Chapter 1072. Missing Eight Seconds of His Own Life
The Earthen Authority’s grip slammed shut around the amber gold notation. The contact wasn’t just physical; it was a metaphysical violation.
The divine authority burned through Rex’s palm like molten phosphorus, searing through muscle and nerve, eating away at flesh that was already struggling to maintain its own continuity.
But Rex didn’t flinch. His fingers locked around the blade with a strength that defied his broken ribs and hemorrhaging side.
He wasn’t trying to stop the weapon; he was using it as an anchor, a tether to chain the god to his own reality.
With a primal roar that tore at his vocal cords, Rex channeled every remaining ounce of his telekinetic reserves into a single, concentrated point. He drove the force upward, a piston-like strike aimed directly at Kaeleth’s sternum at point-blank range.
’Now. Break him.’
The impact was seismic. Kaeleth’s composure, the millennia of practiced, divine detachment, cracked audibly.
The god recoiled as if struck by a physical sledgehammer, his eyes widening in genuine, unfiltered shock. The amber blade dissolved back into flowing robes as Kaeleth stumbled backward, and the entire domain lurched with him.
The very architecture of reality shuddered and groaned, the way a living body convulses when its heart skips a beat.
"You... you are supposed to be dying," Kaeleth hissed.
His voice had stripped away the careful, administrative calm. What remained was something ancient, something feral, the voice of a predator who had ruled unchallenged for two thousand years and had suddenly discovered how terrifying it was to feel pain.
Rex slumped forward slightly, blood streaming from the gash in his ribs, painting his tan skin in wet crimson. He spat a glob of gore onto the reforming floor and watched it splatter.
A slow, vicious smile spread across his face.
"I noticed," Rex rasped, the words bubbling through the blood in his throat. "But I’m not done playing yet."
The smile was the breaking point. Kaeleth’s face twisted into something monstrous, and he answered with three simultaneous workings.
This was the moment that would later be remembered as the catalyst for Rex’s most violent evolution. It wasn’t just that Kaeleth was holding nothing back; it was that he had stopped believing in strategy.
He had moved past the concept of a ’duel’ and into the territory of ’annihilation.’ He was attacking in an overlapping cascade, a desperate belief that if he could apply enough simultaneous pressure, he could crush the anomaly before it could think.
First came the Temporal Compressiontemporal compression. It was smaller this time, surgical and cruel.
It targeted Rex’s hands specifically, aiming to age his grip into brittle, ancient bone before he could tighten it again. Rex felt his fingers begin to wither, the skin wrinkling into parchment even as his muscles screamed.
Second came the Temporal Severancetemporal severance. Three blade-shaped absences tore through the air like spears of nothingness.
They weren’t physical projectiles; they were wounds in time itself, designed to slice through Rex’s duration from a distance, severing his limbs from the present moment.
Third, and this was the true horror, was the Foundation Collapse. In a fit of divine desperation, Kaeleth didn’t aim at Rex at all.
He aimed at the domain. He began to unravel the very framework of the space they stood in, initiating a scorched earth protocol that would collapse the entire reality around them.
He would rather unmake existence itself than allow Rex to stand victorious within it.
’Three threats.’
’Three simultaneous vectors of annihilation.’
Rex’s Divine Perception flared to life, reading all three workings in the same terrifying instant. His mind screamed.
For the first time since the fight began, his adaptation couldn’t process sequentially. The analysis windows couldn’t wait for one to finish before starting the next.
His brain was forced into parallel processing a brutal, overclocked calculation that sent a spike of agony behind his eyes so intense he thought his skull would split open.
’Think, damn you!’
’Adapt or die!’ his inner voice roared through the static of pain. ’I can’t stop all three!’
’If I try to defend everything, I’ll have nothing left to counter the collapse!!!’
His vision blurred. His brain felt like it was being cooked in his own skull as the parallel processing pushed his consciousness to the breaking point.
He saw the withered skin of his hands, he saw the approaching spears of nonexistence, and he felt the ground beneath him beginning to dissolve into the void.
He had a fraction of a second. A choice between survival and total annihilation.
Rex’s jaw set. His eyes burned with a cold, suicidal clarity.
He made his choice. He let the first two hit him.
The first strike hit with the cruelty of a thousand autumns. The temporal compression seized Rex’s hands, aging the flesh, bone, and sinew into something brittle, ancient, and useless.
For one agonizing heartbeat, his fingers became desiccated husks, the bones cracking like dry twigs under the mere pressure of his own grip. But then, the Infinite Regeneration screamed into action.
It was a desperate, violent gambit, a biological counterattack. The cellular damage was reversed in a nauseating flash of heat, forcing the withered flesh back into its prime.
It was a gamble that cost him precious seconds of focus, but it kept his hands from crumbling into dust.
Then came the Temporal Severance.
The blade-shaped absence tore through his torso like a ghost knife made of pure nothingness. This wasn’t a three-second nick; this was a five-second amputation of his existence.
Rex felt the world vanish. There was no pain in that moment, only an absolute, terrifying void where his consciousness should have been.
When his mind finally reconnected to the timeline, the reconnection felt like being slammed into a concrete wall at full speed. A cold, primal terror flooded his system—a genuine, bone-deep recognition that he was running out of time.
If he took one more hit like that, the slice would be too wide. Whatever reassembled itself on the other side of that void wouldn’t be Rex anymore; it would be something broken, hollowed out, and unrecognizable.
’Not yet,’ Rex snarled internally, his mind racing through the static of agony. ’I can’t let him erase me...’
’Not like this...’
He had spent everything the first two hits had cost him—every ounce of mental focus, every drop of regenerative energy—to stop the third.
As the domain began to unravel, as the foundational framework of Kaeleth’s reality started to collapse inward like a dying star, Rex didn’t try to fix it. He couldn’t reinforce a god’s architecture.
Instead, he did something far more desperate: he braced it.
He plunged his telekinetic will into the fracturing structure of the domain itself. He didn’t act as a builder; he acted as a wedge.
He threw his raw, kinetic stubbornness against the collapsing reality, jamming his power into the cracks like steel struts in a collapsing mine shaft. He was trying to hold a universe together through sheer, brute-force refusal.
The domain screamed.
It wasn’t a sound heard with ears, but a psychic shriek that vibrated through every atom of Rex’s being, the ambient equivalent of a god’s own sanctum crying out as it was asked to survive its own creator’s attempt to murder it.
The space groaned, twisted, and buckled under the strain, but through Rex’s impossible defiance, it held.
Silence fell, heavy and suffocating.
Kaeleth stood amidst the wreckage of his own scorched earth working.
The god’s divine composure was gone, replaced by the ragged breathing of an entity that had just spent resources it hadn’t budgeted for power that should have been eternal, now depleted by the sheer effort of trying to erase a single mortal.
His eyes fixed on Rex, and the horror in them was unmistakable.
Rex was a wreck. He was drenched in blood, his side was a gaping wound that refused to fully close, his hands were still faintly translucent as his cells struggled to reassert their proper age, and he was missing eight seconds of his own life.
He looked like something that should have been dead ten minutes ago.
Yet, he was still standing.
"What... what are you?" Kaeleth demanded.
The words weren’t a question; they were a confession of failure. It was the sound of a two thousand-year-old deity realizing that his entire understanding of the universe had just been proven wrong.
He had no framework, no category, no divine law to explain why this anomaly refused to die.
Rex rolled his shoulders, the movement drawing a wet, sickening pop as something in his back dislocated during the earlier melee slammed back into place.
The regeneration was finally catching up, flooding his system with a painful, overwhelming surge of healing that felt like molten metal running through his veins.
Rex spat a mouthful of blood onto the cracked floor, his eyes locking onto Kaeleth’s with a predator’s intensity.
"I told you already," Rex rasped, his voice gravelly and dangerous. "I’m the thing that happens when nobody’s paying attention to the domain that supposedly doesn’t produce combat capability."