Chapter 593: 593. Forty Minutes Isn’t Enough Time! But Hey! I’ve Found Another Legionnaire!
The next forty minutes of the purge were the densest period, and Rex moved through them with the specific quality of someone who had stopped pretending that what they were doing was reluctant or circumstantial. He was fully immersed in the experience, which provided the specific pleasure of complete engagement without any restraint or the need for performance.
The pockets of resistance he faced included individual marked contacts making their last stands and organized groups of non-marked reincarnators who believed they could fight back together, and he handled each situation with the complete set of skills he had developed over months, without needing to use everything.
The Peak Physique made the physical engagements qualitatively different from anything before. Against opponents with conventional enhancement, it was the difference between fighting someone with a weapon and fighting someone without one.
Against opponents with system enhancement, it was the difference between two people who had sharpened their tools and one person who had changed the material from which the tools were made.
Against the three remaining Legion contacts who were still active in the lower districts, all of whom had primordial-frequency immunity that made standard system attacks deflect, it was specifically the category advantage that Lustia had identified: the physical register operating independent of system taxonomy, mass, and momentum carried by a body rather than generated by an ability.
He found the first two of the three in the narrow hallway between the fourth and fifth sub-levels, where the rock formations created natural barriers that someone trained in combat would see as a good place to defend.
They had identified it and were actively utilizing it.
Neither of them survived the next four minutes in any meaningful way.
The third was different.
Raizen Hollow had somehow survived the initial militia engagement and had been moving through the lower tunnels for twenty minutes by the time Rex found him, which was a tribute to something about Raizen that Rex had already filed as worth noting: the man understood how to use an environment.
He had not been hiding. He had been moving, using the Underlayer’s lower tunnel network the way someone moved through terrain they had studied in advance, taking routes that the militia’s patrol doctrine did not cover because they were routes that the patrol doctrine had not been designed for.
Rex found him in a section of tunnel that connected the water processing infrastructure to the geological foundation layer, a passage that most of the kingdom’s population did not know existed because it served no function in ordinary kingdom life. The passage existed because the builders of the Underlayer’s water processing system needed access to the substrate layer during construction and chose to seal it afterward instead of filling it in.
Raizen had unsealed the passage, which required knowledge of its existence, either through very specific understanding of the kingdom’s construction history or a thorough analysis of the geological substrate that Rex’s earthen authority could have passively produced in about three minutes.
Raizen had been in the Underlayer for fourteen months.
...
Rex walked into the passage.
Raizen was at the far end of it, approximately forty meters away, and he had heard Rex coming because the passage was stone and stone carried sound efficiently, and he was already oriented toward the entrance when Rex cleared the threshold.
He looked at Rex with the expression of someone who had been running for twenty minutes, had reached a pre-calculated position, and arrived with a specific plan rather than out of desperation.
"I see that you’ve found this place," Rex said, his voice echoing with a smug, melodic lilt.
He didn’t just walk into the passage; he owned it, his massive, muscular frame casting a shadow that seemed to swallow the very light Raizen had been relying on.
Raizen’s breath hitched. He tried to maintain a flat, controlled tone, but the tremor in his hands was impossible to hide.
’Shit...’
’Try... to stay calm and don’t show any fear...’ Raizen takes a deep breath to calm himself down so that he can answer Rex.
"I found many things in fourteen months," he said, his voice straining to remain steady despite the primal instinct in his gut screaming at him to run. "Most of these things are unknown to the kingdom’s lord."
Rex let out a short, sharp laugh, a sound of pure, arrogant amusement. "Oh really...?"
"Well... He knows now," Rex countered, his eyes gleaming with a predator’s satisfaction. "Or he will. Very, very soon."
"Because you’re going to tell him," Raizen said, his eyes widening as the terrifying reality began to settle in.
"Please," Rex scoffed, stepping forward with a cocky, unhurried gait. "I don’t need to lift a finger to tell him."
"The restructuring review will find it..."
"The review is comprehensive, Raizen... It’s a beautiful, inevitable machine. I just set it in motion."
Raizen stared at him, a cold sweat breaking out across his brow. ’He knows my name... he is dangerous...’
’Is this... the same guy that killed Kregg, or is he different...?’ The fear wasn’t just about the impending death; it was the sheer, overwhelming scale of the intellect facing him.
"That’s the part that’s going to bother me until the end of this," Raizen whispered, his voice cracking. "Not that you’re here..."
"Not even what’s about to happen to me."
"The part that’s going to haunt me is how... how thoroughly you’ve built this."
Rex’s grin widened, sharp and predatory. He looked like a man who had just won a game the opponent didn’t even know they were playing.
"The speech," Raizen continued, his gaze frantic as he tried to deconstruct the nightmare. "The marking frequency that can’t be masked from the outside."
"The sealed exits before anyone even knew they needed to run..."
"The militia doctrine that specifically addresses system holder containment..." He looked at Rex with the hollow, broken attention of a man delivering a final, useless assessment. "Every single variable was addressed before you even opened your mouth to speak."
"You didn’t just react to tonight, Lustful Villain..."
"You planned this from the surface, months before the first drop of blood was spilled."
"Bingo," Rex said, his voice dripping with smug satisfaction. He leaned in slightly, enjoying the way Raizen flinched at his proximity. "You’re finally catching up."
"Finally... some smartass in the Legion." Rex clapped. "I’m actually impressed."
"While Mordecai thought you were his ally..." Raizen’s voice was barely a breath.
"That fucking bum has his full authorization on record," Rex interrupted, his tone dismissive, as if Mordecai were a child playing with blocks. "For the restructuring... as I define it."
"He didn’t know what you were defining," Raizen said, a single tear of pure, terrified realization tracing a path through the grime on his face.
"No," Rex purred, his eyes burning with a dark, unrepentant joy. "He didn’t..."
"And that’s what makes it so delicious, isn’t it?"
Raizen looked at him for a long, agonizing moment. His expression shifted, moving through grief, through anger, and finally arriving at a cold, crystalline terror.
"The Legion..." Raizen started, his voice trembling. "We eliminate reincarnators..."
"That’s our purpose..."
"That’s what everyone on the surface calls monstrous about us: the systematic removal of people based on a category they belong to."
He forced himself to hold Rex’s gaze, even as his knees threatened to buckle under the pressure of Rex’s overwhelming presence.
"You marked twenty-eight people tonight," Raizen said, the accusation hanging heavy in the damp air. "Eleven of them were Legion contacts."
"Seventeen of them were reincarnators who were here because they had nowhere else to go... because they were the specific kind of people this city was built to protect."
Raizen’s voice dropped to a whisper of pure horror. "And you marked them... not because they were threats."
"Not because they were informants... but because their system profiles didn’t fit the world you want to build."
