Chapter 1303. Stabbed Through the Lung, and Honestly? Still Laughing

Chapter 1303: 1303. Stabbed Through the Lung, and Honestly? Still Laughing

There was no wind-up, no dramatic flourish of steel. There was only the terrifying economy of a master at work.

One moment Leonidas was ten yards away, his stance coiled like a spring; the next, he had simply erased the distance. He appeared where Rex had stood, his blade carving through the air in a perfect, hissing horizontal arc.

SHHH TICK.

The blade passed through the space where Rex’s torso had been. Behind the villain, a massive marble pillar, one of the few relics that had survived the initial destruction, slid apart at the waist as if cut by a hot wire.

The two halves groaned before toppling to the ground with a thunderous CRASH that sent chunks of masonry flying across the lawn.

Rex was gone.

Foresight that sixth sense honed by centuries of slaughter had granted him a tenth of a second of warning. He had spent that precious heartbeat springing backward, his boots skidding across the dirt as he narrowly avoided being bisected.

Landing twelve feet away, he didn’t hesitate.

"Impressive," Rex hissed through clenched teeth. "But let’s see how you handle the cold of the void."

With a violent snap of his wrists, Rex conjured a lance of violet ice. It wasn’t frozen water; it was crystallized gravity, a jagged, spinning shard of unnatural frost that screamed as it tore through the air toward Leonidas’s throat.

CRACK SHATTER.

Leonidas didn’t flinch. He didn’t even break his stride. His sword became a bar of pure silver light, meeting the lance mid-flight.

The enchanted steel didn’t just deflect the ice; it shattered it. The fragments of violet frost exploded outward in both directions like severed grass, glittering deadly in the moonlight.

Leonidas immediately transitioned into his second assault. His sword traced a long, scything path through the air, releasing a crescent of compressed mana.

The blade of energy was as long as a city street, a howling crescent of white fire that hissed across the garden and bit deep into the earth, leaving a smoking trench in its wake.

Rex reacted with brutal speed.

"Not today." He slammed his palms toward the ground.

RUMBLE.

A wall of ancient stone erupted from beneath him, thick enough to withstand a siege. The energy crescent struck the barrier with the sound of a lightning strike.

The stone wall shuddered, groaned under the magical pressure, and then burst apart in a spray of deadly fragments.

A thin, hot line opened across Rex’s cheek, a tiny red thread that glistened before a single bead of blood began to slide down his jaw.

Rex reached up, touching the wound with a fingertip. He stared at the crimson smear with mild, detached surprise.

"You’ve drawn blood, Leonidas." Rex’s voice had lost its mocking lilt; it was now flat, dangerous. "Now I must return the favor."

For the first time since the duel with Helena began, Rex was no longer playing. The predator had recognized a threat.

He moved like a shadow. Ducking under a third killing cut that would have taken his head, Rex rolled over the shattered wreckage of the garden pond, water and stone spraying everywhere.

He came up on one knee, his eyes blazing with violet fury as a sheet of purple lightning erupted from his hands. The bolt shrieked across the grass, seeking Leonidas’s heart.

CLANG.

Leonidas spun his blade, catching the bolt on the flat of his sword. The magical discharge threw sparks cascading across his armor like fireworks, but his feet remained planted.

Rex didn’t let up. He slid backward across the grass, his heels gouging two deep trenches in the turf as he maintained distance, and with a guttural roar, he hurled an earthen spear, a sharpened spire of granite launched at subsonic speeds.

Leonidas sidestepped the projectile by a hair’s breadth, the stone whistling past his ear.

WHOOSH.

Without pausing to breathe, he drove forward again.

Their rhythm became a symphony of violence: swift, brutal, and relentless.

CLASH. CRUNCH. WHIP.

Every motion Leonidas made was lean, terrifyingly efficient, and devoid of any wasted energy. There were no theatrical spins or unnecessary shouts.

Each strike closed the distance left by the previous one, each parry positioned to set up a counter thrust. It was the fighting style of a man who had killed thousands the veteran’s way.

A style that didn’t need to impress an audience or seek glory; it only existed to end a life.

’I can feel it,’ Leonidas thought, his lungs burning like he was inhaling molten metal. ’His energy... it’s heavier than any human’s should be.’

’Every time our blades meet, it feels like my bones are being crushed by a hammer.’

’But I will not stop... I will not break.’

’For Helena... For Apollo... For everything he stole...’

"Come on, Rex!" Leonidas roared, his blade singing as it carved another path through the darkness. "Show me what a monster truly is!"

Rex had spent the last week dissecting the legend of Leonidas. He had devoured Helena’s tactical observations, Valentina’s theoretical lectures, and a hundred scattered anecdotes from battle-hardened veterans.

But information was sterile. What he lacked was the visceral, bone-deep reality of the man and the cold, terrifying economy of his actual swordplay.

Unlike Helena, who fought with a lyrical, devastating grace that Rex could predict through pattern recognition, Leonidas had no rhythm to exploit. There was no poetry here.

There were no showy flourishes or predictable cadences. Each strike was a raw necessity, born from the immediate demands of survival.

When the moment shifted, Leonidas shifted with it, as fluid as water but as relentless as a landslide.

’Adaptation,’ Rex thought, his mind working with inhuman speed. ’I need to adapt faster than he can innovate.’

Behind the violet glow of his eyes, Rex’s Full Potential Adaptation hummed like a starving engine. The process was brutal and instantaneous.

Every time Leonidas unleashed a technique Rex hadn’t encountered, it landed.

Every time.

’One... two... three...’ Rex counted internally as a pulsing cut of Starlight mana tore through his ribs. The pain was sharp, a white-hot brand that smelled of burnt flesh. ’Four... five...’

A spiral thrust grazed his thigh, slicing through leather and tendon with a wet SHLICK.

’Six seconds. ’

The analysis was complete.

The technique was catalogued.

The gap in his rhythm was closed.

But Leonidas was a predator who refused to be studied. He slipped through the cracks of Rex’s learning curve, striking before the analysis could reach certainty.

"Let’s see you analyze this!" Rex roared, abandoning all pretense of restraint.

He raised the tempo to a suicidal crescendo. The garden became a maelstrom of conflicting elemental forces.

From his left hand, a wave of purple fire erupted fierce, hungry flames that roared like a furnace.

From his right arm, jagged bolts of violet lightning crackled and spat, seeking to sear flesh from bone.

From above, he summoned a crescent of wind, split into seven stacked blades that hissed through the air like deadly scythes.

And in the same heartbeat, Rex reached out with his telekinesis. An invisible fist of gravitational force slammed into the flat of Leonidas’s sword from the side, seizing the steel and holding it rigid in midair.

’Got you.’

Rex unleashed the full assault, expecting the impaled corpse of the Shield of Aethelgard.

But Leonidas did not panic. He did not struggle against the telekinetic grip. He read the opening in a single, lightning-quick breath, the instinct of thirty years of bloodshed manifesting as a pure reflex.

Instead of fighting the telekinetic hold, he used it.

Leonidas threw his entire body into a tight, violent corkscrew, spinning his weight in perfect synchronization with Rex’s force. At the apex of the spin, he channeled every remaining drop of his unshaped mana into the hilt of his blade.

BOOM.

The magical pulse detonated from the sword like a grenade. The telekinetic hold shattered like brittle glass.

The purple fire washed harmlessly past Leonidas’s shoulder, scorching the air. The lightning struck the ground behind him with a thunderous CRACK, carving a blackened scar across the earth.

The seven blades of wind, aimed at where a man should have been frozen, tore through the air and struck a row of ancient oaks, reducing them to splintered fence posts in an instant.

And Leonidas, still spinning from the momentum of his escape, brought the sword around in one flawless, merciless arc.

SHHH THWACK.

The sound was sickeningly wet. The blade tore through Rex’s left shoulder, punching through muscle, clavicle, and lung before erupting out through his back.

The force was so immense that it drove Rex bodily into the earth.

Rex slammed into the turf, the sword pinning him to the ground like a specimen mounted on a board. A single hand’s breadth of cold, blood-slicked steel protruded from beneath his back, standing defiantly upright through the grass.

Silence returned to the garden, broken only by the ragged, wet breathing of the two combatants.

Rex lay impaled, his body convulsing weakly against the blade. Blood bubbled up in his throat, crimson frothing at the corners of his lips.

He coughed, a wet, gurgling sound that sprayed blood across the silver steel.

Then, to Leonidas’s horror, Rex began to laugh.

A broken, wet chuckle that sounded like grinding stones.