Chapter 586: 586. Another Challenger? But Eh... I Know That He’s Weak!
He unleashed the first counterattack. It wasn’t a strike; it was a demolition.
Rex drove a straight punch into her solar plexus. He was holding back; if he hadn’t, the kinetic energy would have leveled the mountain range behind them, but even at a fraction of his power, the result was catastrophic.
BOOM!
The shockwave rippled through her torso. Her skin didn’t just bruise; it burst.
The sheer pressure caused her abdominal wall to explode outward in a spray of viscera and shredded muscle. A chunk of her liver, pulped and unrecognizable, flew past Rex’s shoulder like a wet stone.
She tried to scream, but all that came out was a wet, bubbling wheeze as she was sent reeling. Before she could even register the loss of her internal organs, Rex was on her.
He delivered a roundhouse kick to her side.
CRUNCH SPLAT!
The impact was so violent that her entire left ribcage didn’t just break; it disintegrated. The force traveled through her spine, and a sickening pop echoed through the plaza as her left hip joint was forcibly ejected from its socket, the limb hanging by mere strips of sinew and skin.
"Look at you," Rex mocked, stepping into her guard as she stumbled, a ruin of meat and shattered bone. "A masterpiece of effort, reduced to a pile of leaking scraps."
He delivered a rapid-fire succession of blows and punches that sounded like sledgehammers hitting wet clay and kicks that sent sprays of bone fragments flying like shrapnel. With every strike, more of her was lost.
A piece of her shoulder flew off; her thigh split open, exposing the white, jagged femur; her very flesh seemed to struggle to stay attached to her frame. She was no longer a woman; she was a walking explosion of gore, a living testament to the terrifying gap between a ’system holder’ and a god.
Finally, the onslaught slowed. The woman, or what was left of her, slumped back to her knees.
She was a grotesque sight, a mangled, heaving mass of shredded muscle, exposed bone, and weeping wounds. She could barely keep her head upright, her chin resting on a chest that was little more than a hollowed-out cavity of red pulp. She let out one final, pathetic, gurgling grunt, her eyes staring vacantly at the blood-soaked ground.
Rex stood over her, looking down with a cold, bored satisfaction.
He didn’t look tired; he looked like a man who had finished a chore. He lifted his heavy, bloodstained boot and placed it slowly, deliberately, on the crown of her head.
He didn’t crush her instantly. He applied pressure with agonizing slowness, letting her feel the weight of her doom.
He felt the skull groan and crack beneath his sole, the sound of bone splintering echoing in the sudden silence of the plaza.
"Rest now," Rex murmured, a dark, final benediction. "The math is finally complete."
Then, he shifted his weight.
KRA THOOM!
With a sudden, violent surge of force, Rex drove his foot downward. The woman’s skull didn’t just break; it detonated.
A massive explosion of grey brain matter, white bone shards, and thick, dark blood erupted from beneath his boot, spraying outward in a wide, gruesome radius. When Rex lifted his foot, there was nothing left of her head but a flattened, gory smear on the stone, a red crater where a human being had once dared to stand.
"Another fucking joke, it seems..."
...
The plaza fell into a deafening, traumatized silence, broken only by the wet, rhythmic drip, drip, drip of the woman’s remaining viscera sliding off Rex’s blood-slicked boot. The red crater that had once been her head stood as a gruesome monument to the absolute disparity in their power.
"Who’s next?" Rex smiled. "Any sacrificial lamb here?"
For a heartbeat, the remaining five reincarnators simply stared, their minds struggling to process the sheer, unadulterated brutality of the slaughter. Then, the silence was shattered by a guttural, soul-wrenching scream.
SWOOSSSHHHH!
"GALE! NO! DON’T!" Verakis roared, his voice cracking with a mixture of horror and frantic desperation.
He saw the look in the wind-type reincarnator’s eyes, a look of pure, unhinged madness born from the sight of their strongest comrade being reduced to a smear of brain matter. "GALE, WAIT! STOP!"
But it was already too late. Gale was gone.
The man who had been a composed, tactical combatant had been replaced by a vessel of pure, screaming rage. His eyes were bloodshot, his teeth bared in a snarl of primal fury as he watched the blood spray from the woman’s exploded skull.
He didn’t see a tactical error; he saw a desecration. He didn’t see a god; he saw a monster that needed to be torn apart.
With a roar that tore from his very lungs, Gale launched himself forward.
"YOU FUCKING BASTAAARDDDDD!!!"
He didn’t just run; he blurred. He used the wind-type ability to compress the air around him, turning himself into a living turbine of kinetic energy.
He had been building the approach since the broad-shouldered woman had first charged, using her chaotic, heavy movements as a smokescreen for his own high-speed flanking maneuver.
He arrived at Rex’s position not with a punch, but with a devastating rotational compression. This technique was on a cyclone scale, designed to catch an opponent and spin them into a state of total disorientation, tearing apart their equilibrium.
He moved to wrap the wind around Rex’s center, intending to spin the man until his internal organs were shredded by the centrifugal force.
Rex didn’t flinch. As the howling gale of Gale’s technique slammed into him, Rex didn’t fight the spin.
He didn’t resist the violent, swirling pressure that sought to throw him off balance. Instead, he stepped into it.
With the precision of a master mathematician, Rex located the exact axis of the rotation. He aligned his own center of gravity with the heart of the cyclone, turning the wind type’s own momentum into a launching mechanism.
As the rotation reached its peak angular velocity, Rex didn’t just spin; he accelerated. He became the eye of the storm, a dense, heavy weight of pure destruction.
At the exact microsecond the spin completed, Rex’s right foot lashed out.
The impact was a cosmic contradiction. The force didn’t just come from Rex; it was the redirected, amplified energy of Gale’s own rotational working, channeled through Rex’s foot and delivered back into the source.
BOOOOOOM!
The sound was like a thunderclap trapped in a stone chamber. Gale didn’t fly backward; the force was so concentrated that it seemed to implode his midsection before exploding outward.
The air in the plaza rippled in a visible shockwave, sending dust and blood mist spiraling into the air. Gale was slammed backward with such violent velocity that he skipped across the plaza stone like a stone across a pond, leaving a trail of cracked granite and scraped flesh behind him.
Gale sat down hard on the plaza stone, his breath coming in ragged, broken gasps. He looked down at his midsection, where his tactical gear was shredded and his skin was a bruised, purple ruin, his very ribs groaning under the pressure of the impact.
He couldn’t move; he couldn’t even scream. He could only stare in wide-eyed, trembling shock at the man who had just turned his own masterpiece of combat against him.
Rex stood perfectly composed, his expression as cold and unbothered as if he had merely stepped over a puddle. He looked down at the broken man, his eyes gleaming with that same terrifying, dark intellect.
"The problem with rotational force," Rex said, his voice cutting through the settling dust like a razor, "is that it works in any direction from the center... Including back."
Gale lay in the center of the plaza, his chest heaving in shallow, agonizing jerks. Rex’s counterstrike had left Gale feeling as though a landslide had rearranged his internal organs.
Every breath was a battle against the crushing weight in his gut, and as he tried to push himself up, his arms gave way, sending him sprawling back into the red-stained dust.
"Help..." Gale wheezed, his eyes searching desperately for his comrades. "Someone... help me up..."
"Don’t move, Gale! Stay down!" Verakis shouted, his voice trembling.
