Chapter 1294. You Taught Me Everything, Helena. Sorry About That.

Chapter 1294: 1294. You Taught Me Everything, Helena. Sorry About That.

Rex did not summon water. He did not call upon the pond or the rain.

Instead, he simply raised his right hand, fingers splayed as if reaching for something unseen in the air, and exhaled a long, steady breath.

From his palm, a sheet of white fire poured forth in a roaring, unrelenting tide.

It was wrong. The color was wrong.

It was not the familiar orange of combustion, not the crackling yellow of a hearth, not even the brilliant blue white of a concentrated forge.

This was a flat, absolute, terrifying white color so pure it seemed to actively consume the light around it, creating a void in the shape of a flame.

When the hurricane of ice shards struck the white tide, there was no dramatic explosion of steam or melting runoff. The ice simply ceased to exist.

One after another, the shards vanished as if they had never been matter at all, erased from reality by the sheer wrongness of the heat.

The fire swept across the garden in a lethal fan, scouring the frost from the grass with a sound like grinding metal shhhhhhhrrrrrrr vaporizing the last of the steam and leaving the air unnaturally clear, ringing with a static charge that made the hair on Helena’s arms stand upright.

Helena threw an arm across her face, shielding her eyes from the impossible glare that seemed to sear through her eyelids.

When she finally lowered her arm, the transformation in her expression was complete.

The raw, bleeding fury that had defined her moments ago was gone, replaced by something sharper, colder, and infinitely more dangerous. It was an instinctive reaction that cut through her grief like a needle through silk.

She stood frozen, her head tilted slightly to one side, staring at the dying wisps of white flame with the analytical intensity of a scholar who had just witnessed an equation behave in a way that defied the very laws of mathematics.

"That is not any element I know," she whispered, her voice trembling not with fear, but with a profound, intellectual vertigo.

Even now, even as her world burned around her, the mage in her refused to surrender to the emotion. "I have catalogued every recorded frequency in the Academy archives."

"Every spectrum, every elemental signature... That flame... it has no entry."

"It has no signature at all... It shouldn’t exist."

"You taught me the theory," Rex said.

A faint ghost of a smile crossed the lower half of his face, a smile that didn’t reach his cold eyes. "I just kept going where the lesson stopped."

The words landed with the force of a guillotine blade. He watched her reaction with clinical precision; he saw the exact moment the realization shattered her.

Helena had been the only person in Aethelgard who knew from the very beginning that Rex was a reincarnator. She had carried that knowledge like a precious, hidden coin in her pocket for months—a private secret, a mark of her own superior intelligence and discretion.

She had kept it from the Academy’s prying eyes; she had kept it from Valentina, who had never needed telling.

She had sat across a table from this boy in the quiet evenings, sketching complex spell diagrams in the margins of old notebooks, believing she was mentoring a gifted, vulnerable student who needed careful guidance.

Now, she realized she hadn’t been guiding a student; she had been feeding a god. The same hand that had once held a pen beside him in scholarly comfort was now the hand that held her city by the throat.

The secret she had been so proud to protect suddenly tasted like bitter ash in her mouth, leaving her hollowed out and utterly exposed.

Rex did not fight her like an enemy; he fought her like a student who had memorized every syllable of his teacher’s lecture. He weaponized memory itself.

He had spent countless hours sitting across from her, ostensibly studying spell theory, but in reality, he had been dissecting her.

He had studied the way her fingers curled when she prepared a ward, the exact rhythm of her breathing when she opened a mana circuit, and the unconscious habits she didn’t even know she possessed.

Helena’s next attack was a masterpiece of cruelty: she conjured a lattice of spinning ice blades, razor sharp and whistling through the air, designed to crisscross at the exact coordinates where any rational man would attempt to dodge.

But Rex was already moving. He didn’t dodge toward the opening; he shifted three inches to the left before she even released the spell, because he knew her patterns; he knew she always placed her traps exactly one beat to the left of the obvious escape route.

"You think you know me?" Helena screamed, her voice cracking with desperation. "You think you can anticipate me?!"

"I don’t think, Helena," Rex’s voice floated back to her, calm and terrifying. "I remember."

She retaliated immediately, summoning a towering column of flame meant to incinerate him mid-leap. Rex didn’t counter with brute force; he simply raised his hand in a precise, elegant curl, a perfect imitation of her own gesture.

With a flick of his wrist, he caught the edge of her flame and bent it, redirecting the inferno harmlessly to the side.

Twice more he did it twice; he finished her spells for her, seizing the raw energy of a lance she had barely begun to weave and twisting it into something else entirely. Each time he touched her magic, Helena’s eyes widened with a horror that transcended pain.

She wasn’t just fighting a mage; she was fighting a mirror that had learned her own handwriting, a predator that could read her thoughts through the very mana she cast.

"Enough of this mockery!" Helena shrieked, her composure finally shattering. "I will tear the air from your lungs!"

She spread her arms wide, her entire body convulsing with the effort. The air around her began to scream.

A rushing roar filled the garden as the atmosphere itself seemed to be sucked toward her. Behind her shoulders, the wind coalesced, spinning into two enormous, translucent wings of compressed air.

Each wing stretched nearly ten feet across, shimmering with veins of pale gold as they churned with lethal velocity.

’Wind Wings.’

It was a spell of desperate escalation. She had used it only a handful of times in her entire life; it burned through mana like a bonfire through straw, consuming the soul as much as the magical reserves.

With a guttural cry, she kicked off the ground. The manicured lawn exploded beneath her feet in a spray of dirt and torn grass as she shot upward in a streak of silver light.

Within seconds, she was a hundred feet above the rooftops, climbing higher and higher into the pale morning sky.

Rex looked up. He didn’t summon a spell.

He didn’t reach for the crushing grip of Gravity or the invisible hands of Telekinesis. He simply crouched, his muscles coiling like steel springs beneath his tan skin.

His peak superhuman physique answered instantly, his entire body becoming a weapon of pure kinetic potential.

Then, he leapt.

BOOM.

The ground beneath him shattered in a violent spiderweb of cracks. A plume of dirt and stone erupted where he had stood as he launched himself upward.

He was not a bird or a mage; he was a dark, unstoppable projectile. He tore through the air with the raw power of a catapulted boulder, defying every law of magical flight through sheer, terrifying muscle.

He caught up to Helena at the apex of her climb, hanging in the air level with her just a few yards away. He wasn’t panting; he wasn’t straining.

He simply floated there, suspended by his own momentum, a predator hovering beside his prey.

Below them, the world had stopped turning.

All of Aethelgard had turned to look. The city held its breath.

In the streets surrounding the Starlight estate, merchants stood paralyzed mid-transaction, their carts abandoned in the middle of the road. Women leaned over wrought iron balconies, arms wrapped around themselves in terror.

Children scrambled onto stone walls, their eyes wide with wonder and dread. On the distant city ramparts, Underlayer soldiers leaned dangerously far over the battlements, their weapons forgotten.

And in a small square to the east, the broken remnants of Aethelgard’s army men and women who had laid down their swords days ago stood in ragged, silent clusters. Their helmets were in their hands, their faces upturned to the sky.

The entire civilization was watching a god and a queen dance on the edge of annihilation.