal fabric with a sound that wasn’t a sound; it was a wet, tearing silence, the sound of something being violently ripped from the network of existence.
The reality beneath Rex gave way, collapsing into a void of fractured causality.
Rex fell.
He plunged through the hole he had violently carved into the universe. But Kaeleth was not content to let his prey escape into the depths.
The God followed, his divine robes dissolving, reforming into something far more lethal: a blade of pure, razor-sharp amber gold notation.
Kaeleth was fast, not human fast, not even superpowered fast, but divine fast. He operated outside the relationship between force and momentum; he simply arrived at his destination slightly before the moment he decided to move.
The amber blade descended like a guillotine of light.
It caught Rex across the ribs.
It didn’t just cut flesh; it cut duration. Rex felt three seconds of his own existence being torn out of his body like pages ripped from a book mid-sentence.
The wound wasn’t just a gash; it was a hole in his timeline. The removal produced a lurch of soul-crushing vertigo that had nothing to do with balance and everything to do with the primal horror of a mind suddenly realizing it was missing pieces of its own reality.
Rex slammed onto his back on the reformed floor below the hole, the impact sending a shockwave through his spine that made his vision go white.
Blood hot and crimson, ordinary human blood gushed from his side, pooling beneath him. His ribs felt like broken glass grinding against his lungs with every ragged breath.
"Is this the limit of your adaptation, Rex?" Kaeleth’s voice descended like a death knell as the god landed gracefully, the amber blade already elongating for the killing stroke. "To die in fragments?"
Rex stared up at the approaching deity, blood frothing at the corners of his mouth. His ribs screamed, his side burned with a wound that defied healing, and his mind reeled from the temporal amputation.
But as Kaeleth swung the blade down for the second strike, something shifted in Rex’s eyes. The panic died.
The pain became nothing more than data.
He didn’t try to block it. He didn’t raise a shield.
As the blade of pure causality descended toward his throat, Rex’s hand shot upward with the speed of a striking viper.
He grabbed it.