Chapter 590: 590. So... They’re Hunting Rex Rexilion? Fine By Me!
He turned his gaze back to the nearly translucent, trembling form of Taiga.
"You all fight with such grace, such ’heroic’ intent," Rex sneered, his hand twitching as he prepared for the final burst. "But you forget the fundamental truth of your existence."
"You are just biological machines held together by fragile laws. And laws... laws can be broken."
Rex’s fingers curled into a tight fist.
"This," Rex declared, his voice rising to a triumphant crescendo as the red light from his mask bathed the dying man in a hellish glow, "is how you properly kill a reincarnator."
"You don’t just end their life fast, but... you shatter the very concept of their survival."
With a sudden, violent clench of his fist, Rex released the internal pressure.
BOOOOOMMMMM!
Taiga didn’t just die; he detonated. A massive explosion of red mist, bone shards, and pressurized fluids erupted from his center, a violent outward burst that shook the plaza, coating Verakis and the ruins in a fresh, hot layer of Taiga’s remains.
Rex stood at the epicenter, the red light of his mask glowing brightly through the settling crimson fog, looking every bit the god of a new, bloodier world.
The plaza was no longer a place of combat; it was a charnel house. The air was thick, heavy with the metallic tang of blood and the sickening, sweet scent of ruptured organs.
Rex stood in the center of the devastation, a silent monolith of carnage. Scattered around his feet were the remains of the five Reincarnators, the elite, the legends, and the supposed pinnacle of power now reduced to mere anatomical debris.
Lyra, Kaelen, Gale, Taiga... and the fifth, a nameless woman, lay as nothing more than a stain on the cobblestones.
Verakis lay a few feet away, his body battered, his spirit bruised, but most of all, his mind reeling from the sheer, clinical efficiency of the slaughter. He stared at the carnage, his eyes tracing the patterns of the blood, realizing the horrific truth: the "unbeatable" had been dismantled like clockwork.
Rex stood there, unhurried, looking down at the bodies with the detached, analytical attention of a scholar reviewing a failed experiment. He wasn’t celebrating; he was merely assessing the situation, as if he were mentally checking off items on a list, organizing the next several minutes of his existence into a perfect, lethal sequence.
Verakis, his voice a ragged, hateful rasp from the ground, broke the heavy silence.
"Are you going to lecture all of them...?" he spat, his eyes burning with a mixture of grief and pure, unadulterated loathing.
"The ones worth lecturing," Rex replied, his voice calm, almost conversational, as if he were discussing the weather rather than the corpses of gods.
"What makes someone worth it...?" Verakis demanded, his fingers digging into the blood-slicked stone.
Rex turned his head slightly, his gaze sweeping over the wreckage. "The ones who were trying to solve the problem were more valuable than those who simply committed to it."
He pointed a bloodstained finger toward the remains of the stone pressure user. "The stone pressure user came in with a working that was designed to create the platform rather than deal with the damage."
He paused, his eyes narrowing as he mentally deconstructed the combat. "Those are three steps of thinking, and the parallel approach was a coordination failure, but the individual components were competent."
Verakis swallowed hard, his throat tight with bile. He looked at the mangled shapes of the others, the ones who had died without a single moment of strategic brilliance.
"And the others...?"
Rex said nothing. The silence was heavy, a brutal, definitive answer that carried more weight than any spoken word.
Verakis looked at the bodies strewn around the plaza, his mind performing the grim arithmetic of the dead.
"Three of them," he whispered, the realization sinking in.
"Yes," Rex said simply.
"Which three...?" Verakis asked, his voice trembling with a sudden, cold dread.
"The ones who were solving problems," Rex said, his voice dropping into a tone of absolute certainty. "The others were just fighting."
He looked at Verakis then, pinning him with a flat, direct attention, the kind of intense, predatory focus he reserved for making specific, undeniable points to the individuals he intended to break.
"You understand the difference," Rex said, his eyes glowing with a faint, menacing light. "That’s why you’re still on the ground talking instead of being one of the three."
Verakis glared up at him, his gaze landing on his own mangled, broken wrist.
"I’m on the ground because you broke my wrist in eight seconds," he hissed, the hatred in his voice nearly palpable.
"You’re on the ground talking," Rex countered, his expression unchanging, "because you’re the one who warned them about me instead of attacking first."
Verakis gripped the dirt, his breath hitching as he realized the terrifying accuracy of the critique. "You did the tactical assessment instead of the emotional response..."
"That’s worth something," Rex concluded, his aura beginning to swell, the air around him vibrating with the impending violence.
Verakis let out a harsh, bitter laugh that turned into a cough, spitting blood onto the crimson-soaked stones. He looked up at the silhouette of the man who had just dismantled the world’s hope.
"Why?" he screamed, the word tearing from his lungs. "Why go through all this...?"
"If you’re against the Reincarnators, and you’re against the Legion... then who the fuck are you even on? Whose side are you on?!"
Rex didn’t answer immediately. He stood amidst the gore, the red light of his mask pulsing like a slow, dying heartbeat.
He looked at the carnage, then at the sky, as if searching for a grander purpose, only to settle back on the man at his feet.
"Sides?" Rex repeated the word as if it were a foreign concept, something quaint and primitive. "You people are so obsessed with labels: ’hero,’ ’villain,’ ’legionnaire,’ ’reincarnator.’ You think the world is a chessboard where you have to pick a color."
He took a step toward Verakis, his presence expanding until it felt like the very atmosphere was being crushed. "The truth is much simpler, Verakis."
"I am on the side of my own desire..."
"I am the only constant in this equation..."
"If the Reincarnators stand in the way of what I want, they die."
"If the Legion tries to bind me to their cause, they die."
"I am not picky about the flavor of the blood, as long as it is spilled to satisfy my whim."
Verakis stared at him, the sheer, unadulterated evil in Rex’s voice chilling him more than the wind. "You’re just... a monster... a heartless fucking void monster who doesn’t have any rights!"
"Perhaps," Rex conceded, a dark smile playing behind his mask. "But a void is the most honest thing in existence."
"And since you’re so fond of truth, Verakis... since you’re so close to meeting the end... why don’t I give you one last one?"
"A truth that will make your final moments truly meaningful."
Rex leaned down, his shadow swallowing Verakis whole. The red light from his mask intensified, casting a hellish glow over the broken man.
"Remember the Canyon?" Rex whispered, his voice dropping to a terrifying, intimate level. "Remember the massacre?"
"The day the Legion thought they lost their greatest warriors? The day Kregg and the others were slaughtered in a way that defied all logic and tactical understanding?"
Verakis’s eyes widened. "What are you... talking about...?"
"It wasn’t a rogue beast, Verakis... It wasn’t a natural disaster, and it wasn’t an army," Rex said, his voice dripping with a sadistic pride. "It was me... It has always been me..."
"Rex Rexilion."
"And this lustful villain that I call myself for the underlayer... is my disguise because I am Rex Rexilion," Rex laughed. "I’ve killed Kregg and the other Legion members who tried to take away those reincarnators who are supposed to be my prey, like Apollo."
Verakis felt the world tilt beneath him, and the foundations of his reality began to crack.
The greatest defeat in the Legion’s history—the death of Kregg—was no mystery. It was a personal execution carried out by the man standing over him.
"You... you were there?" Verakis gasped, his voice trembling with a cocktail of horror and disbelief. "All this time... we were hunting you...?"
"Rex... Rexillion... and Lustful Villain... are the same person...?"
"And you were so very easy to hunt," Rex laughed, the sound cold and final. "But don’t worry."
"I already know who the founder of that legion is, and I just got good new information from you that they’re hunting me... Rex Rexilion."
"But they didn’t know about this identity."
"The mystery is over..."
"Now, the execution begins."
