Chapter 565: 565. He Hasn’t Changed At All, And Starting Now, I’m Going To Change It
Even when Rex roasted him with all kinds of words that came not in this fantasy world... Mordecai was stuck in his own world, enjoying the massage.
Pavellia, for her part, had noticed Rex the moment he cleared the entrance threshold. Especially all the roast words he just said.
Her eyes focused on the Lustful Villain mask with the keen attention of someone conducting a recognition check. Within two seconds, she found what she was looking for, and her posture shifted.
It wasn’t alarm—it was an adjustment, a recalibration of someone who had been engaged in one task and now recognized that a different response was necessary.
Mordecai felt her adjustment through the change in pressure on his shoulders, and his head came up.
"Hm...?" Mordecai glanced at the person Pavillia was looking for. "W-what’s wrong, Pavilia...?"
And then he saw Rex.
For a moment, he did nothing but acknowledge the presence. ’Oh... fuck...’
Then he straightened, drawing himself up with the distinct energy of someone who had been caught in an informal moment by someone they respected and was now shifting into a version of themselves that was more fitting for the situation.
He started to refine his energy signature, channeling the familiar warming-up quality of someone tapping into the power state they usually reserved for formal presentations.
The problem was that Rex was already looking directly at him.
Mordecai immediately froze halfway through it. And the energy flickered awkwardly.
"...Ah."
He lowered his hands slightly.
"...Right."
For some reason that only made it worse. Mordecai cleared his throat and tried again anyway, visibly attempting to deepen his voice.
"Lustful Villain, I had not been informed of your immediate—"
Rex stared at him.
Mordecai stopped mid-sentence. The energy signature collapsed instantly like a stage prop falling apart during rehearsal.
"...Okay, hold on."
He straightened his cape quickly.
"No, wait, give me a second; that wasn’t supposed to sound like that."
Lilith immediately looked away because she was already starting to laugh while Pavellia maintained professional composure with visible effort.
Mordecai tried again. "Oh, Lustful Villain, welcome back to the Underlayer."
"I have maintained operational—" His voice cracked slightly on the last word.
He shut his mouth immediately.
And then silence came.
"...Fuck."
Rex continued staring at him without expression.
Mordecai suddenly looked deeply aware of how ridiculous he appeared.
"No... okay, listen," Mordecai said quickly, raising both hands defensively. "In my defense, I wasn’t expecting you right now!"
"Usually I have at least, like, ten minutes to mentally prepare before doing the whole Demon Lord thing."
Rex said nothing. Mordecai panicked harder under the silence.
"I-I mean, not that I’m pretending! I AM the Demon Lord!"
"Technically... Operationally... Mostly..."
Lilith made a choking sound. "Pfft...!"
Pavellia quietly covered her mouth. Mordecai realized too late that he had somehow made the situation catastrophically worse.
"No, wait, that sounded fraudulent as shit."
"It did," Lilith said immediately.
"I KNOW IT DID."
He rubbed his face aggressively.
"Fuck. Okay. Restart. Restart."
Mordecai stood up straighter again and forced his shoulders back with the determination of a man desperately trying to recover authority that had already died several minutes ago.
Dark energy gathered around him again. This time, the aura lasted almost three whole seconds.
Then Rex slowly raised one eyebrow.
Mordecai lost composure instantly.
"...Sorry."
Silence.
"...I practiced that introduction earlier."
More silence.
"...Pavellia said it sounded intimidating."
Pavellia looked away immediately. "I said it sounded acceptable."
"THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAID."
"You added the voice effect yourself."
"I PANICKED."
Rex finally spoke.
"Don’t."
Mordecai stopped breathing for a second.
Rex looked at the unstable aura still flickering around him like malfunctioning special effects.
Then at the throne.
Then back at Mordecai.
"Shut your bitch ass up."
Mordecai stopped.
The room’s guards, twelve of them by Rex’s count, had already responded to his entrance with the body language of soldiers making rapid threat assessments.
Six of them had oriented toward him. The other six had held their position.
Now all twelve were doing the thing that guards did when the person they were assessing had made it obvious that the person they were technically guarding had deferred to that assessment: they stood completely still and waited to understand what was happening.
"To be honest... I wasn’t expecting you," Mordecai said, with the studied calm of someone who had been surprised and was managing it as a professional.
"I know," Rex said.
He walked into the room at the unhurried pace he reserved for spaces he had already claimed as his own. The guards followed his movements with their eyes but remained still, recognizing that Mordecai’s own stillness signaled their instruction.
"How long has it been?" Rex asked, not inquiring about the passage of time but rather about the nature of the interval itself.
Mordecai looked at him for a moment, parsing the register of the question. "Well, uh..."
"For me it feels like it’s been three months, but the reality is... two weeks," he said. "Since your last visit in person, of course."
"Long enough for things to drift," Rex said. "And don’t even exaggerate it."
"S-sorry... anyway!"
"We followed your instructions," Mordecai said.
The phrasing conveyed a quality that was neither defensive nor reassuring, reflecting the uncertainty of someone who had followed instructions but was not fully confident that their actions were adequate.
"I know you did," Rex said. "Just to make sure for y’all that I’m not here because you failed."
"I’m here because the situation has developed beyond what instructions can manage from a distance."
Mordecai absorbed the information. "Meaning...?"
"Things have developed on the surface that require direct attention in the Underlayer," Rex said. "I need to be here for quite some time."
Mordecai looked at him. "How long are you talking about?"
"As long as it takes," Rex said. "I’ll tell you the shape of it once we’re in a room with fewer witnesses because..."
"...we don’t want to cause any panic, right?"
Mordecai gulped, then briefly glanced at the twelve guards, and his movement indicated that he was quickly assessing which ones he trusted implicitly and which ones he trusted only for operational purposes, as these were two distinct categories.
Rex observed Mordecai as he conducted his assessment and reflected: You have been grappling with those questions for two weeks, yet you still lack the complete answers. This is one of the issues we need to confront.
"Pavellia," Mordecai said.
She had already stepped back from the chair and was standing with the clean posture of someone who had transitioned out of one role and into another without making it visible.
"My lord," she said.
"Find us some private space," he said, which was not a request in any meaningful sense.
"The secondary council chamber," she said. "It’s been secured since this morning’s sweep."
"How recent was the sweep?" Rex said.
Pavellia looked at him directly. "Four hours ago."
"I ran it myself with the updated frequency protocol." A pause. "It’s clean enough for all of us to discuss something so important."
"Who has the updated protocol?" Rex said.
"Three people," she said.
"Myself, Lord Mordecai, and the head of the monitoring division." She spoke in a flat, informative tone, as if she had anticipated the question and organized her answer before it was asked. "The division head has not been inside the secondary chamber since the last full security review, which was six weeks ago."
Rex looked at her. She was giving him more information than he had asked for, which was not the behavior of someone who answered questions.
It was the behavior of someone who understood what questions were for and was providing the downstream answers to avoid the delay of the intermediate ones.
"Good," Rex said.
Something in Pavellia’s expression did not change, but something behind it did. The specific adjustment refers to the response of someone who has made an offer and has seen it accepted correctly.
"Then lead the way," Mordecai said, and she moved, and the room adjusted around the departure in the specific way of a court that had learned to read direction from movement rather than from explicit instructions.
...
Lilith fell into step behind Rex, while Mordecai walked alongside her; the guards stayed in the throne room because they had not received any instructions to follow, and the secondary council chamber was located three corridors away, requiring navigation through the specific architecture of Mordecai’s palace, which was designed for impression rather than efficiency, resulting in a longer travel time than necessary.
In the corridor, Mordecai said, quietly and without looking at Rex, "Is it bad?"
"What kind of bad do you want to talk about, huh?" Rex said.
"The kind of bad that requires you to be here personally," Mordecai said. "Rather than the kind that can be addressed through the channel."
"The kind that requires me to be here personally," Rex said. "Yes."
Mordecai was quiet for several steps.
"The gacha pulls," he said. "The monitoring restructuring... All of it."
"Was it enough?" he said. "What we did while you were gone... Was any of it actually useful?"
Rex looked at him sideways. It was a genuine question, the specific quality of a question from someone who had been working on tasks they could not fully evaluate because they lacked the context to understand what success looked like from the outside.
"The expertise-class pulls were useful," Rex said. "The monitoring restructuring was necessary and Pavellia executed it well."
"The security audit identified several structural gaps that would have been exploited within the next six months." He paused. "You did what you were asked to do, and that matters for once."
"But...?" Mordecai said.
"But there are things that the instructions didn’t cover," Rex said. "I didn’t have the full picture of the situation when I gave the instructions."
"You’re telling me something got through," Mordecai said.
"I’m telling you something was already here before the instructions," Rex said. "And it has been here for a long time."
