The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!

Chapter 813: 813. He Stood at a Funeral Wearing the Exact Appropriate Expression. Perfectly.

Aethelgard buried its dead in the Northern Garden, a sprawling, ancient expanse enclosed by the Academy’s massive outer walls. For eight hundred years, this sacred ground had served as the city’s final ledger, a place where the weight of centuries of loss was physically etched into the landscape.

The trees there were giants, their gnarled roots weaving through the very foundations of the city, having grown thick and heavy through every era of tragedy. The air in the garden felt different, thicker, older, saturated with the quiet, heavy presence of the departed.

Even the light, filtering through the dense, emerald canopy, felt solemn, as if the sun itself were dimming in respect for the sheer volume of souls being returned to the earth.

There were more dead from this engagement than the garden’s most recent additions had space to accommodate. The scale of the slaughter was staggering.

The funeral service was a grim exercise in logistical efficiency, a practical necessity for a city managing a catastrophe of this magnitude. The academy staff were sequestered in their own somber rite; the fallen of the Apostle network were honored separately in a ceremony of martial reverence.

Finally, the civilian population was gathered for the largest, most sprawling ceremony, the final hour of mourning, where the survivors of the Academy and the Apostles stood as witnesses to the collective grief of the people.

Rex stood at the periphery of the civilian ceremony for the first hour, a silent, watchful sentinel. During the second hour, as the ceremonies merged into a singular, massive outpouring of grief, he moved to the very center.

He didn’t mourn, but he observed. And his eyes were fixed on Apollo.

Apollo had arrived for the apostle network’s ceremony with Kaelira at his side. He carried the heavy, hollow expression of a man who had mentally braced himself for a storm, only to find that the reality of the wreckage was far more devastating than his preparations could have accounted for.

He stood before the markers of Eryndra and Calivara, his gaze fixed on the cold stone. He was in that terrifying, stagnant stage of grief, the quiet before the scream, where the fact of the loss is a heavy weight in the chest, but the true, jagged texture of the agony hasn’t yet begun to tear him apart.

He stood there, motionless and silent, for six agonizing minutes.

Kaelira remained a steady anchor at his side, her hand resting on his arm with a quiet, practiced strength. She understood the unspoken geometry of his pain; she knew that in this moment, words were useless clutter.

Her presence was her only contribution, a silent shield against the world.

Rex watched the tableau, his mind dissecting the scene, filing the data of Apollo’s deterioration away with clinical precision.

When Apollo finally turned from the markers, his eyes cut through the crowd and found Rex. There was no hesitation in his gaze; he had known exactly where Rex was standing the entire time.

He walked toward him, his stride heavy, carrying the exhaustion of a man who had survived a war only to find himself defeated by the silence that followed.

He didn’t speak immediately. He simply stood there, reclaiming the physical space, needing the proximity of a peer before he could find the strength to vocalize the void in his heart.

"Calivara mapped my armor in real time," Rex said, cutting through the heavy silence before Apollo could even attempt to find his voice.

He didn’t offer platitudes; he offered the brutal, technical truth. "I have analyzed the diagnostic architecture in the aftermath."

"It was a doctoral-level feat of cognitive processing, deployed under the absolute chaos of full combat conditions without a single moment of preparation."

Apollo looked up at him, his eyes bloodshot and weary.

"She was going to be exceptional," Apollo said, and his voice was terrifyingly flat, a load-bearing flatness that held up the crumbling structure of his composure.

"She was exceptional," Rex corrected, his voice hard and unyielding. "The ’was’ is the tragedy here."

"The math was perfect; the execution was flawless. It was the reality of the battlefield that failed her."

Apollo absorbed the words, the bluntness of Rex’s assessment acting as a cold compress on an open wound.

"And Eryndra," Rex continued, his voice dropping an octave, "her seven manifestation astral summons... at the output level she was maintaining, most practitioners in her designation tier would have collapsed at four."

"She pushed the limit to seven... she forced the soul to do what the body said was impossible."

"She always pushed past where the math said to stop," Apollo said, a ghost of a bitter smile touching his lips. "She used to tell me that math was a floor, Rex... Not a ceiling."

"She was right about that," Rex said.

A heavy silence descended between them, a shared recognition of the brilliance that had been extinguished.

"I am going to instruct Valentina to formalize their designation advancement records," Rex said, his tone shifting to one of command. "Not as a casualty record and not as a footnote in a war log."

"The advancement record... Whatever they were building toward, whatever heights they were climbing, deserves to be etched into the Academy’s permanent history in a form that commands respect."

Something shifted in Apollo’s expression. It was a minute adjustment, a subtle loosening of the tension in his jaw, the reaction of a man who had been starving and had suddenly been offered a lifeline he hadn’t even known he was looking for.

"Thank you," Apollo said, his voice finally cracking just enough to reveal the man beneath the Apostle.

"Yes," Rex said, his eyes already scanning the horizon and moving on to the next calculation.

Aisella, Talyra, Nerith, and Mireya stood at the ragged edge of the ceremony, a fractured silhouette of the unit they once were. They were together, but the cohesion was gone; the tight, lethal formation they would have maintained under Apollo’s command had been replaced by a loose, drifting arrangement.

The specific, jagged gap in their formation was a physical ache, the unmistakable shape of two missing souls, a void in the geometry of their lives that no amount of mourning could fill.

Rex stared at that hollow space, his mind performing a cold, involuntary comparison. He looked at the gap and wondered what Apollo saw when he looked at the same arrangement.

Did Apollo see a tactical error? Or did he see the ghosts of the women who should have been standing there, breathing and alive?

His mind, ever the machine, drifted back to the carnage. He saw Calivara in the center of the plaza, her eyes wide with a terrifying, focused intelligence as she worked.

He remembered the systematic, surgical precision of her diagnostic weaving, the way she had identified the microscopic structural vulnerabilities in his armor in real time, her mana flowing like liquid lightning to map his defenses even as the world screamed around her.

Then, the memory shifted to Eryndra. He saw the blinding, ethereal brilliance of her seven astral summons, a cascading waterfall of celestial power that had pushed the very fabric of reality to its breaking point.

He remembered the moment they had dissolved, the sickening, silent pop of the cancellation frequency hitting them, and the involuntary, guttural sound she had made when they vanished, a sound of pure, unadulterated shock that had been cut short by the sudden, violent arrival of death.

He processed them first as data: output levels, energy efficiency, tactical utility, and casualty variables. Then, because the brutal discipline required to keep him functional demanded a secondary layer of processing, he allowed himself to think of them as people.

He acknowledged the truth with a chilling, clinical detachment: the people were gone. He had run the calculations.

He had weighed the risks, analyzed the variables, and predicted the trajectory of the engagement. The calculations had been correct.

In the cold, logical architecture of his mind, correct calculations with a lethal outcome were the specific category of things his system rewarded with efficiency, while his conscience, that vestigial organ of the weak, was denied any meaningful access to grief.

He filed the loss away in the dark, silent compartment of his mind where all other "acceptable casualties" resided. He stood in the Northern Garden, hands steady at his sides, his face a mask of perfect, somber composure, the exact, appropriate expression for a man attending a funeral.

As Apollo began his slow, heavy trek back to Kaelira, Mireya detached herself from the fractured group. She moved through the crowd like a shadow, her footsteps silent on the damp earth, until she came to stand beside him.

She did not look at him. She didn’t dare.

Instead, her gaze remained fixed on the markers in the Apostle section, staring at the cold stone with the hollow, haunted expression of someone reading a list of names they never expected to find their own on. Her eyes were glassy, reflecting the grey, weeping sky.

"Tremor," she said, her voice a brittle whisper that seemed to crack the very air between them.