Chapter 574: 574. I’m Going To Bring More Chaos In The Underlayer! (It Was Cleaning!)
Lilith held his gaze for a moment, and her expression did the thing it did when she had completed an evaluation and arrived at a position she found unsatisfying and had decided to hold anyway.
She looked back at the kingdom.
Kaida Lunereth was standing in the middle of the large, hollow room in the water processing plant, with the steady, mechanical rumble of heavy equipment and the never-ending, rushing sound of processed water coursing through enormous pipes all around her.
The ambient noise was deafening, a cacophony of liquid pressure and metallic vibration that should have been her safe haven. For a concealment class specialist, this was a playground of interference, a place where signatures could be drowned in a sea of white noise.
But the marking was a parasite that didn’t care about the noise. It was a constant, pulsing frequency that sat on her soul, screaming her location to anyone with the eyes to see it.
She had spent the last several minutes in a feverish trance of technical application.
Her hands had moved in intricate, microscopic patterns, weaving layers of concealment energy around her skin, trying to bend the light, the heat, and the very essence of her presence. She had pushed her energy to the brink of exhaustion, attempting to create a "dead zone" around herself.
It had failed. The marking didn’t just sit on her; it resonated through her.
When the technical solutions crumbled, she had tried the only other tool in her arsenal: diplomacy. She had stepped out of the facility’s shadows, her hands raised in a gesture of non-aggression, her voice projecting a calm, authoritative tone that had served her well in countless high-stakes social arenas.
She had spoken of treaties, of misunderstandings, and of the value of a high-tier skill holder like herself being spared for the sake of the kingdom’s future.
But the patrol units weren’t interested in her intellect. They were interested in the mark.
They moved into the facility’s main transit hall, a wide, cavernous space lined with high-pressure pipes.
There were six of them, moving in a tight, interlocking wedge. They didn’t approach her like soldiers seeking a parley; they approached her like exterminators closing in on a breach.
Kaida realized, with a cold spike of dread, that her words were hitting them like pebbles against a fortress wall.
"Listen to me!" she snapped, her composure finally fracturing as the lead unit leveled a kinetic baton at her chest. "I am a registered talent! You are making a strategic error!"
The response was a synchronized lunge.
Kaida’s instincts kicked in, her body reacting to the sudden surge of hostile intent. She didn’t fight with the brute force of a warrior but with the fluid, evasive grace of a shadow. She spun, her energy flaring to create a momentary burst of sensory distortion, a "glitch" in their vision, and slipped past the first soldier’s grasp.
She was fast, but the facility was a trap of her own making. The heavy pipes provided cover, but they also limited her lines of sight.
As she ducked behind a massive filtration vat, she heard the heavy, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of the units’ boots. They weren’t chasing her; they were herding her.
She emerged from behind the vat, only to find herself caught in a crossfire. Two units had already swung wide, cutting off her retreat toward the upper catwalks.
She unleashed a concussive burst of concealment energy, a wave of "nothingness" meant to disorient them, but the soldiers simply adjusted their stances, their training overriding the momentary vertigo.
The fight became a desperate, frantic scramble of light and shadow. Kaida used her energy to flicker in and out of perception, a ghost dancing through a corridor of steel.
She struck with precision, using small, concentrated bursts of energy to bruise limbs and stagger her attackers, trying to create the space she needed to breathe, to think, and to escape.
But for every strike she landed, two more were aimed at her. The patrol units were a singular organism, their movements so tightly coordinated that they occupied every space she tried to move into.
When she dove left, a shield was already there to meet her. When she pivoted right, a kinetic pulse was waiting to catch her mid-turn.
She was a master of being unseen, but in this arena, being unseen was no longer enough. She had to be untouchable, and she was rapidly running out of ways to be both.
Her breath was coming in jagged gasps now, her energy reserves flickering like a dying candle. She backed toward the edge of a primary outflow pipe, the roaring water behind her a terrifying precipice. The six units closed the circle, their weapons humming with lethal intent, their eyes fixed on the glowing, unyielding mark upon her skin.
The analytical, social, and technical parts of her mind had all reached the same, singular conclusion.
She was out of options.
...
Kaida Lunereth lasted twelve minutes from the start of the purge, which was the longest of the three and was a tribute to the quality of her concealment ability. She had successfully moved from her spot in the administrative district to the water processing area in the Underlayer’s lower levels, which was a smart choice because the water processing systems had the strongest energy signals in the kingdom and were the hardest to detect.
But the frequency Rex had broadcast was not a detection tool. It was a marking.
And a marking that could not be suppressed from the outside was still visible to anyone within five meters of her who had any elemental perception, regardless of what the ambient energy conditions were doing to long-range detection.
She had spent twelve minutes trying to stay more than five meters from everyone.
In a water processing facility with patrol units closing the perimeter, that was not sustainable.
Rex watched the three conclusions and turned his attention to the broader picture.
[SYSTEM ALERT: ACTIVE REINCARNATOR POPULATION IN CURRECT AREA — 23 IDENTIFIED.]
He looked at the notification.
Twenty-three. The eleven Legion contacts, along with twelve others who had arrived in the Underlayer through various routes for different reasons—some having been here for years and others being recent arrivals through Mordecai’s operations—were all present.
None of them were immediately dangerous in the Legion sense. None of them were actively feeding intelligence to an enemy organization.
Rex looked at the twenty-three and thought about what Lustia had said about the reconstruction being real rather than targeted.
He reflected on his speech, where he mentioned that the people who chose to be here built the Underlayer.
He contemplated the weak points in a structure and the consequences of neglecting them.
"You’re about to do something," Lilith said.
She was not watching the kingdom. She was watching him, which was often more informative.
"Yes," Rex said.
"The twelve non-Legion reincarnators," she said.
"Some of them," Rex said.
Lilith looked at the kingdom below. "How many of the twelve are you marking?"
"Seventeen out of twenty-three total," Rex said.
She calculated quickly.
"Six non-Legion," she noted. "Those six you plan to keep."
"Their ability profiles address specific gaps in what the post-reconstruction kingdom needs," Rex said. "The rest are taking up space."
Lilith was quiet for a moment. "Lord Mordecai is going to find this difficult to accept."
"Oh, please, that fucking bum accepted the full authorization before the speech," Rex said. "The full authorization covers what I’m about to do."
"That’s technically accurate," Lilith said. "He didn’t know it covered this when he accepted it."
"No," Rex said. "He didn’t."
"And what is he going to do about it?" Rex laughed.
Lilith looked at him with an expression that conveyed a mix of emotions, closest to one indicating she had evaluated the situation and deemed it acceptable without further discussion.
’Master is... yeah... he is the real leader that we deserved.’
She looked back at the kingdom and said nothing.
Rex activated the Energy Manipulation skill and applied the Legion marking frequency to seventeen of the twenty-three. The six he left unmarked were the ones whose system profiles he had assessed as operationally useful to the post-reconstruction era.
The unmarked individuals were those whose ability sets filled specific gaps in what Mordecai’s gacha had produced and whose presence benefited the kingdom instead of depleting its resources.
The seventeen he marked were the ones who were simply here, taking up space in the kingdom’s resource distribution and contributing nothing that the kingdom’s native population could not have provided for itself.
In a kingdom of two hundred thousand, seventeen was not a significant number.
But the principle it established was.
The purge, which had begun as a targeted response to Legion infiltration, expanded in the next six minutes as seventeen new marking signatures appeared across the Underlayer’s population.
Most of the kingdom did not realize that the seventeen individuals were not affiliated with the Legion. They knew the markings were the thing that the figure on the spire had told them to respond to.
And the kingdom responded.
Below, seventeen people who had arrived in the Underlayer at various times for various reasons and had spent those times being neither useful nor harmful discovered what it meant to be neither useful nor harmful in a kingdom that had just been given permission to identify the difference.
Rex watched the scene from the spire and let it run.
"Is this what it looks like," Lilith said, after a moment, "from the beginning of every empire?"
Rex considered the question with the attention it deserved.
"No," he said. "Most empires start with a story about expansion."
"But this... starts with a story about cleaning."
"And the difference is?" she said.
"The cleaning is real," Rex said. "The expansion comes later, and when it comes, the foundation it builds on will have been cleared of everything that would have made it unstable."
