Apollo crossed the distance in a single, explosive movement. He didn't just run; he became a projectile of divine wrath, his boots tearing gouges into the stone as he accelerated.
But the corridor answered before his fist could even find flesh.
CRACK BOOM!
The punch connected with the empty space where the masked figure had been standing a fraction of a second earlier, but there was no empty air.
Rex had moved with a preternatural fluidity that defied human reaction time. When Apollo's fist missed, the golden light wrapped around his knuckles didn't simply dissipate; it detonated against the air itself.
The shockwave rolled outward from the point of impact in a visible, searing ring of compressed dust and displaced light.
The force was so immense that it acted like a physical wall; the nearest soldiers on both sides were lifted off their feet as if struck by a battering ram, forty or fifty men tumbling backward into the corpses of their comrades.
