Chapter 1293. I Said Magic Only, Not ’Please Turn My Garden Into a Hailstorm’

Chapter 1293: 1293. I Said Magic Only, Not ’Please Turn My Garden Into a Hailstorm’

Valentina lowered her gaze, the silver strands of her hair creating a curtain that hid any trace of emotion. Elizabeth simply closed her eyes for a long, deliberate moment, then opened them again with a breath so quiet it was almost imperceptible.

Neither of them spoke.

Neither of them offered a denial, a justification, or even a lie.

That silence was worse than any confession; it was a guillotine blade that severed Helena’s last connection to her own reality. It cut deeper than any physical wound Rex could have inflicted.

Helena swayed on her feet, her balance gone, her knees threatening to buckle. Her free hand drifted up toward her throat, clawing reflexively at the air as if she were choking on the very atmosphere of the room.

"Xerollion is only one of my faces, Helena," Rex said into the suffocating quiet.

His tone was almost terrifyingly kind, like a teacher explaining a simple concept to a slow student.

It was a deliberate provocation, a loose thread dangling in the air, a small hook with nothing attached. He watched with predatory satisfaction as her mind instinctively latched onto it, her thoughts spinning around the implication, trying to unravel what it meant.

He had no intention of explaining. He wanted her to drown in the uncertainty first.

Then, the shaking began.

It started as a minute tremor in her fingertips, but within seconds it had escalated into a violent convulsion that traveled up through her arms and shoulders, seizing her entire frame.

When she finally spoke, it wasn’t a plea or a question. It was a roar, a raw, primal sound that tore from her lungs, half grief and half fury.

"Liar!" she screamed, the word cracking like a whip. "MURDERER! AND A FUCKING MONSTER!"

The accusations poured out of her like blood from an arterial wound. She screamed about the platform where he had torn Apollo’s throat out in front of two screaming armies.

She called him the butcher of her city, the serpent who had crawled beneath her roof, shared her bread, and smiled at her children with the face of a hero. Every word was punctuated by a sob that she refused to let become a cry.

"You slept beside us!"

"You smiled at them while you planned our end!"

Her eyes were streaming with tears, but they weren’t soft. Her pupils were slit with rage.

Deep within her, something ancient and desperate ignited. Red fire erupted in her palms again, not the controlled, elegant flames of a noble mage, but something thin, ragged, and volatile.

It was a desperate magic, fed by the raw reserves of her trauma, burning hot and unstable.

Rex watched her unravel with clinical interest. He lifted one hand and slowly closed his fingers. The crushing pressure holding Leonidas eased by half.

The big man’s chest rose in a ragged, gasping breath, and his shoulders lifted an inch off the marble, but when he attempted to force himself upright, the invisible weight snapped back like a rubber band, holding him exactly where he was.

Rex hadn’t released him; he had simply loosened the grip enough to allow him the torment of watching.

Then, Rex turned his full attention to Helena. His movements were calm, methodical, almost ritualistic.

He began to unbutton what remained of his scorched cuffs, peeling back the ruined fabric of his sleeves. With a casual flick of his wrist, he tossed the charred rag of his jacket aside.

It fluttered through the air and landed in the rubble with a soft thud.

"I’ll fight you," he said.

His voice was steady, stripped of all pretense, the voice of a predator preparing for a hunt. "With magic only."

"No gravity, no telekinesis, nothing you could call cheating."

He took a single step forward, the violet-black aura around him pulsing like a heartbeat.

"You’re the third strongest mage in Aethelgard, Helena..."

"Don’t disappoint me now!"

"Show me that you ACTUALLY earned the title!!!"

It was not mercy. Rex knew that with the cold certainty of a surgeon, and he knew Helena understood it too.

This was not an act of compassion; it was the cruel invitation of a man who had already written the final page of the evening and simply wanted his audience to witness every agonizing syllable of the descent.

He wanted Helena to believe she had a chance to believe it with every fiber of her being, to let her hope burn as bright as her magic only so he could watch her feel it slip through her fingers, handful by bloody handful.

And behind that stone wall, he wanted those four women to see the truth: that even on fair ground, bound by the sacred rules of her own craft, she was nothing more than prey.

Helena did not need to be asked twice. The insult to her power was the only thing left that could override her terror.

With a guttural cry of defiance, she spun on her heel and launched herself backward, diving through the ragged breach where the rear wall of the hall had collapsed.

Her boots skidded across the manicured grass of the Starlight garden twenty feet beyond, sending up sprays of dirt and torn sod.

The garden was a place of memory, a wide, serene stretch of lawn bordered by ancient, gnarled hedges and a still, reflective pond.

It was the same place where, months ago, Tremor’s stone meteor had once lifted Lily and Diana into the sky in a display of terrifying power.

Now, it would become a slaughterhouse.

Rex followed her without haste. His boots crunched over fallen beams and splintered marble as he crossed the threshold, his pace measured, almost leisurely.

Behind him, the stone wall protecting the four women rose and slid sideways with a low, ominous grinding hum, following him like a loyal hound so they could witness every second of the catastrophe.

Helena stood in the center of the lawn, her breathing ragged, her eyes blazing with a crimson light that matched the flames in her palms. Her hands swept through the air in a wide, violent arc, cutting through the humid air.

"Ignis Decem!" she screamed.

Ten Flame Lances ignited instantaneously around her in a perfect, deadly ring. Each spear of fire was as tall as a man, roaring with supernatural heat that turned the grass beneath them to black ash in seconds.

They hung suspended in the air for a heartbeat, spinning slowly on their axes like the teeth of a great crimson saw, forming a cage of burning points around her shoulders. With a shriek of effort, she flung both arms forward.

The lances tore through the air with a sound like tearing silk—fwoosh, fwoosh, fwoosh—each one shooting toward Rex from a different angle at once, a coordinated execution attempt.

Rex didn’t flinch. He simply raised a single hand toward the pond behind him.

"Water," he commanded, his voice cutting through the roar of the flames.

A massive wall of water erupted from the pond in a single, rolling curve. It rose as tall as the manor itself, a liquid titan that swung across the path of the spears like a heavy curtain.

The first lance struck the barrier and vanished with an explosive TSSSSSSSS, a violent hiss of steam.

The second, third, and fourth followed in rapid succession, each one swallowed in a thunderous eruption of scalding vapor.

By the time the tenth lance was consumed, a thick, white cloud of superheated steam boiled across the garden, so dense and suffocating that Rex’s form disappeared entirely.

The heat rolled off the cloud in waves, distorting the air like a desert mirage.

Helena had been waiting for exactly that. The steam was her canvas; the heat was her forge.

She dropped to one knee, pressing her palm flat against the cooling earth. "Glacies Mortis!"

The temperature in the garden didn’t just drop; it fell off a cliff. A visible wave of cold rippled outward from her touch.

Frost raced across the grass in a spreading, fractal web, turning emerald blades into brittle glass. The superheated vapor in the air suddenly stiffened, grew pale and translucent, and collapsed inward.

It transformed from steam into a hovering, deadly swarm of ice hundreds of jagged shards, each the length of a human hand and honed to a microscopic needle point. They hung suspended within the white cloud like a school of silver fish waiting to strike.

Helena’s face was a mask of absolute focus, her teeth bared in a snarl. Her eyes tracked the invisible space where Rex stood.

Then, with a scream of pure rage, she snapped her fist shut.

"Kill!"

The ice shards moved as one. A silver hurricane of crystal shrapnel screamed through the steam, converging from every direction with lethal velocity, aimed directly at the heart of the cloud where Rex stood waiting.