Chapter 605: 605. I Almost Reveal My True Identity With It, But They’re Scared With The Power
Rex lowered his gaze to the stone floor, his eyes narrowing as he focused on the very foundation of the world.
For months, he had carried this active mode as a dormant potential rather than a functional reality. He had held it in a state of precise, controlled reserve, a capability he knew existed but had refused to deploy until the context was absolute.
He had been waiting for a moment where the output was not merely a requirement for survival but a necessity for measurement. He had been waiting for a moment that could withstand the sheer, unmitigated pressure of his existence.
He had finally found it.
With a sudden, violent grace, Rex drove both of his obsidian-clad fists downward.
The impact was not loud in the conventional sense of a crashing explosion; it was something far more profound and terrifying. It was a sound that bypassed the ears and struck directly at the marrow of the bones.
At the exact microsecond of contact, a roar tore from Rex’s throat, a sound that was not a planned war cry but the visceral, uncontainable release of a man who had been holding back a tectonic storm for months. It was a compressed, primal scream of total commitment, a sound of absolute release that did not need volume to carry because the very earth beneath the chamber acted as a massive, vibrating amplifier.
It was the sound of a mountain waking up.
The sonic wave rippled through the observation chamber, surged through the floors, and tore through the very mineral composition of the underlayer’s substrate in every direction simultaneously.
Across the entire sprawling subterranean metropolis, two hundred thousand people froze. For three agonizing seconds, all movement ceased, and all breath was held, because the ground itself was making a sound that the earth was never supposed to be capable of making.
The impact crater surrounding Rex’s fists was a brutal testament to his power half a meter deep and three meters in diameter. The stone had not merely shattered into debris; it had been fundamentally compressed, driven deep into the crust by a force applied at a geological scale to a surface designed only for the footsteps of men.
The Underlayer did not just tremble; it convulsed.
This was no localized tremor or the mere structural rattle of a combat encounter. This was a full-scale geological event.
The whole underground layer of the kingdom shifted together, sending vibrations out from the observation chamber through all the connected rocks, reaching the farthest parts of the kingdom with a slow, scary delay like an earthquake.
Below, the chaotic symphony of the purge was suddenly, jarringly interrupted. Every blade, every spell, and every scream was suspended in a three-second vacuum of pure, instinctual dread as two hundred thousand souls registered that the ground itself had joined the conversation.
Mordecai lunged for the wall, his fingers clawing at the stone to keep himself upright as the world buckled beneath him. Pavellia, however, did not move.
She stood rooted to the spot, staring at Rex with the hollow, haunted expression of a scholar watching a foundational law of physics being rewritten in real time. The revision of her reality was taking time because the assumption she had built her life upon had just been pulverized.
Rex stood up slowly, emerging from the center of the devastation.
The gauntlets were fully manifest now, dark and terrifyingly beautiful, pulsing with a residual, heavy heat. Around his feet, the floor was still settling into its new, compressed configuration, the stone emitting a series of strange, rhythmic sounds not quite cracking, not quite breathing, but something ancient and alive caught somewhere in between.
"That..." Mordecai gasped, his voice strained as he clung to the wall, "that was not in anything you have ever described to me."
"No," Rex replied, his voice calm, almost casual, as if he hadn’t just rewritten the geography of the kingdom.
Mordecai looked at him, a mixture of awe and genuine, existential terror flickering in his eyes.
"You have been in my kingdom for several hours," he whispered, "carrying the ability to shake the entire geological foundation of my world."
"Yes," Rex said, a small, devastatingly smug smile playing at the corner of his mouth. "And we’ve only just begun."
"I do hope you’re all ready to be my test subject for this shit!"
...
Mordecai stared down at the floor, his eyes tracing the impossible geometry of the impact crater. He didn’t look at the debris; he looked at the stone itself, not shattered, not broken, but fundamentally transformed, compressed into a density that defied the known physics of the Underlayer.
In fourteen months of governing a metropolis of system holders, reincarnators, and monsters, he had seen devastation, but he had never seen redefinition.
"It seems like I was right all along... I do am afraid of you," Mordecai said.
The admission was quiet, stripped of all political posturing or kingly bravado. It was the hollow, fragile voice of a man stating a universal truth.
"That’s appropriate," Rex replied. He turned his gaze toward Mordecai, his eyes possessing a terrifying, clinical clarity. "Fear is the correct response to a situation you don’t fully control."
"You authorized a reconstruction of this kingdom without knowing the true scope of the force performing the work." Rex flexed his arms. "That gap between your perception and the reality of my existence is precisely where your fear is rooted."
"You could have told me," Mordecai whispered, his hand still trembling slightly against the wall.
"If I had told you," Rex countered, his tone smooth and devastatingly logical, "you would have spent the next three months debating whether or not to let me in."
"You would have sought consensus, consulted councils, and hesitated. And in that hesitation, the opportunity would have passed."
Mordecai fell silent. The weight of the truth hung between them, heavy as the stone above their heads.
They both knew that if Rex had played by the rules of diplomacy, the momentum of his arrival would have been strangled by bureaucracy.
"The gauntlets," Cassandra interrupted.
She had moved to a new vantage point, her stance low and her eyes scanning the obsidian structures on Rex’s arms as if she were trying to deconstruct them with her mind alone. Her voice carried the strained intensity of a strategist facing a variable that had just rendered her entire map obsolete.
"Earth Sovereign’s designation."
Rex shifted his focus to her, the smugness in his expression sharpening into something more predatory.
"The island," she continued, her words coming faster now, the pieces of a long-held puzzle clicking into place with violent force. "The assessment mission. The sealed dungeon. The gauntlets were recovered... but they were never reported."
"Reported to whom?" Rex asked, his voice a calm challenge. "The Academy received Elizabeth’s assessment report."
"My undead army caused a staged incident that officially noted the gauntlets as lost."
"Staged," Cassandra repeated, the word tasting like ash.
"The Earth Sovereign’s designation is patronless," Rex explained, his voice resonating with the authority of the very minerals he commanded. "The god has been inactive for eight hundred years."
"There is no institutional claim on the designation’s authority. It was a vacuum waiting to be filled."
"So you took it," she said, her eyes narrowing.
"It was available," Rex said simply, as if he were describing a man picking up a fallen coin. "I was present, and the designation transferred."
Cassandra held his gaze, her mind working at a feverish pace, layering this new, monstrous truth onto the architecture of the man she thought she understood. She wasn’t just looking at a warrior anymore; she was looking at a fundamental shift in the world’s power structure.
Beside them, Gorvasha had remained unnervingly still since the seismic event. Her breathing was shallow, her entire body tuned to the vibrations still humming through the floor.
Her orc lineage was doing more than just observing; it was calculating. The ancestral memory in her blood was reading the quality of the energy that had just surged through the substrate, translating the frequency of the earth’s groan into a terrifying, mathematical certainty.
"Divine tier," she said, her voice thick with a realization that bordered on religious awe.
"Yes," Rex confirmed.
"Two of them," she breathed, her eyes wide as she looked from his gauntlets to the predatory light in his eyes.
"Yep," Rex said, the word a definitive hammer blow.
Gorvasha let out a long, shuddering exhale. "Damn..."
It was the sound of a warrior discarding her pride and adjusting her soul to a new, much more dangerous reality. She realized now that they hadn’t just entered a fight; they had walked into the presence of a natural disaster.
She tightened her grip on her weapon, her muscles coiling with a desperate, instinctive readiness.
"I’m really going to go all out at you," she declared, her voice regaining its strength even as her heart raced. "Not because I think I can stop what those are."
"But because if I don’t test them, I will never truly know what they are capable of."
Rex’s lips curled into a dark, confident smile. He stood his ground, the very earth beneath him seeming to lean into his presence.
"That," Rex said, his voice a low, inviting rumble, "is the only correct reason."
