Chapter 1078. A Corpse That Hasn’t Realized It’s Dead Yet

Chapter 1078: 1078. A Corpse That Hasn’t Realized It’s Dead Yet

Kaeleth straightened with a slow, unnatural deliberation that made Rex’s skin crawl. It wasn’t the movement of a man recovering from a blow; it was the movement of a predator reasserting its dominance.

His face was no longer a composed administrative mask; it was a contorted visage of divine rage, his features twisted into something primal and terrifying.

His eyes didn’t just glow; they burned with an incandescent fury that seemed to sear the very air in the room, threatening to consume everything in its path.

The measured administrator was dead. In his place stood something ancient, something terrible, something that predated morality itself.

"Because it IS working," Kaeleth spat.

The words didn’t just carry sound; they carried physical force, vibrating with such murderous intent that the air itself seemed to bleed at the frequency of his voice.

With a contemptuous sweep of his hand, Kaeleth gestured toward Rex. "Look at yourself, mortal!"

His voice rose to a crescendo of divine scorn. "Look at what you’ve become!"

"A patchwork of stolen moments, a corpse that hasn’t realized it’s dead yet!"

Rex didn’t need to look. He could feel the wrongness in his own marrow.

There was a nauseating instability building in his continuity, a terrifying sensation that the thread connecting this heartbeat to the last was fraying, thinning into nothingness.

Every time he blinked, his vision stuttered as if the frames of his reality were being deleted. He felt like a ghost haunting his own body, a consciousness clinging to a dissolving anchor.

’I’m unraveling,’ Rex thought, a cold spike of panic piercing through his focus. ’Every cut is taking more than just blood.’

’It’s taking... me.’

But through the haze of pain and temporal static, his mind, sharpened by years of survival, spotted the flaw. The god’s gambit was failing.

Kaeleth unleashed another combined pulse, a wave of amber gold energy designed to shatter Rex’s remaining defenses. But something was different.

The pulse lacked the apocalyptic roar of the first; the light was visibly dimmer, flickering like a flame starved of oxygen. Kaeleth was overdrawing his accounts.

Rex’s adaptation screamed to life. Having survived the first catastrophic collision, the system had already begun the brutal work of reverse engineering the god’s mathematics.

As the pulse tore toward him, the adaptation processed the compound mechanism in less than a second.

’Faster... Faster than before.’

The pulse still struck. Rex felt the wet, tearing agony as a shard of compressed time raked across his ribs.

He heard the sickening crunch of bone snapping under temporal pressure, followed by the unnatural sound of his own existence leaking out, a sound like wind rushing through a crack in a tomb.

Another handful of seconds vanished from his life, leaving him feeling hollow and disoriented. But the window of vulnerability had shrunk.

The interval where he was helpless had diminished, proving that Kaeleth’s reckless escalation was playing right into Rex’s hands.

’He’s burning out.’

’Now or never.’

Rex didn’t retreat from the pain; he fed on it. Using the split-second opening created by his improved reaction time, he lunged forward.

He didn’t charge blindly; he targeted the source of the god’s precision.

As he closed the distance, he didn’t aim for Kaeleth’s chest. Instead, he threw his hands toward the orbiting cluster of temporal shards.

"Mine," Rex growled through gritted teeth.

Using his telekinesis like a vise, he seized two of the deadly shards mid-orbit. The effort made his nose bleed from the sheer psychic strain, but he didn’t let go.

With a violent, twisting motion, he wrenched them out of their lethal rotation. The two shards collided with the remaining cluster in a spectacular, chaotic explosion of fractured causality.

The sound was like glass shattering in a cathedral. The orbiting weapon disintegrated, half the shards exploding into harmless, inert fragments that dissolved before they could hit the ground.

The silence that followed was heavier than the combat itself.

Rex stood panting, blood streaming from his ribs and nose, his body a map of fresh trauma. Across from him, Kaeleth stood frozen.

The divine light in his eyes flickered erratically, and for the first time, the raw fury in his expression shifted.

The rage didn’t vanish, but it sharpened, curdling into something far more dangerous: the cold, focused desperation of a god who realized he might actually lose. ℯℯ𝘭.

Kaeleth’s expression twisted. The desperation had crystallized into something far more lethal than rage: a cold, focused intent to erase Rex from existence entirely.

He abandoned the shattered blade cluster entirely, his hands clawing at the very fabric of reality. Instead of attacking Rex directly, he reached for the domain’s remaining structural integrity, the golden, geometric notation that held the space together.

With a guttural scream of effort, Kaeleth began to twist. He wasn’t just attacking; he was collapsing the universe around Rex.

The walls of the domain began to fold inward with terrifying speed, the amber gold notation contracting like the jaws of a cosmic trap.

This wasn’t the broad, scorched earth destruction from earlier; this was a scalpel made of collapsing space, aimed with surgical precision to crush Rex into a single, microscopic point.

Rex watched the walls scream toward him, the air itself groaning as it was compressed. The sound was deafening, the screech of reality being torn apart.

’If I brace... I die,’ Rex thought, his mind racing through the implications. ’If I try to tank this, the pressure will liquefy my organs before the walls even touch me.’

He made his choice.

Instead of bracing for impact, Rex ignited his enhanced physical attributes. With a roar that tore at his vocal cords, he exploded off the cracked floor.

He didn’t run away from the collapse; he drove himself directly into the heart of the storm. He knew the mathematics of the working: a mechanism designed to crush a static target requires the target to stay still.

Rex refused to be a target. He became a projectile.

The collapsing space chased him like a tidal wave of golden glass, missing his heels by the width of a heartbeat, the displaced air creating a vacuum that threatened to rip the lungs from his chest.

Rex breached Kaeleth’s guard in the split second the god’s attention wavered between maintaining the collapse and tracking Rex’s impossible movement. That split attention was the wound Rex had been bleeding for throughout the entire fight.

"My turn," Rex hissed through a mouthful of blood.

The first strike was a telekinetic hammer, aimed not at Kaeleth’s body but at the golden threads of the collapsing domain itself.

The impact shattered Kaeleth’s concentration like a stone through ice. The folding walls lost their cohesion, the geometric notation fracturing into useless sparks that dissipated into the void.

The second strike landed clean.

Rex drove his fist into Kaeleth’s sternum with the full, unbridled weight of Earthen Authority. The sound was horrific: a wet, splintering crack that echoed through the dying domain.

Kaeleth went down.

He didn’t fall with divine grace. He fell like a broken marionette, his body thrashing as he crashed toward the cracked floor.

The amber gold energy that once flowed around him now sputtered in violent, uneven pulses, bleeding out of him like sparks from a dying fire. The temporal notation across his skin flickered erratically, a dying signal from a failing source.

For one agonizing moment, his fingers twitched, reaching for some final, desperate mechanism to unleash.

Rex was already there.

Before Kaeleth’s back could even settle against the stone, Rex descended like a predator. He slammed a knee into the god’s chest, pinning him to the floor with enough force to crack the foundation beneath them.

His left hand clamped around Kaeleth’s throat like a vise of iron, cutting off any hope of divine speech.

There was no dramatic pause.

No monologue.

No mercy.

Rex drove his fist downward in a brutal, piston-like motion.

CRUNCH.

His knuckles connected with the god’s sternum, driving bone fragments deeper into the chest cavity. Kaeleth let out a wrenching, unmanaged scream, a sound that wasn’t divine but raw, animalistic agony.

Rex didn’t stop. He pulled back and struck again, faster, harder, pouring every ounce of his hatred and exhaustion into the blow.

The second impact produced a sickening sound of grinding bone and collapsing cartilage. This time, there was no divine echo behind the scream, only the hollow, wet gasp of a being whose power had been utterly spent.

Kaeleth’s struggles began to falter. His hands, which had clawed weakly at Rex’s forearms in a desperate attempt to push him off, lost their strength halfway through the motion.

They fell limp against the blood-slicked floor with a pathetic thud.

The golden light that had once filled the room began to dim, fading from a brilliant blaze to something resembling dying embers in a cold wind.

The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by Rex’s ragged, blood-soaked breathing.