Chapter 598: 598. This Is Worth Doing! What Didn’t I Do It Sooner?!
Rex stood amidst the swirling, golden embers of Raizen’s disintegrating form. A sound erupted from his throat, pure and filled with unadulterated joy. He laughed—a loud, boisterous, almost celebratory sound that echoed through the silent, scorched tunnel.
"Holy fuck, that was exquisite!" Rex roared, wiping a smear of soot from his cheek. "The way you pushed, the way you screamed... you really are a masterpiece of a warrior, Raizen!"
But as the laughter died down, the expression on Rex’s face shifted. The joy didn’t vanish; it curdled, turning into something darker, more predatory.
The respect was still there, but it was the respect a sculptor has for a piece of clay that is finally firm enough to be molded.
"But a masterpiece shouldn’t be finished so soon," Rex mused, his eyes narrowing. "A man who fights like that... he deserves to experience the full spectrum of existence."
"And that includes the most delicious parts of agony."
Raizen felt a sudden, violent surge of energy, even as his consciousness flickered like a dying candle in a storm of ash. It wasn’t the chaotic, self-destructive heat of his own fire; it was something different.
Something heavy, structured, and overwhelmingly powerful.
Rex reached out, his hand glowing with the divine, terrifying light of Supreme Healing. He didn’t just touch the embers; he forced the essence of his own vitality into the dissipating particles of Raizen’s soul.
Raizen’s eyes snapped open, wide and frantic. He felt his bones knitting together with agonizing speed, his skin weaving itself back from ash to flesh, his lungs expanding with air that felt like liquid fire.
He was being forced back into a state of wholeness, his body reconstructed with a violent, unnatural efficiency. He gasped, coughing up a mouthful of blood as he felt his strength return—not the strength of a warrior, but the forced vitality of a prisoner.
"Why...?" Raizen wheezed, staring up at the grinning monster. "Why bring me back... just to kill me again?"
Rex leaned down, his face a mask of beautiful, terrifying malice.
"Because you’re a proud warrior worth keeping longer," Rex whispered, "and you can’t be tortured if you’re dead."
"And the fun is just beginning... now."
Before Raizen could even process the horror, Rex lunged.
He didn’t strike with a fist; he grabbed Raizen’s face with both hands, his fingers digging into the newly healed flesh with bruising force. With a burst of telekinetic propulsion, Rex took flight, dragging Raizen’s body through the air like a ragdoll.
SLAM!
Rex drove Raizen’s head into the jagged stone floor of the tunnel.
SLAM!
He slammed him against the ceiling, the impact sending a shower of stalactites raining down.
SLAM!
He used Raizen as a living mace, swinging him violently against the walls, the sound of bone hitting stone echoing like rhythmic thunder. Raizen was caught in a cycle of instant, miraculous healing and instant, catastrophic trauma.
Every time his skull cracked or his ribs shattered, Rex’s magic would flash, mending him just in time for the next, even more brutal impact.
But Rex wasn’t finished with the tunnel. He wanted a bigger stage.
With a predatory roar, Rex burst out of the tunnel entrance, flying into the open expanse of the Underlayer like a comet. Behind him, Raizen was a blur of motion, his body glowing with a dark, violet aura as Rex infused him with a massive, unstable surge of his own magic.
The sight was terrifying. A god-like entity hurled a massive, muscular man, glowing with a sinister light, as a projectile.
A group of reincarnators, who had been desperately scrambling through the crags to escape the chaos, looked up in horror. They didn’t even have an opportunity to scream before Rex swung Raizen like a wrecking ball.
CRUNCH!
Raizen’s body smashed into the group, the magical infusion turning him into a living bomb. The impact pulverized the Reincarnators, but the magical feedback sent a searing, agonizing shockwave back through Raizen’s own nervous system.
He was a weapon that felt every hit it delivered.
Rex didn’t stop. He dived into a swarm of native Underlayer monsters: shadowy demons, hulking insectoid beasts, and ethereal wraiths.
He became a whirlwind of carnage. He would grab a demon, swing Raizen into it with enough force to shatter the creature’s essence, and then immediately use the momentum to slam Raizen into a cluster of gargantuan monsters.
The battlefield was a chaotic symphony of destruction. Rex was playing a game of celestial billiards, using Raizen to clear the board.
Every time Raizen’s body collided with a target, the magical discharge caused a dual catastrophe: the enemy was obliterated by the physical force, while Raizen was simultaneously ravaged by the magical recoil, his body screaming in a constant, unending loop of being broken and reborn.
Rex laughed all the way through it, a dark, triumphant sound that drowned out the screams of the dying and the groans of the warrior he held in his merciless, loving grip.
The massacre was a masterpiece of kinetic cruelty. Rex was no longer just fighting; he was conducting a symphony of carnage, and Raizen was his most precious, most agonizing instrument.
Rex tore through the Underlayer like a god of destruction unleashed. He would grab a massive, armored demon, swing Raizen’s body into its maw with enough force to shatter its skull, and then before the creature even hit the ground, he would use his telekinesis to whip Raizen around in a tight, violent arc, slamming him into a wall of stone.
The magical feedback was a constant, screaming torture. Every time Raizen’s body made contact with a target, the violet magic Rex had infused into him would detonate.
The enemies were vaporized by the impact, but the recoil was a jagged lightning bolt that traveled straight back into Raizen’s nervous system, shredding his muscles and liquefying his internal organs.
"Look at you, Raizen!" Rex bellowed, his voice a manic roar as he caught a group of fleeing Reincarnators in a telekinetic net and slammed them all into a single point, using Raizen as the hammer. "You’re the strongest thing in this entire godforsaken hole!"
The torture became a rhythmic, sickening cycle. Rex would slam Raizen into the earth, let the Supreme Healing stitch the shattered bones back together in a flash of sickening light, and then immediately launch him upward to collide with a soaring wyvern or a hovering wraith.
Raizen was a living projectile of agony. He was a man being broken and rebuilt a thousand times a minute, his screams lost in the roar of the magical explosions.
He was being used to kill, but he was also being killed by the very act of killing.
The end came not with a grand duel, but with a total, catastrophic exhaustion of existence.
Rex decided he had played enough. He gathered every ounce of his dark telekinetic magic, condensing it into a single, crushing sphere around Raizen’s body.
He spun the warrior like a drill, a blurring vortex of flesh and violet light, and then, with a final, guttural shout of pure, sadistic joy, he slammed him into the very bedrock of the Underlayer.
The impact was unlike anything before. It wasn’t just a collision; it was a collapse. The magical pressure reached a critical mass, and instead of a clean explosion, the energy imploded.
Raizen’s body, pushed far beyond the limits of even the Supreme Healing, simply gave up. The magical recoil and the physical trauma synchronized in a final, horrific crescendo.
Raizen’s body didn’t just break; it disintegrated from the inside out. The violet magic turned inward, eating the very cells it had been forced to mend. He felt his consciousness fragmenting, his very essence being shredded by the sheer weight of the power Rex had forced into him.
There was a final, blinding flash of violet and gold, a sound like a world cracking in half, and then... silence. The warrior of the Legion was gone, reduced to a smear of scorched ash and a lingering, bitter scent of ozone in the stagnant air.
Rex landed softly in the settling dust, the silence of the dead pressing in around him. He stood on the ground alone and thought about the body count and about what it meant.
He thought about Lustia’s question: when was the last time you were a force of nature rather than a plan?
He thought the answer was right now, tonight, in an underground kingdom under a floating island in a world he had arrived in by dying.
He reflected on Raizen’s argument, which he had previously acknowledged as structurally sound; however, it had not changed the outcome, leading him to consider the specific quality of an argument that can be both correct and insufficient at the same time.
Most arguments were one or the other. Raizen had been both.
He filed this as the most fascinating thing that had happened tonight, which was saying something given the night.
He thought, ’yes, this was worth doing.’
He went back up.
