Chapter 1304. Wrath? Oh, You Sneaky Dad. You Had a Secret Mode the Whole Time.

Chapter 1304: 1304. Wrath? Oh, You Sneaky Dad. You Had a Secret Mode the Whole Time.

"Good," Rex wheezed, the word thick with arterial blood.

His fingers, pale and unsteady, reached up and closed around the protruding steel where it emerged from his back.

Instead of pulling away in agony, he gripped the blade with a terrifying familiarity, holding the sword steady in his own body to prevent Leonidas from withdrawing it. A grotesque smile split his blood-soaked face.

"It has been... so long... since anyone had the courage to get this close to me."

Leonidas did not offer him the satisfaction of a retort. His face was a mask of divine fury, twisted by a pain that was no longer physical but spiritual.

His knuckles were white as he gripped the hilt. With a guttural roar of pure, unadulterated hatred, he twisted the sword.

CRUNCH. SKREEEE.

The sound of steel grinding against Rex’s shattered clavicle and splintering ribs echoed through the silent garden like breaking timber. Blood erupted from the wound in fresh, hot spurts, soaking Leonidas’s hands and spattering his face.

"That is for Apollo!" Leonidas screamed through clenched teeth, each syllable a prayer and a curse. "That is for everything you have destroyed!"

Then, something changed. Something fundamental broke in the fabric of reality.

It began as something beneath the surface. A faint, dull glow the sickly color of an ember buried deep beneath ancient ash began to throb beneath the fabric of Leonidas’s shirt, directly over his left breast.

The heartbeat was visible now, a rhythmic hammering that seemed to displace the very air.

Thump-Thump-Thump.

The glow brightened, turning from ember to molten magma. A crimson so dark it bordered on obsidian began to force its way through his skin.

It wasn’t just blood; it was something older, something primal. Thin, branching lines of infernal light erupted from his chest, crawling up his neck and across his collarbone like the roots of some cursed tree or the veins of a poisoned leaf.

The skin along these lines split slightly, weeping a faint golden ichor that smoked as it touched the air.

Leonidas’s transformation was absolute. His eyes, those warm, ordinary brown eyes that had watched his children grow for fifty years, drained of all humanity.

They became twin pits of smoldering crimson, each with a needle-thin black pupil that seemed to drink in the moonlight. His hair lifted, defying gravity, standing away from his skull as though an invisible current of raw power was coursing through every nerve ending.

His breathing changed; it was no longer the ragged gasp of a dying man but the slow, terrifyingly controlled inhalation of a furnace being stoked for war.

Haaaaah... Haaaaah...

The temperature in the garden skyrocketed. The evening chill was incinerated, replaced by a dry, oppressive heat that made the air shimmer and warp.

A shiver ran through the grass as if the earth itself were recoiling in fear. The scattered fragments of marble and debris began to hum, then tremble, then vibrate violently against the soil.

The magical pressure rolling off Leonidas’s body became physical, a crushing weight that pushed against the lawn like an invisible hand, flattening the blades of grass in concentric circles around him.

He was no longer just a mage. He was no longer just a man.

He was a furnace of righteous retribution.

Rex’s cocky smile faltered. For the first time, the predator felt the cold prickle of genuine terror. His mind, capable of processing a thousand variables a second, began to scream.

In Rex’s mind, Divine Perception didn’t just warn him; it shrieked in agony, a psychic siren wailing that something impossible, something that shouldn’t exist in the mortal realm, had just awakened.

The sensation was unlike anything Rex had experienced. When he had encountered the attention of lesser deities before, it had felt like being observed by a cold gaze from across a vast distance.

But this? This was not an observation.

This was an alarm. It was the deafening, dissonant clanging of bronze bells ringing at the base of his skull, a psychic shriek that momentarily paralyzed his synapses.

For a terrifying fraction of a second, Rex’s inhuman reflexes froze.

His Divine Perception was working overtime, frantically trying to map the impossible architecture unfolding before him. He looked at the soul register of the man standing over him, the man who had once been merely a mortal mage, and saw something that defied the laws of existence.

It wasn’t Lust. And it wasn’t Greed.

The geometry of Leonidas’s soul had shifted into something terrifyingly unfamiliar. The lines of his essence were no longer flowing streams; they were jagged, serrated edges.

The structure was rougher, more violent the way a sledgehammer differs from a needle. But the class, the register, and the fundamental weight of the power were unmistakable.

’Forbidden God.’

An unacknowledged entity. Something exempt from the divine framework, something that existed outside the sacred code of the universe.

It was a kinsman to the very mark Rex carried upon his own wrist. And this power, this infernal, molten force, had been coiled inside Leonidas like a sleeping viper, silent and patient, waiting for the exact moment of maximum devastation to strike.

Then, the system intervened. A translucent line of text burned itself across Rex’s retinas, pulsing with an ominous violet light.

[Divine signature detected: Mark of Wrath Authority.]

[Class: Forbidden God.]

[Status: Spontaneously active Reality Anchor compromised.]

Rex stared at the word. ’Wrath.’

For all the months he had spent navigating this twisted system, crawling through its strange corridors and unlocking its hidden rooms, that word had never appeared.

It was a ghost in the machine, a hidden variable he had failed to calculate. It stood there on the screen of his vision without explanation, without context. A cold stone dropped into a still pond, sending ripples of dread through his entire being.

’Wrath...’ Rex thought, his mind racing. ’Not anger. Not fury. But Wrath.’

’The divine punishment of the wronged.’

’The power that burns when justice fails.’

"Fuck," Rex hissed.

With a desperate, violent jerk, he tore himself backward off the blade.

SHLIIIIICK SPLUT.

The steel slid out of his shoulder with a wet, nauseating rasp. Blood sprayed across the grass in a crimson arc as his body was forcibly unpinned from the earth. He rolled frantically across the lawn, covering twenty feet in a desperate bid for distance.

Behind him, his Infinite Regeneration kicked in with audible fury, the sound of knitting flesh and snapping bone echoing in the quiet garden. The gaping hole in his shoulder closed in seconds, leaving behind only a raw, steaming scar.

Rex scrambled to his feet, clutching his shoulder as he gasped for air. For the first time since he had arrived in this world, the cool, detached control in his expression shattered.

The mask of the untouchable predator fell away, revealing a terrifying cocktail of startled recognition and something far more dangerous: hunger.

His eyes locked onto Leonidas. The man before him was no longer a husband or a father; he was a walking apocalypse.

The heat rolling off Leonidas was so intense that the air between them began to distort, creating a mirage that made the enraged mage look like a shifting demon made of fire and shadow.

"Mark of Wrath," Rex said, his voice dropping to a reverent, deadly whisper.

A slow, twisted grin began to spread across his lips despite the blood staining his teeth. "All this time... you weren’t just protecting Aethelgard."

"You were holding back... this?"