Chapter 735: 735. The Tremor Avatar Was Still Standing. I Was Already Behind Zane.

The dragon’s descent was not a landing; it was a celestial impact.

As the beast’s massive talons bit into the shattered plaza, the displaced air hit like a physical wall, a hurricane of dust and pulverized marble that drowned out the dying cries of the battlefield.

KRA BOOOOOOOM!

The impact sent a violent seismic shockwave through the ground, sending secondary fracture lines screaming through the substrate. Rex felt it instantly through his [Earthen Authority]: a jagged, agonizing pulse of kinetic energy that felt like a hot needle being driven into his very consciousness.

The dragon’s arrival had turned the battlefield into a vortex of chaos.

The two riders sat atop the beast, their eyes scanning the carnage with a chilling, detached precision. They didn’t look like saviors; they looked like harvesters arriving at a field that had already been partially reaped.

They surveyed the broken stone, the blood-soaked golems, and the mangled bodies of the fighters with the clinical gaze of gods inspecting a mess.

Zane’s eyes, cold and predatory, bypassed the wreckage and locked onto Rex. His expression was a mask of flat, terrifying intellect, the analytical read of a man who wasn’t just looking at a person but was deconstructing a mathematical problem.

"You did this," Ignivara said.

Her voice wasn’t a shout; it was a calm, heavy statement that carried the weight of an inevitable truth. She spoke to the ruins themselves, as if the destruction were a crime scene she had been summoned to investigate.

"Most of it," Zane replied, his gaze never wavering from Rex’s eyes.

A dark, knowing smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Not all of it."

"The rest of it is standing right there."

Valentina, still trembling on her knees, felt a sudden, icy dread wash over her. She looked at the dragon, then at the two riders, and then at the sigils etched into their armor, the mark of the Legion of Anti-Reincarnators.

Her heart skipped a beat, a cold spasm of terror blooming in her chest.

"The Legion..." she gasped, her voice a ragged whisper of horror. "At this situation... why... why are they here...?"

"Wait no...! They’re here to hunt..." Valentina gritted her teeth. "They’re here for the weakened Apollo!"

She looked toward Apollo, who was staggering toward the plaza’s remnant wall, his face pale, his golden aura flickering like a candle in a gale. He was weakened, his essence drained by the eighteen-minute war of attrition, and the Legion was the ultimate predator of his kind.

"You two!" Apollo shouted, his voice straining against the wind.

He looked at the dragon and its riders with the expression of a man who had just survived a nightmare only to find himself in a waking hell. "Who are you?! What are you doing here?!"

Ignivara didn’t even look at him. Her gaze remained fixed on the horizon, her tone as indifferent as if she were addressing a piece of discarded furniture.

"We’re not here for you," she said, her voice cutting through the wind. "We’re here for him."

Rex watched the entire scene unfold with a terrifying, godlike apathy. He saw Apollo’s instinctual move toward them, the Apostle of Life, sensing the ultimate entropy in the dragon and its riders.

He saw the tension rising, the air thickening with the scent of a second, even more violent engagement.

But Rex... Rex just stayed there.

He stood amidst the blood and the broken bones, his eyes hooded, watching the drama play out like a spectator at a theater. He felt no urge to intervene, no urge to protect the weakened Apollo or the terrified Valentina.

He simply watched, a dark, silent observer of the chaos he had helped cultivate.

Then, Zane moved.

He stepped off the dragon’s back, his descent a masterclass in spatial manipulation. As he dropped, the [Void Working] flared around his feet, cushioning his fall with a sickening, pressurized "VREEEEEE!" that displaced the very air.

He landed on the broken stone with the silent grace of a ghost, instantly positioning himself in a tactical intercept between the staggering Apollo and the dragon. Zane turned his head slightly, looking at Apollo with a weary, almost patronizing expression.

"You don’t want to do this," Zane said.

His voice was heavy with the exhaustion of a man who had spent a lifetime fighting the same losing battles. "You’re running on fumes, Apollo."

"I can see the cracks in your soul from here. Just... sit down."

Apollo gritted his teeth, his hands trembling as he summoned the last of his fading strength, his eyes blazing with a desperate, dying pride. "I don’t take orders... from people I don’t know!"

Zane didn’t even flinch. He didn’t even raise his guard.

He just looked at Apollo with a chilling, final indifference.

"That’s fine," Zane said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous hum. "I wasn’t really asking."

The air between the two combatants didn’t just vibrate; it screamed.

Apollo, driven by a desperate, dying pride, lunged forward. He didn’t go for a blade or a fist; he unleashed a directed boundary condition force, a concentrated burst of life essence that hammered the very fabric of reality.

It was the same devastating working that had been battering Rex’s armor for the last twenty minutes, a golden wave of pure, unadulterated existence meant to shatter anything in its path.

KRA THOOOOM!

The shockwave tore through the air, a blinding lance of light aimed straight at Zane’s chest. But Zane didn’t dodge, and he didn’t even brace.

He simply reached out.

Using the [Void Working]’s terrifying absorption aspect, Zane didn’t deflect the blow; he consumed it. The golden light hit his palm and was instantly swallowed by a swirling, pitch-black vortex of spatial displacement.

There was no explosion, no recoil, just a sickening, silent "VREEEEEE" as the immense energy was sucked into the nothingness of Zane’s palm, leaving the air feeling unnervingly empty.

Apollo, realizing his magical output had been devoured like a drop of water in an ocean, shifted instantly. In the brutal logic of combat, when the working fails, the physical must follow.

He surged forward, his movements heavy and labored, his golden aura flickering like a dying star. He swung a desperate, bone-crushing punch aimed at Zane’s jaw.

CRACK!

Zane caught his wrist.

It wasn’t a cinematic clash of titans; it was a surgical execution of momentum. Zane’s grip was absolute, applied at the exact leverage angle to turn Apollo’s own desperate strength against him.

With a subtle, violent twist, Zane redirected the force. Apollo’s momentum was hijacked, his body jerked forward with a sickening lurch, and he slammed face-first into the jagged, broken stone of the plaza.

SPLAT CRUNCH!

The sound of Apollo’s nose breaking and his forehead hitting the granite was visceral. Blood sprayed across the cracked pavement, a bright, crimson smear against the grey stone.

Apollo groaned, a wet, guttural sound, as he pushed himself up. His face was a mask of agony, bruised, bleeding, and caked in dust.

He looked up at Zane with the hollow, cornered expression of a man who had finally run out of miracles.

Zane stood over him, a shadow cast by the dragon above, looking down with the chilling indifference of a reaper.

"One chance," Zane said.

His voice was quiet, terrifyingly calm in the midst of the carnage. It wasn’t a threat; it was a mathematical fact. "Do you have one?"

Zane’s hand blurred.

He launched a strike, a punch so fast it tore the air with a sonic snap, "WHIP!" aimed to end the Apostle of Life once and for all. To the onlookers, it was a flash of motion, a blur of lethal intent.

But the strike never landed.

It stopped dead in midair, arrested by a force that shouldn’t have been there. There was no sound of impact, just the sudden, jarring cessation of movement, as if the world itself had frozen.

Rex’s hand had materialized in the gap.

It wasn’t the heavy, earth-shattering gauntlet of ’Tremor.’ It wasn’t the armored, divine hand of a conqueror.

It was a human hand, tanned, muscular, and terrifyingly steady, clad in the simple, blood-stained fabric of an academy student’s clothes. In the chaotic seconds of the engagement, Rex had executed a perfect, surgical separation of his identities.

The ’Tremor’ avatar was still there, standing a few yards away in the plaza, a perfect, mindless geological anchor performing its duties with 97.3% accuracy. But the true Rex—the man, the god, the architect— was standing directly behind Zane.

Rex stood in the shadow of the man he had manipulated, looking down at the broken, bleeding Apollo across Zane’s outstretched arm.

Apollo’s eyes widened. His breath hitched in a throat filled with blood.

His expression cycled through shock, terror, and a soul-deep confusion so profound it looked like physical pain.

Zane felt the warmth of the hand holding his fist. He froze.

Very slowly, with a tension that felt like a wire about to snap, Zane turned his head. He looked at the hand, then up at the face attached to it.

The flat, analytical mask he wore shattered, replaced by the frantic recalibration of a man seeing a ghost in the middle of a war zone.

"You..." Zane breathed, his voice cracking for the first time.

Rex didn’t smile. He didn’t gloat.

He simply maintained his iron grip on Zane’s fist, his eyes locking onto the man he had spent months befriending, only to turn him into a weapon. He spoke the only words that could bridge the impossible gap between the man they knew and the god standing before them.

"He has me," Rex said.