Chapter 617: 617. More Talk And Less Action Now. Well, I Still Give Her A Chance

At the edge of the carnage, pressed hard against the far wall, stood Mordecai and Pavellia. They were statues of disbelief.

Mordecai’s face was a mask of profound, existential confusion, as if he were trying to categorize a phenomenon that defied every law of physics he knew. Pavellia was equally still, her eyes narrowed in a silent, terrifying assessment of a threat that had just surpassed her wildest projections.

"She’s... she’s genuinely different from before," Mordecai whispered, his voice barely audible over the tectonic grinding of the fight.

"Yes," Pavellia replied, her voice tight, her gaze never leaving the two monsters in the center of the room.

"Did you know she had this in her?" Mordecai asked, gesturing vaguely at the erupting crimson energy.

"I suspected a reserve," Pavellia admitted, her hands tightening at her sides. "But even I did not know the scale of the abyss she was hiding."

Mordecai stared at the floor, where the very foundation of the building seemed to be melting into light. "The stone... the stone is glowing, Pavellia."

"Yes," she said, her voice a grim acknowledgment of reality.

"In a fight," Mordecai said, his voice trembling with a sudden, chilling realization, "in my observation chamber... the stone is glowing."

Pavellia said nothing, which was the specific nothing that meant she had noted this and had no useful addition to make.

...

For the first four minutes of this escalated exchange, Rex had managed to keep his defenses intact. The single penetration had been a momentary lapse, and he had since locked down his system; he was now operating on a razor’s edge, completing his geological redistributions at a velocity that barely outpaced the Blood Oath’s divine sensitivity.

The metric of the fight had shifted from mere survival to a brutal contest of timing.

It was a speed contest that Rex was winning, but the margin was alarmingly slim.

The full coverage form of the Blood Oath had fundamentally altered the nature of Cassandra. It wasn’t just her physical velocity that had increased; it was her cognitive processing.

The divine authority had accelerated her mind, her ability to analyze and react, granting her an analytical precision that the activation form lacked. She read him faster, processing the substrate’s vibrations with a biological computer overclocked by the Blood Oath’s power.

"You’re adapting faster than the activation form," Rex observed, his voice carrying a smug, effortless quality even as he strained to keep his guard up.

Between two violent clashes, he straightened, his posture radiating the cocky confidence of a man who still held all the cards.

"The full form doesn’t just enhance the body," Cassandra snared, her voice a jagged edge of hatred. "It enhances everything."

She surged forward, a streak of visceral red and blinding heat, her blade aimed with pinpoint accuracy at the same seam she had exploited moments before. "Every calculation I make in this form is faster than anything I can do outside it!"

Rex shifted his weight, the ground beneath him erupting in a sudden, concussive surge of stone that forced her blade to deviate. He stepped back, his expression bored.

"You’re trying too hard," he taunted. "That’s your problem."

"You’re fighting because you hate me, not because you can actually win."

Cassandra recoiled, her blade whistling through the air as she pulled back, her face contorted with a deep, simmering rage.

"The transition state," she said, her voice trembling with fury. "You’re completing it before I arrive!"

"You’re closing the window."

"Yes," Rex said, his eyes gleaming with a dark, mocking amusement. "But I’m still closing it."

"Tell me something," she demanded, her voice rising, the tension in the room thickening until it was almost palpable. "The window you’re closing... how close are you to making it disappear?"

"To make it so it doesn’t even exist for a millisecond?"

Rex considered the question, his mind calculating at a speed that matched her own.

"The redistribution speed is at the absolute limit of the geological authority’s continuous application," he admitted, his tone devoid of genuine concern. "I can close it before you arrive, but I cannot make the transition state vanish."

"It is a fundamental part of how the authority operates."

"So the window exists," she said, her eyes narrowing. "You’re just faster than me... For now..."

"At the current differential," Rex agreed, his smugness reaching a new peak. "Yes."

Cassandra’s expression darkened, her lips twisting into a sneer of pure loathing.

"The differential will shrink," she hissed, the heat from her blade causing the air to shimmer and warp. "Over time."

"The longer this form runs, the more data the blood authority accumulates about your redistribution patterns..."

"It doesn’t just see the change; it learns the rhythm. It learns you."

"I’m aware," Rex said, yawning. "But you’re running on a timer, aren’t you?"

"What’s the cost of this little display?"

"You’re running on a geological reserve," she countered, her voice dripping with venom. "It’s external."

"You aren’t fatiguing, but you are depleting the substrate."

"Every time you close that window, you’re burning through the very ground we’re standing on."

"Eventually, you’ll run out of stone to reshape." She stepped forward, her aura of blood-red energy swirling violently. "So the longer this goes on, the narrower the window gets and the more your reserve drains."

"You’re fighting a losing battle, Lustful Villain."

Rex’s eyes flashed. The challenge was intoxicating.

He could feel the substrate beneath his feet growing brittle, the energy reserves of the chamber dwindling as he forced the geological authority to work at its breaking point. But that only made the prospect of her failure more delightful.

"You still want me to come at you again," Rex said, his voice a low, mocking drawl. He opened his arms wide, a gesture of utter contempt and invitation. "Come on, then."

"Come and show me how much you hate me."

"Show me if you can actually do it before you run out of breath."

A flicker of something far more volatile than mere rage danced through Cassandra’s eyes. Beneath the surface of her fury and the stinging frustration of her missed opportunity, there was a primal, ancient resentment—the kind of hatred that had been festering long before the Blood Oath had reached its full, terrifying zenith.

It was the resentment of a warrior who had realized she was being treated as a mere variable in an experiment. He hadn’t even been threatened; he had simply been interested.

She had found the gap. She had driven a divine tier blade four millimeters into a godlike defense that was supposed to be absolute.

And his reaction? A smug, analytical observation.

Then, the world began to burn.

It wasn’t the concentrated, localized heat of the blade’s contact. It was something far more insidious. The blood on Cassandra’s skin, soaked with the effects of the Blood Oath, started to interact both chemically and in a spiritual way with the stone in the observation chamber.

The geological material, already affected by the long exposure to the divine frequency from their battle, started to change violently and spread out.

The fire didn’t start in a single point; it erupted from the very floor.

The cracked stone, the heat-modified patches, and the ring of impact: every surface that had been touched by her full-form output began to ignite from within. The crimson stains on the walls didn’t just sit on the surface; they began to pulse, taking on a terrifying, rhythmic luminescence.

The entire chamber was being swallowed by a deep, visceral red light, an ambient radiation of adjacent primordial frequency that turned the air itself into a thick, glowing haze.

"We should leave," Mordecai whispered, his voice small against the low, tectonic hum of the room.

"We can’t," Pavellia replied, her eyes fixed on the floor between them and the exit.

The ground was no longer just stone; it was a river of glowing, red-hot energy. To step on it would be to invite a divine burn. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Cassandra stood in the center of the chaos, her chest heaving, her eyes sweeping over the destruction she had wrought simply by existing at this level of power. The room was no longer a chamber; it was a crucible.

And in the center of that crucible stood Rex.

He hadn’t moved in nearly a minute. His gauntlets were visible, scarred by her blade, and his mask was partially displaced, revealing a sliver of a face that remained maddeningly calm.

He looked less like a combatant and more like a king watching a storm pass over his kingdom.

"You’re waiting," Cassandra spat, her voice trembling with the effort to keep her composure amidst the rising heat.

"You’re deciding," Rex countered, his voice smooth and infuriatingly steady.

He didn’t even raise his guard; he simply stood there, inviting her to strike.

"I already decided!" she roared, the sound echoing through the crimson haze. "I drove my sword through my own chest to force this state! That was the decision!"

"The decision to use the full form," Rex corrected, his eyes locking onto hers with a piercing, predatory intelligence. "That was just the preparation..."

"The real decision is how you will respond to the truth that the full form reveals to you."

The tension in the room was a physical weight, a pressure that felt like it might crush the very lungs of anyone standing within it. Cassandra held his gaze, her eyes burning with a hatred so pure it seemed to fuel the light around her.

"What does it show me, Lustful Villain!? Tell me!"

"It shows you that the window exists," Rex said, his voice dropping to a low, confident drawl. "It shows you that the differential is manageable."

"It shows you that while the blood authority learns faster than my redistribution rate can increase, it is still a race." He stepped forward, the glowing floor pulsing beneath his boots like a living heart. "It shows you that if you had six more months and the perfect conditions, you would close the gap."

"You would actually win."

"But I don’t have six months!" Cassandra screamed, her aura flaring so violently that the air hissed. "I have five minutes of reserves in this form before the fuel source is utterly depleted!"

Rex’s lips curled into a devastating, cocky smirk. He looked at the glowing, dying floor, then back at her, his eyes mocking her desperation.

"Less now," he said, his voice dripping with a cruel, triumphant satisfaction. "You’ve been running it for three minutes longer than the activation form."

"You’re running out of time, Cassandra..."

"So, are you going to keep talking, or are you going to try and kill me before the world goes dark?"