Rex looked at him with the flat patience of someone who had finished a task and was giving the result time to settle before moving to the next one.
Zane was on the platform floor with both knees down and his right wrist held against his chest, which was not a defensive posture but the posture of someone managing several simultaneous points of damage and having to prioritize which ones got attention first. His breathing was the controlled, deliberate kind that people produced when normal breathing was producing pain and they had made the adjustment without choosing to.
Three ribs. Rex had felt them give in sequence during the third exchange, each one a distinct structural failure as the Peak Physique's output found the cumulative limit of what Zane's body could absorb and absorbed it anyway.
The knee strike to the base of his spine had not broken anything but would be producing the specific radiating pain that took hours to fully surface and made standing difficult once it did.
