Chapter 578: 578. It Seems Like Cassandra Improved By A Lot! I’ll Fight Her Again Any Time!
She did not move like a soldier executing a maneuver; she moved like a catastrophe that had already decided its path. Cassandra crossed the plaza at a predatory angle, her movement so efficient it rendered the formation’s defensive math obsolete.
Before the outer flank could even register her presence to rotate, she was already inside their optimal engagement range, a ghost in the machinery of their defense. Her sword didn’t swing in grand, theatrical arcs; it worked in tight, vicious, compact snips, a rhythmic, surgical butchery designed to shred anything within arm’s reach without ever leaving her exposed.
The first exchange was a five-second blur of violence. The formation’s left flank lunged to intercept her, unleashing a concussive pressure wave meant to shatter her bones and halt her momentum ten meters out.
But Cassandra didn’t fight the wave; she danced on its edge. She angled her body with terrifying precision, letting the kinetic force slam into the empty air where her torso had been a heartbeat before.
"Hah!" A sharp, controlled exhale escaped her as she used the pressure to pivot.
The momentum of the wave actually served to slingshot her into the intercept’s blind spot, catching them in a state of panicked, uncoordinated lunge as they realized they had just struck nothing but air.
The second exchange was a three-second massacre. Now inside the meat of the formation, Cassandra turned their own geometry against them.
Where the defenders relied on space to swing their weapons, she compressed the world. Her blade worked in short, brutal stabs and tight, shearing arcs that bypassed their guards and found the soft, yielding gaps in their armor.
It wasn’t a duel; it was a deconstruction of human anatomy.
From her vantage point on the raised floor, the fifth member, the lookout, saw the opening. Sensing Cassandra’s momentum, she unleashed a massive compression strike downward, a heavy, crushing hammer of force intended to pin Cassandra to the blood-slicked stones.
"Now! Die!" the lookout shrieked, pouring her mana into the strike.
It was a perfect anticipatory strike, the kind that ended fights against skilled but predictable opponents.
But Cassandra wasn’t just skilled; she was a trap. Her entire approach had been a choreographed lie, a sequence of movements designed to bait exactly this kind of strike.
Instead of recoiling from the descending hammer of force, she stepped into the kill zone. She caught the brutal impact on her forward shoulder, a guttural "Nngh!" escaping her teeth as the bone groaned under the pressure. She absorbed the shock with a grimace of iron will.
The force didn’t knock her back; it redirected her. She was tossed two meters sideways and downward, a controlled tumble that kept her center of gravity lethal, and she was already uncoiling from the impact before the next threat had even finished its motion.
The next threat was a large, fire-type reincarnator, a man possessed by the delusional bravado that he could burn his way through a purge.
He roared, his voice a thunderous, arrogant bellow, "Burn! Burn in the light of my glory!"
He unleashed a wide area suppression blast, a roaring sun of incinerating heat and kinetic force meant to blast every living thing in the plaza twenty meters back.
It was a death sentence.
At the last possible microsecond, Cassandra angled her body into the heart of the inferno. She took the brunt of the explosion on her shoulder, a pained, sharp "Khhh!" escaping her lips as the heat singed her skin. She used the violent redirection to pivot sideways rather than being thrown like a ragdoll.
As the fire type leaned into his follow-through, his eyes wide with the arrogant expectation of victory, his lips curling into a triumphant smirk, Cassandra was already moving through the smoke, her blade a silver streak of vengeance.
The follow-through was the last thing he ever felt. As the fire died down, the man didn’t fall backward from his own blast; he fell forward, his head nearly severed from his shoulders by a strike so fast and so heavy that the heat of his own flames seemed to cauterize the wound as it opened.
His triumphant roar died in a wet, gurgling "Guh!" as he collapsed. He died in the center of his own dying sun, a broken, steaming husk in a plaza of gore.
Rex watched this and thought about the technical quality of what Cassandra had done: not the result but the method, the specific understanding of force redirection that let her convert a suppression blast that should have removed her from the engagement into a movement tool that put her exactly where she needed to be.
"She’s been practicing," Lilith said, using the specific tone she reserved for expressing admiration while not fully concealing her feelings.
"Nah, it’s more accurate to say... She’s been preparing," Rex said. "There’s a difference."
"Practicing is repetition, and preparing is building toward a specific problem."
"What problem is she preparing for?" Lilith said.
Rex said nothing.
Lilith looked at him and then at the plaza below, where Cassandra was finishing what remained of the engagement with the clean efficiency of someone who had spent the last forty minutes making similar decisions and arrived at the answer on her own.
"She’s preparing for you," Lilith said.
"She’s been preparing for me since the first time I demonstrated what the telekinesis could do at full output," Rex said. "She’s systematic about it."
"Every time I’ve used a specific technique in her presence, she files it and finds the counter for it."
"Does she know you know that?" Lilith asked.
"She knows I know she’s capable of it," Rex said. "She probably suspects I’ve noticed the specific preparation."
"The question she doesn’t have the answer to yet is how much of what I’ve shown her is real and how much of it is what I wanted her to see."
Lilith was quiet for a moment. "How much of it is what you wanted her to see?"
Rex looked at Cassandra in the plaza below; she had finished the engagement and was speaking to the militia unit commander beside her, but Rex’s elevated position prevented him from hearing the specific words.
"More than she thinks," he said. "Less than she fears."
He kept Cassandra in his field of view as she moved out of the plaza toward the next engagement concentration, maintained the mental file on her for updates, and added the force-redirection technique as evidence of her more advanced preparation compared to her previous demonstrations.
Useful, all of it.
Below, the chaos continued.
The last eight Legion contacts were handling their problems with different levels of skill, and the growing group of marked non-Legion reincarnators was adding to the fighting in the kingdom, turning a conflict that began with a clear purpose into something more chaotic and less focused.
Rex watched it all with the flat, clear attention of someone who had anticipated the expansion and had included it in the calculation from the beginning.
"How long until it peaks?" Lilith said.
"It peaked eleven minutes ago," Rex said. "The engagement count has been dropping since then."
"Most of the secondary conflicts are already in their resolution phase."
Lilith looked at him. "You’ve been watching the peak pass in real time and not mentioned it."
"I didn’t need to mention it," Rex said. "You were watching."
"I was watching the fights," she said. "You were watching the pattern."
"The pattern is the important part," Rex said. "The fights are how the pattern expresses itself."
Lilith looked at the kingdom, which was starting to show signs of having experienced something significant and was now in the recovery stage, with the sounds of battle still faintly heard, the main areas of conflict spreading out as the intense fights ended, and what was left was the slower process of the kingdom dealing with what had happened to it.
"It’s going to look different in the morning," Lilith said.
"Yes," Rex said.
"The people who are still here," she said. "They’re going to have to decide what that means."
"They’ll decide it the way populations always decide things after a defining event," Rex said. "They’ll incorporate it into the story they tell about themselves and move forward."
"And the story they tell," Lilith said, "will include the Lustful Villain."
"Yes," Rex said. "That is the point."
She looked at him one more time with the expression that was closest to the one she had when she was genuinely trying to understand something about him rather than simply accepting it.
"Do you want them to be afraid of you?" she said.
Rex looked at the kingdom below, at the two hundred thousand lives that were now in the process of becoming something that had not existed before tonight.
"I want them to understand that what I’m afraid of is worse than I am," he said. "The fear of me is the functional part."
"The rest is just accurate information."
Lilith held the answer for a moment and then turned back to the kingdom.
’Oh my god~! He’s so coooooool~! And charminggggggg~!’
