Chapter 592: 592. Trying To Explode Yourself? Nah... I’ll Explode Your Head First!
He began spamming his magic with a frantic, uncoordinated desperation. "WATER WALL! WIND BARRIER! STONE ARMOR!"
He created a chaotic, layered cocoon of elemental defenses, a frantic shell of magic meant to protect his crumbling psyche.
But Rex wasn’t concerned about the layers. He treated the defensive spells like mere nuisances.
Pop.
A kick to the stomach, shattering the Water Wall.
Pop.
A punch to the temple, slicing through the Wind Barrier.
Pop.
A knee to the chest, cracking the Stone Armor.
It was a relentless, rhythmic slaughter of movement. Rex was a blur of motion, a flickering shadow that appeared only to deliver a brutal, physical blow before vanishing back into the void.
He wasn’t using grand magic anymore; he was using the most basic, primal forms of combat, punches, kicks, and elbows, but delivered with the terrifying velocity of a teleporting god.
Verakis was drowning in his own panic. He was a man trying to catch smoke with his bare hands.
Every time he thought he had a moment to breathe, every time he thought he had constructed a defense, Rex was there, a sudden, violent presence that broke his spirit as much as his bones.
"Look at you," Rex taunted, appearing above him and delivering a downward heel to Verakis’s shoulder, pinning him momentarily to the ground. "Spamming your little spells like a child throwing toys!"
"You’re trying to build a fortress, but you’ve forgotten that the enemy is already inside the walls."
Verakis lay there, his breath coming in ragged, sobbing gasps. He was now spamming magic blindly, creating useless flickers of light and small gusts of wind, his mental state completely shattered.
He was no longer a soldier of the Legion; he was a cornered animal, waiting for the final, inevitable blow from a monster who was playing with him as if he were nothing more than a broken toy.
The world had become a blur of pain and mockery. Verakis felt his mind fracturing, the pieces of his identity scattering into the red mist of the plaza.
He was no longer fighting for the Legion, or for the truth, or even for survival. He was fighting to end the sensation of existing.
"Please..." Verakis whimpered, his eyes rolling back in his head. "Just... let it be over..."
The desperation reached a fever pitch, a primal, white-hot madness. If he couldn’t win, if he couldn’t live to tell the tale, then he would simply cease to be.
He would take the monster with him. He would turn his very soul into a detonator.
"ALL... OF... IT!" Verakis shrieked, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony.
He stopped trying to shape the magic. He stopped trying to be precise.
Instead, he opened every single energy gate in his body at once. He forced his entire life force, his very essence, to circulate through his veins in a violent, uncontrolled torrent.
He wasn’t just using magic; he was burning it. He was turning his internal organs into fuel, his blood into liquid mana.
His skin began to glow with a sickly, pulsating light. The air around him began to vibrate with a frequency so high it shattered the nearby stones into dust.
He was becoming a living sun, a pressurized vessel of pure, unrefined energy. The heat was unbearable; his clothes began to singe, and the smell of burning flesh rose from his own limbs.
He was preparing for the ultimate, suicidal act: a total magical burnout, an explosion of his own soul that would leave nothing behind but a crater and a memory.
’Here it comes!’ he thought, a twisted sense of relief washing over him as he felt his heart begin to rhythmically expand, ready to burst. ’One final flash!’
’One final scream!’
He braced himself for the white light, for the sudden, violent end.
But the explosion never came.
Just as the pressure reached its absolute breaking point, just as the first crack of light began to tear through his skin, a sudden, crushing weight slammed into his entire being. It wasn’t a physical blow but a conceptual one.
It was an invisible, absolute grip that seized every atom of his vibrating body.
Rex’s telekinesis.
The explosion was caught in midair. The massive, surging wave of primordial and elemental energy was frozen, held in place by a force so much more absolute than the magic itself.
Verakis felt his body being squeezed, not from the outside, but from every direction simultaneously, as if the universe itself had decided to hold him in a suffocating embrace.
The light faded and the heat dissipated. The violent vibrations subsided into a low, agonizing hum.
Rex appeared, standing just inches away, his mask reflecting the dying, trapped glow of Verakis’s soul. He looked at the trembling, glowing man with a look of profound, sadistic disappointment.
"An explosion?" Rex asked, his voice cool and mocking. "How cliché..."
"How... uninspired."
"You really thought you could just blow yourself up and escape the conversation?"
Rex tightened his telekinetic grip, the pressure increasing until Verakis’s bones groaned in protest. The energy was still there, trapped inside him, burning him from the inside out, but it had nowhere to go.
Rex was forcing him to endure the agony of the explosion without the mercy of the release.
"No, Verakis," Rex whispered, leaning in so the red light of his mask washed over Verakis’s sweating, terrified face. "You don’t get to die that easily."
"You don’t get to end it on your own terms..."
"You will stay here, in this state of perpetual, burning transition, until I decide you have suffered enough."
Verakis let out a strangled, silent sob. He was a man caught in the moment between life and death, a living bomb that was being forced to stay lit, unable to explode, unable to fade, and doomed to endure the infinite, agonizing second of his own destruction.
The mockery was over. The playtime had reached its conclusion.
Rex’s expression shifted from sadistic amusement to a cold, clinical finality. He reached out with a speed that defied the eye, his massive, gloved hand lashing out to seize Verakis’s head.
His fingers dug into the temples like iron clamps, the sheer strength of his grip making the bones of Verakis’s skull creak and groan. Verakis could only let out a muffled, pathetic whimper, his eyes wide and rolling in terror, staring into the unblinking red void of Rex’s mask.
Then, the brutality began.
Rex didn’t use a weapon. He used his hands.
He brought his palms together, not in prayer but in a rhythmic, devastating crush.
CRUNCH.
The first impact sent a shockwave through Verakis’s entire frame. The pressure was localized, concentrated entirely on the cranial vault.
CRACK.
The second impact was more violent. The structural integrity of the skull reached its limit. With a sickening, wet pop,
Verakis’s eyes, once bright with the fire of the Legion, bulged and then literally burst from their sockets, dangling by the optic nerves as the internal pressure became too much for the flesh to contain.
A torrent of thick, dark blood erupted from his nose and mouth, spraying across Rex’s knuckles. A moment later, a crimson stream began to pour from his ears, a sign that the very brain matter inside was being pulverized into a slurry.
Rex leaned in closer, his voice a low, terrifying lullaby against the backdrop of Verakis’s dying gurgles.
"Rest assured, Verakis," Rex whispered, the red light of his mask bathing the dying man in a hellish glow. "Not all of the Legion will have it this easy."
"Most will die wondering why they ever dared to stand in my way..."
"But you... you got to see the truth."
"That is a mercy most won’t receive."
He paused, letting the weight of the words sink into the dying man’s consciousness. "Goodbye, little soldier."
Rex didn’t just let him fall. He gripped the head with both hands, his muscles rippling with the terrifying power of his peak superhuman physique.
With a sudden, explosive jerk, he snapped Verakis’s neck. The sound was like a dry branch breaking in a silent forest, a sharp, definitive SNAP that signaled the end of the soul’s connection to the body.
But Rex wasn’t finished. He wanted to leave a monument of carnage.
Holding the severed, limp head firmly, Rex swung Verakis’s entire body upward with a violent, centrifugal force. Then, with the precision of a butcher and the strength of a god, he brought the head crashing down, slamming it directly into the center of Verakis’s own torso.
SHLICK THUD!
The impact was catastrophic. The sheer, concentrated force of Rex’s superhuman strength, combined with the downward momentum, acted like a guillotine of pure muscle and bone.
The spine shattered, the ribs exploded outward, and the abdominal cavity surrendered to the pressure.
Verakis’s body didn’t just break; it split.
The torso tore apart from the sternum down to the pelvis, the two halves of the man splaying outward in a spray of viscera, intestines, and hot, steaming blood. The top half, still clutching the head, tumbled into the red mire, while the lower half slumped uselessly into the dirt.
Rex stood amidst the bifurcated remains of the man who had tried to defy him. He wiped a smear of blood from his mask, the red light dimming slightly as he turned his back on the ruin, leaving the broken pieces of the Legion to rot in the silence of the plaza.
"Good fucking shit..."
"Almost feels better than sex..."
"...torturing weaklings, that is."
