Chapter 1301. Father-in-Law Has Entered the Chat (Loudly)

Chapter 1301: 1301. Father-in-Law Has Entered the Chat (Loudly)

In the shattered remains of the great hall, at the farthest edge of the ruins where the air itself felt thick with malice, Leonidas lay pinned.

The crushing weight of Rex’s gravity had held him to the marble floor since the moment he had arrived, a physical manifestation of a power that rendered his legendary strength irrelevant.

He was shaking. Not with fear, but with something far more volatile.

He had been forced to be a spectator to his own apocalypse.

From where he lay, cheek pressed against the cold, fractured stone, the gap in the collapsed rear wall offered a perfect, unobstructed view across the garden.

He had seen every atrocity. He had watched the duel from its first spark of hope to its final, bloody conclusion.

He had seen Helena’s magic, that beautiful, transcendent art, rise in magnificent spirals only to be snuffed out like cheap candles.

He had seen her phoenix wings flare in a desperate, final storm, only to watch them dissolve into ash.

He had seen the exact moment her knees struck the dirt, and he had been forced to watch every agonizing second that followed.

For all his legendary discipline, for all his reputation as the second finest mage in Aethelgard, he had been utterly impotent.

The gravity pressed down on him like an invisible titan’s hand, pinning him like a specimen to a board. He could not reach for his staff; he could not summon his wards; he could not even lift his head.

All he could do was breathe through the pain and witness.

What was building inside him did not explode in a sudden burst of rage. It was something worse.

It was a slow, inexorable accumulation. It was the way snow piles on a rooftop in the dead of winter, silent, heavy, flake after flake, until the entire structure begins to groan under the impossible burden.

First, there was Apollo.

The boy.

The child Leonidas had placed a wooden sword in the hands of when he was six years old. He had raised him with the same patient tenderness he had given his own flesh and blood.

And Apollo had died screaming on a platform with a hole torn through his throat.

Then came Elliot, broken and bleeding in some city infirmary, his body shattered, while Evelyn kept a desperate, exhausted vigil over his fading heartbeat.

Then his daughters. Lily and Diana.

His own blood, standing behind that stone wall with faces that had seen the abyss and realized there was no bottom.

Then Valentina and Elizabeth, the women who had been his pillars through decades of hardship, were now reduced to kneeling in the dirt.

The city he had sworn to protect, the city he had guarded for decades, was now a hunting ground for monsters.

And his wife, his Helena, his heart, his entire world, was being systematically dismantled, beaten into the soil while he lay paralyzed on a floor, forced to watch his life’s work be ground into crimson mud.

Behind his eyes, the memories came like knives, each one cutting deeper than the last.

’Helena laughing in the kitchen on the night they were betrothed, golden sunlight catching the flour in her hair as she kissed him.’

Elliot at five years old, snoring softly against Leonidas’s shoulder while he read aloud.

Diana’s first successful shot with a bow, the pride in her eyes making his own chest swell.

Lily running up to him, thrusting a crude crayon drawing of their family, all five of them holding hands under a bright, smiling yellow sun.

And Apollo, grinning through a face streaked with mud, hoisting a wooden sword and demanding to know if he had won his first battle.

’I failed them,’ a voice whispered in the back of his mind. ’I failed every single one of them.’

The whisper died, replaced by something far more ancient and terrible.

His muscles began to coil, tightening until they felt as though they might snap. The tendons in his neck stood out like steel cables, straining against the supernatural pressure.

A sound began to build in his chest—not a scream, not a sob, but a low, guttural growl that vibrated through his bones, rising from somewhere deep beneath his ribs.

CRACK.

The marble beneath his palms began to spiderweb. The stone didn’t just break; it surrendered.

The air around him began to hum with a frequency that made the very atoms tremble. The gravity was still there, pressing down with the weight of a mountain, but Leonidas was no longer simply accepting it.

He was pushing back.

The grief was gone. The despair had burned away, leaving behind only a white-hot, radioactive core of pure, unadulterated fury.

"REEXXXXXXX...!!!"

"...REXXIIIILLLLIOOOOONNNNNN!"

He roared it. The sound wasn’t human; it was a raw, shredded detonation that tore itself out of his lungs and cracked across the ruins like thunder striking glass.

Every head in the garden the weeping daughters, the paralyzed witnesses, the monster himself snapped toward the shattered hall.

"I... TRUSTED YOU THROUGH MY DAUGHTERS AND MY WIFE!" Leonidas screamed, his voice breaking under the strain of his own fury. "I let you into my home!"

"I let you sit at my table and eat my bread!"

"I let you call my children by their names while you plotted our fucking extinction!"

Rex turned slowly. His movements were liquid, terrifyingly calm.

He didn’t flinch at the noise; he simply lifted one eyebrow, studying Leonidas with the detached curiosity of a predator watching a cornered animal realize it has no escape.

"I’m going to rip every bone out of your body!" Leonidas shrieked.

Blood flecked spit flew from his lips as his jaw worked with murderous intent. His eyes were blown wide, bloodshot and wild with a grief that had curdled into pure, radioactive hatred.

"I’ll break you apart one piece at a time, Rex!"

"I’ll peel the skin from your bones and make you wish you had never been born!"

"I don’t care how many monsters kneel to you!"

"I don’t care how much the ground weighs!"

"I don’t care what mask you wear...! I will tear it off your face with my bare hands and watch you die screaming!"

Rex didn’t respond with words. Instead, he simply tilted his head to the side and raised two fingers.

WHUMP.

The gravity in the hall didn’t just increase; it multiplied. The atmosphere itself seemed to solidify into lead.

CRUNCH SHATTER.

The marble floor beneath Leonidas caved inward as if struck by a fallen star. Cracks raced outward from his torso like lightning bolts frozen in stone, and the floor sank into a shallow, jagged bowl.

Any other man in Aethelgard would have been instantly pancaked, their organs liquified by the sheer atmospheric pressure.

Leonidas’s arms trembled so violently they became a blur; his face turned the color of raw, bruised meat as blood vessels in his eyes began to burst.

But he did not go down.

Grrrrrrrnd.

With a sound like grinding gravel, Leonidas forced one knee beneath his center of gravity. The bones in his leg groaned a wet, terrifying sound of cartilage protesting under impossible loads.

Then he forced the other knee down. Blood began to stream from his nose, dripping onto the cracked marble.

Step by crushing, agonizing step, he rose. His vertebrae popped audibly, each movement a battle against the very fabric of space.

Finally, he stood bent nearly double, his spine curved under a weight that should have turned his skeleton into paste, his teeth bared in a snarl of pure defiance.

Helena, dangling limply in Rex’s grasp, caught sight of him through her swollen eye. A small, broken sound a whimper that might have been hope escaped her blood soaked lips.

Rex noticed. He looked at Leonidas, then back at Helena.

With a casual flick of his wrist, he released his grip on her hair.

Helena collapsed, sagging against the dirt like a marionette with cut strings. She was barely conscious, her breathing wet and shallow, each inhale accompanied by a sickening gurgle.

A pinkish bubble of blood formed at the corner of her mouth, expanding and contracting with her fading pulse. Her eyelids fluttered as she stared at nothing.

Rex stood tall, flexing his fingers as if warming up for a performance. The crushing pressure of his Gravity Manipulation remained absolute, a constant, suffocating blanket across the entire garden.

He raised his right hand over Helena’s broken form. His palm began to glow with a concentrated, sickly light a gathering of pure kinetic force.

It wasn’t enough to kill her instantly, but it was enough to shatter what was left of her body, to ensure she would never stand again, and to deliver the final, crushing punctuation to his lesson.

His eyes locked onto Leonidas’s furious stare, a silent challenge.

He brought his palm down.

BOOM.

The air itself cracked like a whip, the soundwave preceding the impact.