Chapter 1297. Local Dark Lord Finally Has a Fun Day at Work

Chapter 1297: 1297. Local Dark Lord Finally Has a Fun Day at Work

Helena descended. Her wings, once magnificent displays of elemental power, now looked like tattered shrouds, folding inward in slow, dissipating streamers of wind that hissed as they touched the air.

She didn’t land with the grace of a prodigy; she fell. Her boots struck the torn grass with a wet stumble, her knees buckling beneath the sheer weight of her magical exhaustion.

She caught herself on one hand, fingers digging into the blood-soaked soil, before forcing herself upright.

Her chest heaved in ragged, desperate spasms. Her face was a mask of soot, sweat, and tear tracks that left pale streaks through the grime.

She was shaking not just a tremor but a violent, full-body convulsion that made her silhouette blur against the horizon. Her eyes, wide and wild with a terrifying mixture of triumph and horror, remained locked on the smoking furrow where Rex lay.

"You said nothing could kill you!" she screamed.

The sound was raw, a primal shriek that tore from her lungs and echoed off the Academy walls.

"You said you were beyond death!" Her voice cracked on the last word, breaking into a sob. "But you bleed! You bleed, Rex!"

For three agonizing seconds, there was only the sound of her labored breathing and the distant, uncertain murmurs of the crowd. Then, the broken thing in the crater stirred.

Rex pushed himself up. The motion was slow and mechanical, accompanied by the wet, grinding sound of vertebrae resettling.

Smoke curled lazily from his scorched hair, and when he turned his head toward her, the spectators gasped.

Half of his face was a nightmare, a blackened, cauterized ruin where the flesh had been cooked away from the bone, exposing the wet, glistening red of muscle and the white flash of a cheekbone.

But beneath the horror, something alien was happening. His Infinite Regeneration was not merely healing; it was fighting a war.

The blackened, dead skin flaked away in steaming patches, revealing raw, pink new growth that writhed and spread like living worms beneath the surface. His shoulder wound stitched itself shut in a grotesque, creeping line of knitting tissue that made an audible squelch as it sealed.

Pain tore through him in long, white-hot pulses that felt like molten lead being poured through his veins. He reached up, wiping a mixture of blood and ash from his split lip with the back of his hand.

Then, to the absolute astonishment of every soldier, mage, and civilian watching, he began to chuckle.

It started as a wet wheeze and grew into a full, throaty laugh.

"I bleed because I let myself," he said.

His voice was hoarse, warped by the damage to his jawbone, giving his words an eerie, distorted quality. Yet, despite the ruin of his face, he sounded perfectly, terrifyingly cheerful.

"And I’m enjoying every single second of it, Helena." He leaned forward slightly, his good eye blazing with a manic light. "Don’t stop now..."

"We’re just getting to the good part, right?! Keep going!"

It was the truth, and that truth burned in his chest like a warm coal. For the first time in centuries, he wasn’t bored.

He hadn’t fought a duel of pure magical theory against an opponent who understood the poetry of the elements in longer than he could remember.

In this world, most fights were simple equations of power: who had the larger reservoir and who could crush harder. He had always won those without breaking a sweat.

But Helena was different. She wasn’t just throwing spells; she was solving him.

She forced him to think, to calculate angles, costs, and timing with the precision of a surgeon. She made him feel like a student at the Academy again, desperate to impress a master.

Standing there, with half his face peeling off and his body screaming in agony, he admitted to himself a secret he would carry to his grave: She was the finest mage he had ever faced.

But that admiration was not mercy. That was the dangerous part.

If anything, his respect for her made him more lethal. He didn’t want to simply kill her; he wanted to break her.

He wanted to shatter that brilliant mind and that unshakable will so completely that she would understand what true defeat felt like.

She had earned a proper ending.

She deserved to be broken.

Helena stared at him, her jaw working silently as she processed his madness. The fear in her eyes began to recede, replaced by something colder, something harder.

She drew in a breath that sounded like breaking glass, summoning the last vestiges of her energy, gathering her shattered courage.

She would not die a victim. She would die a warrior.

Helena braced her stance, her fingers beginning to glow once more.

Helena’s next spell did not come as a burst; it came as an incantation that seemed to stretch time itself.

For nearly sixty agonizing seconds, she stood motionless, her arms outstretched like a priestess summoning an apocalypse. Rex did not move.

He stood in the center of the ravaged garden, arms hanging loose at his sides, his regenerating face still wet with the fluids of his own healing flesh.

He simply watched. He watched as the very sky above Aethelgard began to bleed color.

"Four Seasons Cataclysm!" Helena’s voice wasn’t a scream anymore; it was a command that resonated with the authority of the universe.

The atmosphere shattered.

From the east, a column of murderous winter blizzard descended, white and howling, carrying ice crystals sharp enough to flay skin from bone.

From the west came the dry, roaring heat of a summer drought, shimmering with falling embers that turned the air into a furnace.

From the north, a spring storm of torrential rain and bone-crushing hail whirled inward, and from the south came an autumn gale, a vortex of tearing leaves and jagged lightning.

The four elemental forces collided directly over the garden. They didn’t just mix; they fought.

The snow, fire, rain, and thunder wrapped around one another in a violent, spiraling struggle, rising into a single, monstrous pillar of living weather that split the clouds from the academy roofs to the very heavens.

The roar of the storm was deafening, a cacophony of grinding ice, crackling fire, and thunder that drowned out all thought.

Rex’s good eye locked onto the pillar.

’Now,’ he thought. ’Show me what you are.’

He opened his hands, fingers splayed wide. He reached deep into the hollow places of his consciousness, into that terrifying silence where his own humanity had long since eroded and found the core of his power.

He didn’t call upon a spell; he called upon the fundamental law of existence.

"Elemental Magic Creation."

The sound that emerged from him was wrong. It was a frequency no mage had ever catalogued, a low, bone-trembling note struck on an instrument that had never been built.

It wasn’t a sound you heard with your ears; it was a sound you felt in your marrow. A wave of faint, shimmering lines of pure reality flowed outward from his palms, spreading across the garden like cracks in a frozen lake.

The shimmering wave reached the pillar of the Four Seasons and sank into it.

For three heartbeats, there was a terrifying stillness. The storm continued to howl, but the magic seemed to hesitate, suspended in midair.

Then, a hairline crack appeared down the center of the elemental column.

Crrrr ack.

Another followed.

Then another.

The entire pillar began to shudder violently, its roar rising from a storm to a shriek of agony as the two opposing forces of creation and destruction tore at each other’s throats.

The colors began to split and stutter blue, orange, green, and gold, fraying at the edges like burnt paper.

Then, the two enormous workings met in a final, catastrophic embrace.

KRA BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The light came first: a flash of pure, absolute white that bleached the world of all color, turning everything into a stark, terrifying negative.

The sound followed seconds later: a deep, flat detonation that didn’t just shake the buildings; it threatened to liquify the organs of anyone within the city.

The shockwave rolled outward in a visible, physical ring of displaced air. It flattened the hedges like they were blades of grass and ripped every remaining leaf from every tree in a single instant.

Clouds fled from the epicenter as if terrified.

Above the estate, a perfectly round hole punched through the atmosphere, edged with rippling mist, leaving a shaft of pale, eerie morning sun to pour down into the carnage.

In the distance, the structural integrity of the city gave way.

In the northern district, the old watchtower groaned as its foundation shattered; it leaned slowly, impossibly, before sliding sideways into the street with a grinding roar of stone on stone.

Two smaller towers beside it followed, collapsing in a cascade of rubble and dust.

When the blinding glare finally faded, and the thunderous echoes died down to a ringing silence, the smoke cleared to reveal a wasteland. The garden was gone, replaced by a crater of fused glass and scorched earth.

Neither of them had won.