Chapter 773: 773. Better Prepare Themselves, Because Torture Is Coming For Every Action

The air didn’t just vibrate; it screamed with the friction of their movement.

Ignivara wasn’t just flying; she was a living projectile of fury and desperation. She banked hard, her wings snapping with a sound like a whip CRACK THWIP! as she pivoted.

She came at him from the right, abandoning her preferred lateral sweeps for a jagged, unpredictable angle. It was a desperate gamble, a move born of the frantic realization that he wasn’t just fighting her; he was calculating her.

Rex didn’t even blink behind the porcelain void of his mask.

"You are varying the approach angle," he said, his voice cutting through the roar of the wind with terrifying, surgical clarity.

He didn’t wait for her to reach him; he moved to meet her, a ghost stepping into the path of a storm. "You identified that I read patterns."

"You are attempting to reduce the sample size by introducing chaos... A logical, intelligent response."

K BOOOOOM!

Before she could strike, a slab of dense, obsidian black stone erupted from the empty air between them. It wasn’t just a shield; it was a wall of geological spite.

Ignivara slammed into it at full velocity.

CRUNCH!

The impact sent a shockwave through her entire skeletal structure, the vibration rattling her teeth and making her vision blur. Instead of absorbing the blow, the shield’s angle was perfectly calibrated to redirect her momentum, throwing her off balance like a bird caught in a sudden gale.

"The problem," Rex continued, his voice devoid of any warmth, "is that I have been reading your patterns since the plaza."

"I have fourteen minutes of continuous sample data..."

"The variance you are introducing now is a mere rounding error within the data set."

Ignivara snarled, her lungs burning as she wrenched herself back into a climb.

"You’re a monster!" she spat, her voice thick with rage. "You’re explaining your entire goddamn method while you use it! You’re treating this like a lecture!"

"You cannot stop a landslide by understanding the physics of gravity," Rex countered, his tone chillingly indifferent to her mounting panic. "The Foresight reads twelve seconds into your future."

"Understanding that fact does not grant you twelve extra seconds of planning..."

"You are still trapped within the twelve seconds that I have already lived through."

"Then stop reading and fight!" she screamed, her golden eyes flashing with a primal, draconic light.

"I am fighting," Rex replied.

There was a subtle, terrifying shift in his posture, a tightening of the air around him. "The reading is the fight."

"To me, they are not separate activities... One is the map; the other is the blade."

Ignivara decided to break the map. She abandoned the lateral plane entirely, tucking her wings and diving into a vertical ascent.

She shot upward like a golden spear, aiming to use the sheer mass of her half-dragon wings to generate a devastating downward strike, a hammer blow from the heavens.

But the Foresight saw the arc before her muscles even fully contracted.

Rex didn’t dodge. He didn’t retreat.

He applied a zero-gravity field to his own mass and launched.

WHOOOOOSH!

He ascended with a sickening, unnatural speed, meeting her mid-flight. He wasn’t below her, waiting to be hit; he was inside her approach vector, a predator intercepting a prey that thought it was the hunter.

The downward strike, designed to crush a target beneath him, suddenly had nowhere to go. It was a strike aimed at a ghost.

Desperation took over. Ignivara’s draconic reflexes kicked in, overriding her tactical mind.

Instead of a strike, she converted the momentum into a frantic, crushing grab. Her hands, clawlike and powerful, tore into the fabric of his jacket, her fingers locking onto his lapels with a strength that could snap human ribs.

She drove her wings downward with everything she had, trying to use her entire body mass to slam him into the earth.

Rex didn’t fight the grab. He didn’t even try to break her hold.

He simply drifted within her grasp, his mask inches from her face.

The silence between them was deafening, broken only by the ragged, heavy panting of the dragon woman. Through the unreadable slit of the mask, Rex seemed to stare directly into her soul.

"The left shoulder is still injured," he whispered.

It wasn’t a question; it was a cold, clinical observation.

Ignivara’s breath hitched. Her grip, which had been a solid vise, faltered for a fraction of a second, a microscopic tremor of pain that betrayed her.

"The ice immobilization Mireya applied... it locked the joint at a specific, unnatural angle," Rex continued, his voice a low, rhythmic drone of terrifying intelligence. "The joint has been moving since the ice shattered, but it has not regained its full range of motion."

"Your upward lunge just now required a full extension..."

"You felt the snap, didn’t you?"

SKREEEE!

Ignivara let out a guttural cry of frustration and pain, doubling down on her effort. She screamed, a draconic roar of pure, unadulterated will, and slammed her wings downward one last time.

The sheer force of the impact pushed Rex down, a violent, six-meter plummet through the air.

But as they hit the bottom of the drop, the gravity manipulation caught him. He stopped dead in mid-air, hovering with the effortless, insulting ease of a man sitting in a chair.

He had accounted for the fall. He had expected the impact.

He was perfectly, unnervingly still.

He looked up at her, the mask staring into her wounded, trembling eyes.

"Seven times the standard threshold," Rex said, his voice flat and devoid of mercy. "And you are already beginning to break."

The world suddenly became a crushing, suffocating weight.

WHAM!

The gravity field didn’t just descend; it slammed into Ignivara like a falling mountain. Seven times the standard Earth gravity, a localized, invisible hammer of pure force that sought to flatten her into the very dirt below.

The wings that had just been her greatest weapon, the massive, muscular appendages that had driven them downward, were suddenly turned into her greatest liability.

RRRRR KRAK!

The sudden reversal of force was agonizing. To avoid being pulverized instantly, her draconic nervous system screamed as it forced her wings to flip their entire output, fighting against the downward momentum to stabilize her body.

It was a violent, jarring transition that cost her everything: stamina, momentum, and precious, precious seconds. At seven times the standard load, her "output budget," the finite energy her body could expend to maintain its form, was being bled dry at a terrifying rate.

Her muscles began to quiver. A low, guttural groan escaped her lips, a sound of pure, unadulterated strain.

"Hnnnnnnnngh!"

She held.

She held longer than he had given her credit for during the carnage in the plaza. Rex’s Foresight had calculated her limits based on her full draconic transformation, but he had made a fatal clinical error in his data.

Because she was currently in her humanoid form, she wasn’t struggling to manage the massive, volatile temperature differential of a full transformation. She wasn’t fighting to keep her internal fires from melting her own organs; she could divert every single ounce of her metabolic energy, every drop of her draconic essence, into the sheer, brutal task of resisting the gravity.

Rex hovered there, unmoved by the storm of her struggle, watching her with the cold, detached curiosity of a scientist observing an insect struggling in a jar of honey.

"Fascinating," Rex said, his voice cutting through the sound of her straining muscles and the whistling wind. "You are significantly stronger in your humanoid form than your full form at this specific gravity level."

Ignivara’s teeth were clenched so hard she feared they might shatter.

CRACK.

A small chip of enamel broke off, tasting of copper and salt.

"Shut... up..." she wheezed, her voice a ragged shadow of itself.

"The physics are simple," Rex continued, his tone maddeningly instructional, as if he were teaching a child the basics of arithmetic rather than presiding over a life or death struggle. "The full form’s massive scale works against it when the gravity output is targeted rather than ambient."

"The sheer volume of your mass becomes a burden."

"Your humanoid form’s wing-to-body mass ratio is far more efficient for high-density resistance."

"You are more agile because you have less of yourself to hold up."

"I am... aware... of my own... damn... physiology!" Ignivara roared, a spray of hot, crimson blood erupting from her lips as the pressure in her lungs reached a breaking point.

PFT!

The effort was so intense that capillaries in her eyes began to burst, staining the whites a terrifying, bruised red.

"I know you are," Rex replied, and for a split second, there was a flicker of something in his voice—not empathy, but a cruel, mocking sort of respect. "I am only saying it because Celestina’s briefing on you is likely superficial."

"It lacks the granular, empirical detail required for true combat mastery."

He drifted a fraction closer, the shadow of his mask falling over her trembling, sweat-slicked face.

"When you eventually fail—and you will— and when Celestina asks you why you were crushed like a dried leaf in this engagement, that is the detail you should provide her."

"You should tell her that she is making a tactical error."

"Tell her she should not be sending half dragons into targeted gravity fields without first understanding the catastrophic implications of the mass differential problem."

He paused, letting the weight of his words sink in, as heavy as the gravity itself.

"She is playing with variables she doesn’t truly control, Ignivara... And you are the variable currently being crushed."