Chapter 746: 746. She Aimed For My Heart. She Missed By Four Meters. Close, Though.

Rex didn’t just let her fall; he treated her descent like a game of catch with a dying star. As Ignivara’s massive, wounded form began to plummet, a trail of scorched blood and golden scales weeping behind her, Rex didn’t just fly; he erupted.

Using his telekinesis to compress the air beneath his feet, he launched himself upward like a railgun projectile, a streak of violet-black fury cutting through the clouds.

He caught her midair, a predator intercepting a falling mountain.

BAM!

His fist, hardened by the sheer density of his superhuman physique, buried itself into her solar plexus. The impact wasn’t just a sound; it was a physical event.

The air around them detonated in a localized shockwave, and the sickening crunch of her ribs buckling under the pressure echoed across the sky. Ignivara’s eyes bulged, a spray of thick, hot blood erupting from her lips as the breath was violently forced from her lungs.

"What’s the matter, ’Great Dragon’?" Rex’s voice was a calm, terrifying contrast to the carnage. He was moving so fast his words seemed to vibrate in the air. "Is the little girl feeling a bit lightheaded?"

He didn’t give her a second to gasp. He pivoted, his body a coiled spring of lethal intent.

CRACK!

A brutal, rising uppercut caught her squarely under the jaw. The force was so immense that her head snapped back with a violent, whip-like motion, the sound of her vertebrae grinding against each other audible even above the wind.

Her massive frame was sent hurtling upward, spiraling toward the stratosphere.

But Rex was already there, waiting for her in the thin, freezing air.

WHISH THUD!

He intercepted her mid-spiral with a spinning heel kick that connected with her side. The sound was like a heavy mallet hitting a sack of wet gravel.

Her ribs didn’t just break; they shattered, the jagged edges of bone threatening to pierce her internal organs. She was sent tumbling, a broken comet of gold and crimson.

"Come on, Ignivara! Fight me!" Rex roared, his eyes gleaming with a sadistic, unyielding hunger.

He was a rhythmic engine of destruction, a blur of muscle and bone that refused to let her find her footing. "Show me that legendary fury! Or is all that scale and fire just... decoration?"

He was playing with her, and the psychological cruelty was as devastating as the physical. He would launch her into the heavens with a telekinetic-assisted strike, watching her struggle to regain her senses in the vacuum of the high sky, only to descend like a vengeful god to meet her again.

BOOM!

He drove his shoulder into her chest with the force of a battering ram, the impact sending a fresh wave of blood spraying from her mouth, painting the clouds in a macabre, crimson mist.

CRACK! CRACK!

A double jab, delivered with blinding speed, rattled her skull so violently that her vision fractured. Her brain felt like it was sloshing against her cranium, the sheer kinetic energy of his hands turning her world into a dizzying, painful kaleidoscope of red and gold.

To the terrified citizens of Aethelgard, the sky had become a war zone of impossible proportions. They saw no duel; they saw a massacre.

They saw a boy, a mere human silhouette, moving with the terrifying, jerky speed of a glitch in reality, relentlessly pummeling a massive, screaming deity of fire. Every time she reached the apex of her flight, a violet flash would signal his arrival, and a new, thunderous explosion would signal her descent.

THUD. CRACK. BOOM. WHACK.

The percussion was relentless, a drumbeat of agony that seemed to shake the very stars. The air itself groaned, the atmosphere weeping under the constant, violent sonic booms of their collisions.

Ignivara was losing her mind. The rage was no longer a tool she wielded; it was a tidal wave that had swallowed her whole.

The pain was a white-hot roar in her ears, a constant, gnawing ache in her shattered bones. She was a mosaic of trauma, bruised, bleeding, and broken, but beneath the agony, something primal was waking up.

Her breathing had devolved into a guttural, wet snarl, a sound of a beast that had forgotten how to weep and only knew how to kill.

The transformation was not instantaneous, because full half-dragon transformations at this scale were not instantaneous; they were the sustained expression of a body resolving the specific tension between its humanoid resting state and its full expression.

But it was faster than Rex had modeled, the wings expanding from the flight form’s dimensions to something that blocked a significant portion of the morning sky above him, the horn structure extending from the small curved markers to the full rack of a mature dragon’s cranial architecture.

She was bigger than the dragon she had ridden on.

Rex hung suspended in the churning atmosphere, a speck of violet defiance against the colossal shadow of the creature he had just broken. He looked up, his gaze tracing the terrifying expanse of her new form.

The sky was no longer blue; it was a bruised, flickering canvas of gold, crimson, and the dark, obsidian sheen of her growing scales.

From his perspective, she was no longer a girl. She was a mountain of muscle, heat, and ancient, unbridled malice.

HUUUUUUU RRRRRRRGH!

The sound of her breathing was a tectonic event. It wasn’t the breath of a living thing; it was the rhythmic, pressurized venting of a volcanic caldera.

FSSSSSS HAAAAAA!

With every exhale, a plume of superheated, sulfurous steam erupted from her nostrils, creating miniature thunderclaps in the thin air. The heat was so intense that the moisture in the air around her head didn’t just evaporate; it detonated.

Rex felt his skin prickle, the sheer thermal radiation of her presence hitting him like a physical wall. He didn’t flinch, but his mind was racing.

He felt the foresight kick into a fever pitch, the capability screaming at him, forcing his consciousness to expand. It wasn’t just a prediction anymore; it was a frantic, high-speed playback of the immediate future.

The world slowed to a crawl, the chaotic swirling of the clouds freezing in place as the Foresight read the next twelve seconds with the desperate, jagged urgency that only a true apex threat could trigger.

"There you are," Rex whispered, a predatory, cocky smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth despite the looming apocalypse. "Finally showing some real teeth!"

"Let’s see if you can actually bite, or if you’re just all smoke and mirrors."

He saw it before it happened. In the hyperaccelerated vision of his foresight, the sequence was laid bare.

She didn’t lead with a breath of fire. She didn’t lead with a magical blast.

She led with the most fundamental weapon a dragon possessed: her own terrifying, massive existence.

Ignivara tucked her wings, her massive, scaled body coiling like a spring made of iron and sunfire. She converted every ounce of her newfound mass and the terrifying velocity of her descent into a single, singular directional impact.

She wasn’t just flying; she was a kinetic kill vehicle, a living meteor aimed directly at his heart.

RRRRRRR OOOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRR!

Her roar was a guttural, bone-shaking vibration that felt like it was trying to liquefy his internal organs.

Rex didn’t move to dodge. He didn’t move to block.

He simply stood his ground, his eyes glowing with a cold, calculating light. As the shadow of her colossal form blotted out the sun, he activated gravity manipulation at its absolute maximum field capacity that he controlled to look like telekinesis so no one would suspect a thing.

VREEEEEEEEE SHHHH!

The air around him groaned as the fundamental laws of physics were forcibly rewritten. Within a thirty-meter radius, the crushing weight of the world vanished.

Gravity didn’t just weaken; it died.

The impact was supposed to be a collision of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. But as Ignivara entered the zero-gravity zone, the math of her destruction failed.

Her aerial charge, a masterpiece of momentum and gravitational trajectory, suddenly lost its anchor. The heavy, downward pull that guided her arc was gone, replaced by a sickening, directionless buoyancy.

"Oops," Rex chuckled, the sound lost in the roar of the wind. "Lost your footing, did we?"

The half-dragon’s reflexes were godlike; her instinct screamed at her to compensate for the sudden, unnatural lightness. She wrenched her massive wings, fighting the vacuum of the zero-G field, her muscles bulging and scales grinding against each other with a sound like tectonic plates shifting: SKREEEEE CRUNCH!

She managed to correct her path with a desperate, violent heave of her wings, but the momentum of her massive new form was too great to be fully tamed by the sudden lack of weight. She didn’t crash into him, but she didn’t miss by a wide margin either.

The sheer, terrifying mass of her body surged past him, the heat of her scales singeing the very air in his lungs.

She cleared him by approximately four meters.