Chapter 1305. Every Time I Hit Him, He Gets Stronger. Great. Love That for Me.

Chapter 1305: 1305. Every Time I Hit Him, He Gets Stronger. Great. Love That for Me.

Leonidas did not understand a word of Rex’s taunts. The complex terminology of forbidden gods and divine marks meant nothing to the man who was currently drowning in his own blood.

What he knew was primal. He knew that a furnace had been ignited behind his ribs, consuming his fear, his exhaustion, and his grief, converting them into something far more volatile.

Pain was no longer a warning signal; it was fuel. His rage had suddenly acquired a physical geometry—an edge that could cut through reality and a weight that pulled at his very soul.

His smoldering crimson eyes dropped to his own hands, which were shaking, not from weakness, but from the sheer pressure of the power coursing through them. For one heartbeat, a flicker of human confusion crossed his transformed features.

"What did you do to me?" Leonidas demanded, his voice hoarse, sounding like grinding tectonic plates. "What is this... this poison in my veins?"

But the moment of doubt was incinerated by the next surge of power. The confusion burned away in a white-hot flash, leaving behind nothing but a raw, screaming void of fury.

Without warning, Leonidas vanished. He didn’t just move; he exploded forward at twice his previous speed, leaving a crater where his feet had been.

BOOM.

The fight changed shape. The duel was no longer a contest of skill; it had become a collision of fundamental forces.

Rex saw the shift immediately. His enhanced perception registered the terrifying change in Leonidas’s biomechanics.

Earlier, Leonidas had been a cold, economical surgeon, a man spending exactly as much energy as the moment required to kill.

Now, he was a hurricane.

Each swing of his sword carried a catastrophic surplus of force that seemed to originate from somewhere deeper than his muscles. It was as though the anger itself was a physical lever, pushing the blade from within Leonidas’s bones.

The environment itself began to scream. Heat shimmers danced off Leonidas’s shoulders like liquid glass, and the lush green grass beneath his advancing feet withered instantly, turning brown, brittle, and then black as he passed.

WHOOSH CLANG!

Rex threw himself sideways to dodge a diagonal slash that would have bisected his torso. He felt the sheer wind pressure of the passing blade tugging at his hair, the displaced air hitting his face like a physical blow.

In that half second of desperate evasion, the pieces of the puzzle finally locked into place. Rex began to understand the terrifying mathematics of this new enemy.

His own power was a vast, oceanic thing. The Mark of Lust was expansive; it grew from the bonds he forged, the desires he sowed, and the pleasures he harvested.

It was a flood that rose slowly, spreading outward in every direction as he claimed more hearts. It was patient. It was broad, and it was a slow-burning crescendo.

What lived inside Leonidas was the opposite. Wrath was not a flood; it was a singularity.

It was a point of infinite pressure. It fed on the agony of the wronged, the pain of the broken, and the righteous indignation of a world trampled under a monster’s heel.

It condensed all that suffering into a single, driving edge. It was a parasitic divinity that transformed trauma into lethality.

Every wound Leonidas took did not weaken him; it fed the engine. Every insult Rex spat, every drop of blood spilled, became fresh oil poured onto an infernal fire.

SHLICK.

A thin red line opened across Rex’s ribs as Leonidas’s blade grazed him during a vicious follow-up strike. Rex didn’t retreat; he stepped inside the next slash, closing the distance to test the limits of this new phenomenon.

The air between them was so hot it burned his lungs.

"I see it now," Rex murmured, his voice almost lost in the roaring wind of the exchange, his eyes alight with a manic, scholarly fascination. "It’s beautiful, in its own twisted way..."

"It’s taking the pain you give it."

He ducked under a thrust that shattered the stone beneath his feet, feeling the heat of Leonidas’s aura searing his skin. "It scales with what you suffer..."

"Every wound I inflict, every ounce of agony you endure... it all converts directly into power."

"That’s why every hit I land makes you hit harder."

Rex’s grin widened, blood dripping from his chin. "You’re not fighting me anymore, Leonidas... You’re fighting the very pain I’m giving you."

Leonidas didn’t need Rex’s clinical analysis to understand the mechanics of his own transformation. He didn’t need words to explain the impossible.

He could feel it in the marrow of his bones.

A strike from Rex, a precise, magically enhanced punch that should have shattered Leonidas’s ribs, with a wet CRUNCH landed square against his sternum.

Instead of the agony of breaking bone, Leonidas felt only a surge of molten heat spreading through his chest. The pain didn’t incapacitate him; it acted like a bellows, stoking the furnace.

A searing burn from Rex’s lightning grazed his forearm, peeling back skin in blackened strips, but as the blood wept, the crimson veins carved into Leonidas’s flesh brightened. The sword in his grip suddenly felt as light as a feather, its balance perfect, its hunger insatiable.

Three horrific, divine truths governed this new state.

First, his physical strength and his sorcerous output were now tethered to his suffering; the more he bled, the more devastating his magic became.

Second, his threshold for agony had ascended to something inhuman; as long as the fury burned, pain was merely data, a secondary sensation that couldn’t touch his consciousness.

And third, most terrifyingly, the Mark possessed a reflexive cruelty. Every injury Leonidas sustained triggered an involuntary backlash, a psychic lash that struck back at Rex like a whip made of pure retribution.

It was a gift from a god of vengeance, and it was profoundly unfair.

Rex, however, was not a man who accepted unfairness. He was a man who conquered it.

’This is a feedback loop,’ Rex thought, his mind racing through tactical simulations even as his lungs burned from the superheated air. ’ The more I press, the more he evolves.’

’I can’t win a war of attrition against a man who gains power from being beaten.’

He had spent months sculpting his abilities, weaving together telekinesis, elemental mastery, and regenerative immortality specifically to ensure that no single opponent could ever truly claim him. He had prepared for every trick, every hidden blade, every secret technique.

But as he threw himself backward, narrowly avoiding a horizontal slash that carved a furrow of molten earth where his head had been a millisecond before, a cold realization settled in his gut.

For the first time since he had begun his conquest, the ground beneath his feet felt unstable. The fundamental rules of engagement had been rewritten.

He was no longer fighting a mage; he was fighting a phenomenon of pure, concentrated consequence.

The air around Leonidas began to scream. The mana pressure became so dense that it created visible distortions in the space around him, warping light like a gravitational lens.

Leonidas’s breathing was no longer human; it was the rhythmic, terrifying hiss of a dragon’s forge.

"You want to see what Wrath truly means?" Leonidas’s voice didn’t come from his throat; it seemed to vibrate out of the very air, ancient and terrible. "Then witness its conclusion."

Leonidas planted his feet, the grass beneath his boots disintegrating into ash. He gripped his sword with both hands, muscles bulging beneath skin that glowed like cooling magma.

He raised the blade high above his head, the steel catching the violet light of Rex’s magic and refracting it into a thousand deadly shards.

The muscles in Leonidas’s back corded like steel cables. The energy coiled around the blade began to spiral upward, forming a vortex of crimson mana that shrieked with the sound of ten thousand tormented souls.

With a roar that tore through the fabric of the evening silence, a sound of pure, unadulterated devastation, Leonidas brought the sword down in a devastating overhead cleave.

KRA BOOOOOM!