Chapter 618: 618. She Finally Made Me Bleed! (A Real Damage!)

Cassandra exhaled, a long, shuddering breath that seemed to release more than just air; it was the sound of a woman shedding the last vestiges of restraint. The frustration, the calculated patience, the strategic hesitation—it all bled out of her, replaced by a terrifying, singular focus.

She wasn’t looking for a window anymore. She was going to break the door down.

She lunged.

This wasn’t the measured, surgical approach of a scholar hunting a variable. This was a total, unmitigated assault.

She threw the entire weight of the Blood Oath’s divine authority into a single, devastating forward surge. There was no blood architecture, no feints, and no indirect manipulation of the environment.

It was pure, raw intent: blade, body, and a divine frequency so dense it felt like the air itself was being crushed into a liquid state.

Rex met her head on. He didn’t dodge; he didn’t retreat.

He drove his gauntlets forward at maximum geological output, meeting her fury with the unyielding strength of the earth’s core.

The collision was cataclysmic.

BAAMMMMMM!

It wasn’t the sound of metal hitting stone; it was a resonant, world-shaking crash that signaled the meeting of two divine tier expressions at their absolute zenith. The vibration was so intense it bypassed the ears and rattled the very marrow of the bones of anyone watching.

The observation chamber didn’t just shake; it screamed. Rex’s geological authority took the main hit, directing the force downwards with great power.

The floor beneath his feet didn’t just crack; it shattered in a massive, expanding ring of pulverized stone, while the heat from the contact point erupted in a blinding wave of crimson light, turning the very atmosphere of the room into a visible, shimmering haze of primordial energy.

Rex was forced back. A single, heavy step.

But as his heel left the ground, a pillar of transmuted stone surged upward from the floor, instantly replacing the space he had vacated to reinforce his position. He was a master of the terrain, using the earth to anchor his very existence.

Cassandra didn’t give him a second to breathe.

The Blood Oath’s full form speed had fundamentally altered the combat rhythm. She wasn’t striking in sequences anymore; she was striking in a continuous, overlapping blur of violence.

The second strike arrived before the first had even finished its resonance. Rex, his gauntlets still occupied with the massive geological redistribution of the first impact, had to pivot to telekinesis to survive.

A shimmering field of force intercepted the blade. The adjacent primordial frequency coating the steel lashed out at the telekinetic barrier like a living thing, fighting the very logic of the system.

The field buckled and groaned, the energy of the blade grinding against the psychic construct in a shower of sparks and red light.

The blade slowed, but it did not stop. It groaned through the resistance, inching forward with a murderous, inevitable momentum.

Three centimeters from his chest. The tip of the blade was a hair’s breadth from his heart.

"There’s the gap!" Cassandra screamed, her voice a triumphant, jagged roar of pure, unadulterated hatred.

"Yes," Rex replied, his voice maddeningly calm, almost bored.

With a movement so sudden it seemed to defy the laws of inertia, Rex brought his gauntlet across the gap. He didn’t just block her; he intercepted her with a geometry of movement that was utterly alien.

The gauntlet slammed shut around the blade, halting its progress with a definitive, metallic clack.

Cassandra froze. Her eyes widened, darting from the gauntlet to the path the movement had taken.

Her mind, accelerated by the Blood Oath, raced to deconstruct the impossibility of what she had just witnessed.

"You moved at Peak Physique speed in a direction the geological passive awareness masked," she hissed, her teeth bared in a snarl of disbelief. "You moved through the blind spot."

"The earthen authority provides substrate mapping," Rex explained, his tone patronizing, as if he were teaching a child a simple lesson. "It means I can move through the substrate’s blind angles."

"You made yourself invisible to the geological reading," she corrected, her voice trembling with a mixture of rage and dawning horror.

"In short bursts," Rex conceded, a smug, lopsided grin tugging at his lips. "Specifically at the moments when the substrate’s attention is occupied by something else."

The realization hit her like a physical blow. She stared at the gauntlet holding her weapon, then up at the man who had just played her like a finely tuned instrument. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"You used the exchange itself as the distraction," she whispered, her voice rising in pitch. "While the substrate was busy processing the resonance of the first hit, you used that very moment to slip through its blind angle!"

"Yes," Rex said, his eyes gleaming with the delight of a predator who had just finished a successful hunt.

"You didn’t just react," she realized, her eyes burning with a frantic, desperate fury. "You set that up four exchanges ago."

"You’ve been building the substrate’s processing load deliberately... you were fattening the calf for the slaughter!"

Rex said nothing. He simply stood there, bathed in the crimson light of her own power, looking every bit the unbeatable villain who had known the end of the fight before it had even begun.

Cassandra stared at him for a heartbeat of pure, agonizing tension. And then, she began to laugh.

It wasn’t a laugh of joy; it was the jagged, hysterical laugh of a woman who realized she had been fighting a ghost in a labyrinth of his own making.

The laughter was the most terrifying thing Rex had ever heard. It wasn’t the sound of a warrior finding peace; it was the sound of a mind fracturing under the weight of a thousand humiliations.

Cassandra’s laughter grew louder, more jagged, until it devolved into a primal, guttural scream that tore through the crimson haze of the chamber.

"Enough!" she shrieked, the word vibrating with a force that made the glowing floor crack further. "Enough of the lessons! Enough of the games! Enough of you looking down at me like I’m a child playing with pebbles!"

The air around her didn’t just shimmer; it began to scream. The Blood Oath’s output, which had been a steady, rhythmic pulse, suddenly spiked into a violent, uncontrolled supernova.

The crimson light turned from a deep red to a blinding, terrifying violet black. The energy was no longer just interacting with the stone; it was consuming it.

The very concept of "output" seemed too small for what was happening. She wasn’t just using her authority; she was forcing the divinity to bleed out of her all at once.

She lunged.

There was no windup, no telegraph, no buildup of kinetic energy. It was a singular, instantaneous event.

She swung her blade in a horizontal arc, but it wasn’t a physical movement; it was a tear in the fabric of existence. The slash didn’t just cut through the air; it sliced through the local reality, leaving a jagged, black void in its wake that seemed to swallow the light itself.

Rex’s eyes widened. For the first time in the entire exchange, his foresight, that godlike predictive engine of his, remained silent.

There was no vibration in the substrate to warn him, no shift in the geological frequency to signal an incoming strike. The attack didn’t exist in the world of physics until the moment it arrived.

Schlick.

The sound was sickeningly clean. The reality-tearing slash caught Rex across his left side.

The blade passed through his divine tier physique as if it were mere parchment, carving deep through muscle, bone, and sinew. A massive spray of blood erupted from the wound, painting the glowing floor in a fresh, hot crimson.

Rex’s left arm, from the shoulder down to the fingertips, was nearly severed, hanging by a horrific thread of tissue and a sliver of bone. The blood didn’t just drip; it burst out in rhythmic, violent pulses, matching the frantic beat of his heart.

But Rex didn’t scream. He didn’t even flinch.

He stood there, his left arm hanging limp and ruined, blood cascading down his side and pooling at his feet, and a slow, wide, terrifying grin began to spread across his face.

"Hmm...?"

Cassandra didn’t give him the satisfaction of a reaction. She was a whirlwind of pure, unadulterated madness.

She slammed the tip of her blade into the floor, and the impact sent a shockwave of void-tainted energy through the substrate.

"Don’t you dare look bored!" she screamed. "Don’t you dare act like this is a game!"

As the energy traveled through the ground, she tapped into the deepest, darkest well of her power. The void magic, the primordial nothingness that sat at the heart of her authority, surged upward.

The black, swirling tendrils of absolute vacuum erupted from the floor, lashing around Rex like the coils of a cosmic serpent. The void magic formed a sphere of crushing, silent darkness around him, a localized event horizon designed to strip the very essence from his soul.

Inside the swirling vortex of black and red, Rex’s laughter finally broke through. It wasn’t the smug, quiet chuckle from before.

This was a loud, booming, manic roar of pure, unbridled amusement. He looked at his ruined, bleeding arm, then up at the screaming goddess of blood and void who had finally, finally forced him to feel the sting of a real strike.

"There it is!" Rex shouted, his voice ringing with a terrifying joy that cut through the roar of the void. "Something that could make all of this more intense, and not some boring shit!"

"You actually did it, Cassandra!" Rex laughed. "You bypassed the foresight!"

"You actually made me bleed for a low creature like you!"