Chapter 595: 595. That Raizen Guy... He’s Worthy To Put Up A Good Fight That I Enjoy!
Raizen moved.
It wasn’t a desperate lunge; it was the calculated explosion of a man who had accepted his death and turned it into a weapon. His fire ability was a nightmare of engineering, not a standard combustion but a terrifying hybrid that incorporated the Legion’s primordial frequency calibration.
This wasn’t the orange, flickering warmth of a campfire; it was a deep, structural heat, a silent, invisible distortion in the air that operated on a register far beyond conventional thermal damage.
The first strike erupted from his right hand, a focused lance of compressed, frequency-calibrated combustion. It didn’t look like fire; it looked like a ripple in reality itself.
The lance slammed into Rex’s right shoulder. There was no roar of flame, no scorched fabric, no spray of embers. Instead, there was a disturbing, deep vibration that went straight through Rex’s armor and clothes, hitting directly at the inside of his body.
Rex felt it. It was a specific, jarring pain signature, a bone-deep resonance that felt less like a burn and more like his very atoms were being shaken apart. He noted the sensation, cataloged the unique frequency, and with a terrifying, smug nonchalance didn’t even break his stride.
"You felt that," Raizen hissed, his eyes wide, his breath coming in ragged, terrified gasps as he realized the monster hadn’t even flinched.
"Yeah, I fucking felt that," Rex replied, his voice smooth, almost bored. He kept moving forward, the predator closing the gap. "Finally... someone a little worthy."
Raizen swung the second strike wider, a sweeping arc of invisible heat designed to force a directional response. It was a sophisticated gambit, intended to pin Rex into a specific vector so the third strike could follow through before the momentum could be reversed.
But Rex was playing a different game.
As the lance of structural heat raced toward him, Rex didn’t dodge. He simply deployed a telekinetic field.
It wasn’t a blunt wall of force; it was a precise, surgical interception that caught the frequency vector mid-flight and dispersed it sideways. The strike slammed into the tunnel wall with a muffled thrum, the stone absorbing the heat with the indifferent density of the deep earth.
Raizen’s eyes widened.
"Telekinesis?" he gasped, his composure fracturing. "Primordial frequency... it should have deflected that!"
"Standard telekinesis," Rex countered, his grin widening as he loomed closer, the sheer mass of his physique making the tunnel feel like a tomb. "The field I used is not standard."
Raizen unleashed the third strike, the killing blow.
But Rex was already there.
Utilizing the two-second foresight window, Rex had timed his movement to the millisecond. He had used the lateral spread of the second strike as a shroud, closing the distance with a predatory burst of speed.
He arrived at Raizen’s threshold precisely as the third strike was forming, striking in that infinitesimal, lethal gap between the energy’s formation and its discharge. It was the moment when the rhythm of a fire type collapsed, the moment when the weapon was most vulnerable.
At this suffocating close range, Raizen’s modified fire lacked the space to breathe. He was caught in the transition.
Raizen adapted with the desperate brilliance of a survivor. Realizing the lance would fail, he forcibly converted the gathering energy into a chaotic, close-range burst.
It was less focused and less precise but far more immediate—a frantic, thermal explosion meant to blast Rex backward.
Rex took the hit on his forearm. He angled his limb with surgical precision, allowing the surface heat to wash harmlessly over his skin while the deep, structural vibration was absorbed into his limb.
Before the damage could even register as a wound, his Supreme Healing kicked in, the real-time tissue maintenance knitting the vibrating cells back together before the pain could even accumulate.
He stepped through the explosion as if walking through a light mist.
Rex’s massive right hand shot out, seizing Raizen’s lead shoulder. The grip wasn’t just physical; Rex layered his telekinesis in parallel with the hold, a micro-scale application of force that worked at the molecular level.
It wasn’t a broad, crushing pressure that Raizen’s primordial frequency immunity could deflect; it was a precise, inescapable anchor that locked onto Raizen’s very essence.
Raizen roared, pulling against the grip with every ounce of strength his system could muster. He poured everything, every bit of his survival instinct, every drop of his mana, into the struggle.
The system was immense. The power was staggering.
And Rex didn’t move an inch. He held Raizen with the terrifying, effortless strength of a god gripping a trembling bird.
"Release!" Raizen screamed through gritted teeth, his face contorting in a mask of pure, agonizing terror.
Rex leaned in, his face inches from Raizen’s, his eyes burning with a dark, triumphant, and utterly sadistic joy.
"In a moment," Rex purred.
The struggle was no longer a duel of abilities; it was a brutal, claustrophobic collision of wills. Trapped in the inescapable molecular vice of Rex’s grip, Raizen realized that his only hope lay in the geometry of the hold itself.
With a desperate, guttural roar, he drove his left elbow backward, aiming it with surgical precision into Rex’s ribs at the exact angle the grip allowed. It was a strike born of pure Legion instinct, a heavy, bone-shattering blow designed to crack the cage of the chest.
The impact was massive, transferring a clean, violent force that should have sent Rex reeling or at least forced a momentary loosening of his hold.
But the outcome was unsettling. It was fundamentally, horrifyingly wrong.
Rex didn’t even grunt. The force seemed to vanish into him, absorbed by a body that felt less like flesh and more like living granite.
Rex felt the vibration of the strike, and he knew Raizen felt the failure of it. Sensing the shift, Raizen pivoted instantly, dropping his next strike lower, aiming a frantic, heavy blow at the floating ribs where the structural resistance was weaker.
Again, the impact was immense, and again, it produced nothing but the hollow sensation of hitting an immovable mountain.
"What... are you?" Raizen gasped, the question tearing from his throat.
It wasn’t a request for a name or a title; it was the existential scream of a man whose entire understanding of reality had just been shattered. He was looking at a variable that shouldn’t exist, a predator that defied every law of combat he had ever mastered.
Rex’s grin was a jagged blade of pure, unadulterated arrogance.
"Something the Legion hasn’t built a protocol for yet," he purred, his eyes dancing with the sadistic joy of a man who knew he was the ultimate anomaly.
The next seven seconds were a blur of high speed, lethal desperation. Raizen was a master, a combatant whose skill was forged in the fires of long-term, disciplined practice rather than mere system handouts.
In that frantic window, he found two openings that would have ended any other man’s life. He unleashed a frequency-modified fire burst, a needle of heat aimed directly at the nerve cluster in Rex’s neck at a contact distance so close that a redirect should have been physically impossible.
Simultaneously, he attempted a complex joint manipulation on Rex’s wrist, utilizing the Legion’s most advanced close-range techniques to snap the grip.
But against Rex’s new, transcendent physical baseline, these elite maneuvers found only walls. They were like waves crashing against a cliffside, impressive, powerful, but ultimately futile.
Then came the seventh second—the crescendo of their battle.
Rex decided the dance was over. He didn’t just strike; he detonated.
He drove his elbow into Raizen’s solar plexus, channeling the geological, crushing weight of his Earthen Authority through the amplified, terrifying output of his Peak Physique. It wasn’t just a punch; it was a tectonic shift.
The impact was catastrophic. Raizen’s breath didn’t just leave him; it was violently evicted, his diaphragm collapsing under a force that far exceeded its structural limits.
It was the feeling of being hit by a falling star.
Raizen went down.
The world spun in a nauseating whirl of dark stone and white-hot pain. But he was a survivor of the Underlayer, a man of iron discipline.
He didn’t collapse into a heap of broken meat; instead, he caught himself with a desperate, practiced grace, dropping to one knee and bracing one hand against the damp floor. His body, trained to maintain operational capacity even while the central system was screaming in agony, fought to keep him upright.
He stayed there, trembling, gasping for air that wouldn’t come, managing the wreckage of his internal organs with the grim, controlled discipline of a soldier who had stared into the mouth of death many times before and was about to do it again.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
"Damn it...!"
