The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!

Chapter 823: 823. Apollo and Aurelia Are On My Side... I’m more Surprised With Aurelia!

Morwenna didn’t break eye contact. She stared at him for a long, agonizing moment, her gaze flat and unreadable.

It was the look of a seasoned predator, someone who had sat in a thousand war rooms and interrogated a thousand men, someone who knew the infinitesimal difference between a liar and a man who was telling a specifically curated version of the truth.

She was searching for a tell, a flicker of guilt, a shadow of deception, but she was finding that Rex existed in a category of person she had rarely encountered: a man who spoke the truth with the surgical precision of a man who had already accounted for every possible doubt.

"The explanation I have given you is the accurate one," Rex said.

He didn’t say it with the booming bravado of a man defending himself, nor the frantic pitch of a man pleading for belief. He said it with a terrifying, even quality, the tone of a man stating a fundamental law of physics.

To him, the statement did not require emphasis because the statement simply was.

"I understand why the pattern you have identified supports your suspicion," he continued, his voice cutting through the thickening tension. "The similarity in capability, the granular operational knowledge, and the way the Legion operatives reacted to my presence."

"These are anomalies... and they are variables that demand an explanation."

He shifted his gaze momentarily to the dark obsidian of the table, as if reading the very grain of the stone, before locking back onto Morwenna’s piercing eyes.

"And I can tell you this," he said, his voice dropping into a register of absolute, chilling certainty. "If I were Tremor, the specific outcome required by his operational objectives would not have been the one we witnessed this morning."

"Tremor’s goal was surgical: the total elimination of the Apostle network’s Aethelgard adjacent capacity."

"He wanted a vacuum and he wanted the foundation of this network to crumble under the weight of the impact."

Rex leaned forward, the light catching the hard lines of his face.

"If I were Tremor, I would not have intervened at the climax of the engagement..."

"I would not have exerted the massive, bone-shattering energy required to redirect the meteor that was seconds away from achieving that very objective."

"If the goal was destruction, the meteor would have landed... It would have crushed the plaza, pulverized the defenders, and left nothing but a crater of blood and pulverized stone."

"If I were him, the outcome would have been a massacre. But it wasn’t... It was a redirection."

The silence that followed was absolute. It was a vacuum of sound, a heavy, expectant stillness where the only thing audible was the frantic, unspoken racing of hearts in the room.

The logic was a physical blow, a counterstrike that left Morwenna momentarily breathless.

Then, from the far end of the table, a voice broke the quiet.

"I want to add something to that," Apollo said.

His voice was low, carrying the weight of a man who had seen the carnage firsthand. It was the voice of a veteran who had smelled the ozone and the copper of blood and who had felt the earth groan under the weight of gods.

He had been waiting for the exact moment to strike, and he had found it.

"I was in the engagement from its earliest phase," Apollo stated, his eyes fixed on the center of the table, his expression grim. "I was holding position near the Academy gate when Tremor’s golem network first broke the surface, when the earth literally screamed as they rose."

"I was locked in a brutal, forty-minute exchange with the void working operative in the thick of the chaos. And finally, I was in the plaza for the terminal phase."

"I saw the meteor descend... I saw the moment the atmosphere ignited."

He looked up, his gaze meeting Rex’s, a silent, heavy understanding passing between them.

"I saw the redirection," Apollo added, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. "And I tell you now... it didn’t feel like a god reclaiming his territory."

"It felt like a man saving his home."

Apollo turned his gaze toward Morwenna, his eyes hard and reflecting the grim reality of the battlefield.

"Tremor’s operational behavior throughout the entire engagement was not the chaotic fury of a destroyer," Apollo said, his voice steady despite the memory of the carnage. "It was the calculated movement of an entity managing multiple, simultaneous objectives with a rigid priority sequence."

"I could read it in the way the earth moved... The golem network’s deployment wasn’t designed to pulverize the defenders or maximize immediate casualties; it was designed for infrastructure disruption to tear the veins out of our logistics without killing the heart."

"The earthquake protocol was deployed only after the Apostle coordination positions were already compromised, rather than at the opening when it would have been most effective. And that meteor..."

He paused, a shadow of the violence crossing his face.

"The assembly of that meteor only began after the engagement had passed the point of no return, when most of the network’s remaining operational capacity was either already committed to the front or shielded."

"Tremor wasn’t trying to wipe us out... He was playing a game of attrition where he held all the pieces."

He let the observation hang in the air, heavy and undeniable.

"The behavior I observed in Tremor during those forty minutes of hell," Apollo continued, "was the behavior of something managing consequences, not maximizing damage."

"He wasn’t swinging a hammer to break a world; he was wielding a scalpel to reshape it."

"That is not the behavior of an entity whose singular goal is the total elimination of this network."

Morwenna’s eyes drifted from Rex to Apollo, her expression tightening.

"You are making the same argument Rex just made," she said, her voice a sharp, skeptical needle. "Just from a different angle."

"I am making the argument the engagement itself supports," Apollo countered, his voice flat and direct. "The angle is simply the one I was standing in while the ground was turning into a slaughterhouse."

Aurelia, who had been watching the exchange with a growing sense of urgency, finally spoke. Her voice was a calm melody amidst the rising storm of the debate.

"Rex Rexilion has been a constant presence in Aethelgard for months," she said, her eyes sweeping the table. "He was in the canyon..."

"He was there when Kregg’s operation was systematically dismantled, piece by bloody piece."

"He has been present in every single engagement where this network’s capacity has been protected from the brink of collapse." She turned her gaze to Morwenna, her expression softening but her resolve hardening. "Grandmother... I see what you see."

"I know how the pattern looks... It looks like a shadow moving in tandem with a storm."

"But there is another pattern running alongside it, the pattern of a man who has been doing the heavy, brutal work this network simply cannot afford to lose."

"A pattern can be manufactured," Morwenna snapped, her patience fraying like a worn rope. "A man can play the savior while he prepares the grave."

"Any pattern can be manufactured," Apollo interjected, his voice cutting through her cynicism with the finality of a gavel. "The question isn’t whether a man can manufacture a lie."

"The question is whether the man sitting in that chair has given us a single shred of evidence to believe he has. Because he hasn’t."

"He has repeatedly placed himself in positions where the math, the cold, hard, brutal math of survival, only works in our favor if he is working with us, not against us."

"The math can also be manufactured," Morwenna whispered, a final, desperate attempt to hold onto her suspicion.

"Grandmother," Aurelia said. The tone of her voice shifted instantly; the diplomat vanished, and the granddaughter remained. It was a tone of profound, heavy respect, but it carried the weight of an ultimatum.

"We have already cost Rex Rexilion a significant amount through the history of this household."

"We have taken from him, and we have bled him."

"Now, I am asking you specifically as the woman who carries the weight of that history not to add to that debt through a suspicion that, while logical, lacks the blood-stained evidence required to justify the execution it implies."