Rex didn’t give her a second to recover. As she slid down the rock, he pivoted and drove his left fist into her stomach.

The air escaped her lungs in a pathetic, wheezing, blood-flecked gasp. He didn’t stop there.

He gripped her by the hair, pulling her head back to expose her throat, and slammed his fist into her ribs.

CRACK CRACK CRACK.

The sound of ribs snapping was like dry kindling being broken over a knee. Eryndra’s body convulsed, coughing up a spray of crimson that painted Rex’s gauntlet.

He laughed, a guttural, jagged sound, and tossed her aside.

Calivara tried to crawl away, her fingers clawing at the stone, but Rex was faster. He stepped on her wrist, the sound of small bones grinding together accompanying her shrill scream of agony.

"Where are you going, little bird?" Rex asked, his voice dripping with a sadistic, charismatic, and utterly terrifying calm. "The show’s just getting started."

He reached down and seized her by the collar, hoisting her up. With a sudden, violent, blurred motion, he slammed her face-first into the ground.

The sound was dull and heavy. Calivara’s nose shattered, blood erupting and flooding her mouth and nostrils.

She tried to fight back, swinging a desperate, weak fist at his head, but Rex simply tilted his head, the blow glancing off his cheek.

"My turn," he whispered.

He launched her into the air, and before she could even register the motion, he drove a clenched fist into her midsection. The force was so immense that she flew backward, her spine hitting the jagged wall of the pit.

A sickening crunch echoed through the cavern, the sound of vertebrae fracturing under the impact. She slumped to the ground, her body twisting at an unnatural angle.

With every step, Rex moved closer to her, each one a guarantee of further agony. He grabbed her by the hair again, pulling her up so her face was inches from his.

He could smell the copper of her blood and see the vacant, shocked look in her eyes.

"You’re not a shield," he told her, his voice a low, dangerous purr. "You’re just a punching bag."

He delivered a devastating hook to her temple. Her head whipped to the side, and she collapsed, her forehead hitting a sharp rock with a wet thud.

Blood began to pool under her, staining the grey stone a deep, vivid red.

Rex looked over at Apollo and Kaelira, who were watching in horrified silence. He grinned, a wide, bloodstained smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

"You see? This is how it’s done. This is how you break the world."

He stepped over the broken, twitching bodies of the two women, his gauntlets humming with the anticipation of the next strike. He stood tall, his presence filling the pit, a god of ruin amidst the wreckage.

"Who’s next?"

The air in the pit was thick with the metallic tang of blood and the suffocating scent of pulverized stone. Eryndra and Calivra lay broken, their bodies a ruin of bruised flesh and shattered bone, yet they were still alive, a testament to their unyielding will to survive, or perhaps just a testament to Rex’s cruel deliberation.

"STOP IT!" Apollo’s voice tore through the cavern, a raw, unfiltered scream of pure agony.

He tried to lunge forward, but his legs were trembling, his energy-depleted body barely able to support his own weight. "LEAVE THEM ALONE! YOU MONSTER!"

Kaelira’s voice joined his, a high, piercing wail of despair. "Please! Have mercy! They’re already broken!"

Rex turned his head, a mocking grin spreading across his face. He looked like a god of malice, his eyes glowing with a dark delight.

"Mercy?" he echoed, the word full of sarcasm. "Mercy is for the weak."

"And right now... you’re all looking very weak."

He didn’t just want to kill them. He wanted to make them feel every single second of their demise.

Rex raised his hands, his fingers splayed like a conductor of a symphony of pain. "Gravity... increase!"

He didn’t use the earthen authority this time. He used his telekinetic will.

A sudden, invisible weight slammed down upon the two women. It wasn’t a blunt force; it was a concentrated, crushing pressure that seemed to target their very skeletons.

The gravity around Eryndra and Calivra intensified a thousand fold.

The sound was immediate. A sickening, wet crunch.

Eryndra’s ribs, already fractured, began to cave inward under the unrelenting weight. The sound of her lungs being compressed was like a bellows being squeezed too hard.

She couldn’t even scream; the pressure was so intense that the air was forced out of her throat in a bloody, gurgling wheeze. Her eyes bulged, the capillaries in her sclera bursting until her eyes were nothing but pools of crimson red.

Besides her, Calivara was undergoing a similar hell. The gravity was pinning her to the stone floor with such force that her skin seemed to be stretching, her limbs splaying at unnatural angles.

A bone in her forearm snapped with a sharp, crystalline crack, the jagged end of the radius piercing through the muscle and skin, a splinter of white bone dripping with dark blood.

"Look at them!" Rex laughed, his voice a manic howl. "Look at how they break!"

He intensified the pressure even further. The gravity field became a vice.

Eryndra’s spine began to arch unnaturally, the vertebrae grinding against each other with a sound like stones rubbing together. A spray of blood erupted from her mouth as her internal organs began to fail under the crushing weight. She was being turned into a living mush of flesh and bone.

Calivra’s legs, already bruised, began to give way. The bone structure in her thighs groaned under the load, the femurs bowing slightly before the pressure became too much.

A muffled, wet thud echoed as a piece of her pelvis finally gave way, the sound of the break lost in her stifled, blood-soaked gasp.

"STOP IT! PLEASE!" Apollo screamed again, his voice cracking.

He tried to lunge forward, but his knees buckled, and he fell to a single knee, his breath coming in ragged sobs.

Rex ignored him. He was lost in the beauty of the destruction.

He watched with a predatory intensity as the two women were slowly crushed, their bodies becoming a mangled mess of red and white. He was not just a warrior; he was a sculptor, and his medium was human suffering.

"Do you hear that, Apollo?" Rex taunted, his voice dropping to a whisper that was more terrifying than his roar. "That’s the sound of your hope breaking~!"

"That’s the sound of the world dying~!"

He stepped closer to the pit, his shadow looming over the dying women like a dark god. He raised a hand, his fingers twitching as if he were ready to deliver the final, crushing blow.

The air was thick with the smell of blood, the scent of death, and the unrelenting weight of gravity.

Rex stood at the edge of the crater, his eyes wide with a manic, divinelike madness. He wasn’t satisfied with just crushing them; he wanted to dismantle them.

"Let’s see what’s inside," Rex whispered, his voice a jagged blade of sound.

With a sudden, violent flick of his wrists, Rex used his telekinetic gravity manipulation to actually pull the broken bodies apart. He didn’t just press down; he applied lateral tension.

He began to literally peel the layers of their bodies away.

A sickening, tearing sound, like heavy wet canvas being ripped in half, echoed through the chamber. Eryndra’s skin began to split under the unnatural tension.

As the gravity field pulled her upper torso one way and her lower half another, her muscles began to fray like old rope. With a wet, gory thwip, a string of vessels and tendons snapped, spraying a fan of crimson across the stone.

"LOOK!" Rex screamed, pointing at the carnage. "LOOK AT THE BEAUTY OF IT!"

He then turned his attention to Calivra. He used his gravity to compress her torso into a singular, dense mass, literally squeezing the life and the organs out of her body.

The pressure was so intense that her ribs didn’t just break; they exploded inward, turning into shards of bone that acted like knives, shredding her lungs and liver from the inside out. A thick, dark slurry of blood and bile erupted from her mouth as her internal structure collapsed into a mushy, red mess.

Apollo, watching from above, was no longer a god; he was a man drowning in horror. He saw the way Eryndra’s eye popped from its socket under the pressure, the way Calivra’s body became a hollowed-out shell of shattered flesh.

"STOP IT! STOP IT, YOU MONSTER!" Apollo let out a soul-shattering cry.

Tears of pure agony streamed down his face, mixing with the dust and blood on his cheeks. The sight of his comrades being turned into a slaughtered mess was too much.

The pain was a physical weight in his chest.

But then, something changed. The crying stopped.

The sobbing turned into a low, vibrating growl. The grief in his eyes was swallowed by a blinding, white-hot fury.

"YOU... BASTARD!" Apollo roared.

His aura, which had been flickering, suddenly ignited. It wasn’t a warm light; it was a searing, blinding radiance that seemed to burn the very air.

The light didn’t just shine; it pulsed with the rhythm of a dying star. The ground beneath him began to melt, turning into a pool of glowing magma from the sheer intensity of his divine outrage.

"YOU TOOK EVERYTHING!" Apollo screamed, his voice echoing like thunder. "YOU TOOK THEIR LIVES."

"YOU TOOK THEIR DIGNITY! NOW... I WILL TAKE YOUR VERY SOUL!"