CHAPTER 390: FIRST SUBORDINATE

Apollo raised an eyebrow, watching the way Thomas swayed on his feet—blood dripping from a cut on his forehead, his knuckles raw, clothes torn and soaked with the filth of battle.

"You’ve already made your point," Apollo said, his voice calm but laced with authority. "Any more and you’ll break. You’ve done well."

Thomas opened his mouth, perhaps to protest, but something in Apollo’s gaze made him pause.

Then Apollo turned to Damon.

The moment their eyes met, Damon flinched—the weight of Apollo’s presence suddenly suffocating. The once-smirking, arrogant young master stumbled a step back.

He felt the situation was bad and felt anxious. "Marcus, quick, kill these three; don’t hold back."

He ordered the peak saint guard around, who was the strongest person his father had arranged for him.

The Saint-rank expert behind Damon immediately moved, his aura flaring like a crashing wave, ready to intercept. He felt Apollo and his guardian were a bit mysterious, but the aura around them was weak, so he thought it might be due to some treasure.

Not to mention he also knows about the crippled Thomas and thought his friends wouldn’t be trash like him.

But just as he was about to move and show his strength, he didn’t even see when it happened.

A gust of wind—no, a distortion—surged forward.

CRACK.

The Saint-rank expert was hurled backwards like a broken doll, smashing through a dozen stone pillars and the road before finally crashing into a wall, unconscious. Blood sprayed across the ground in a fine mist, and silence swept over the street.

Damon froze. His legs locked. His breath hitched. His protector... had just vanished in a blink.

Apollo didn’t even glance at the man he’d just crushed.

He stepped right up to Damon, eyes glinting like stars behind a veil of mist. And slowly walked towards him.

"You... you don’t come close!" Damon shouted with a trembling voice, cracking into something shrill and pathetic.

Apollo didn’t stop.

His eyes—calm, detached, and glinting with that mysterious starlight—locked onto Damon’s soul.

"You like playing the big shot who controls others’ lives," Apollo said quietly, his voice like a blade drawn slow. "But with your strength, you’re not even worth a bug. So how dare you—you piece of shit—crawl out here and act like you matter?"

And with that, a tremendous pressure overwhelmed Damon that seemed to squeeze him from within. Many treasures that were supposed to protect him shattered one after another as the space around him started to distort.

His blood started to boil and started coming out from his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth.

Then, with a sickening squelch, his body bloated unnaturally... and burst.

Like a balloon under too much pressure, he exploded in a violent spray of blood and gore, leaving behind nothing but silence and scattered fragments of a once-arrogant fool.

Thomas stood rooted to the ground, unable to move or speak.

He had seen death before—had lived among killers and survived unspeakable horrors—but nothing compared to the sight before him. Damon, a pampered young master with a peak Saint-rank guard, had been erased from existence like he was no more than a fly.

Thomas gulped, cold sweat trailing down his back. "W-what kind of monster...?" he muttered under his breath, his gaze fixed on Apollo’s calm back.

All around them, silence reigned.

The onlookers—criminals, cutthroats, mercenaries, and opportunists who had gathered to watch the "execution"—were "frozen in place. The ones hiding in alleyways didn’t even dare to breathe too loudly.

"Don’t be surprised; you also did good. Your talent isn’t bad. Here is the reward." As Apollo said that, he flicked his fingers, and a powerful and pure divine essence seemed to instantly enter Thomas’s body.

Boom!

A muffled explosion echoed within Thomas’s body as the divine energy surged through his veins. Warm and radiant, it coursed through him like a tide, instantly locating and purging the sinister poison gnawing at his core. His eyes widened as the unbearable heaviness inside him began to lift.

He staggered, gasping—not in pain, but in awe—as his body began to heal, cell by cell, like fire melting ice.

The poison that seemed to make him feel despair for years now, like a rat, seemed to be trying to run from the mighty divine essence. But it was all meaningless in front of its divine nature, and in a matter of seconds the poison was fully devoured.

And with that, a very intense energy burst within him. The divine essence slowly clears his blood, muscles, and veins, slowly transforming his foundation and talent.

It was as if he was being reforged by divine hands. His foundation began to transform, and even his latent potential—once thought to be crippled—bloomed like a phoenix rising from ash.

Bang!

His aura exploded outward. From the third-rank limit, it surged past the threshold of the fourth rank... and didn’t stop. The ground quaked beneath his feet as his cultivation climbed higher and higher, finally settling at the peak of Saint rank.

But the momentum wasn’t finished.

Years of suffering, the patience of survival, and an iron will honed in countless life-and-death struggles—all of it burst forth.

And in that climactic moment, Thomas broke through once more, stepping into the Half-God Realm—his body glowing with divine resonance, eyes shining like stars that had finally found their place in the sky.

He felt unimaginable power and felt his talent improved by a large margin, but instead of celebrating, he quickly bent on his knees and bowed towards Apollo with a fanatic expression.

"Thank you, Master, for giving me this chance to be reborn!"

Apollo smiled at it and wasn’t surprised by the breakthrough of Thomas. It was expected, as he was already a talented guy, and these years of hard survival made his mind and will stronger.

Now after he reforged his foundation and increased his talent with the help of his pure divine energy, he should be able to become a void god and even reach the true god realm in the future.

"Alright," Apollo said, his voice steady and absolute, "from now on, you are the first subordinate."