Chapter 214: 214. At First, I Was Disappointed, but then The Desert Came!

Rex finally introduced himself as The Undead Bringer, and it makes him satisfied already just by seeing his confused face.

“The Undead Bringer…” Apollo repeated. “So you’re the one who caused trouble from the start, huh? Since the incident that happened to my girl.”

“My girl…? Oh, you meant Kaelira, right?” Rex laughed. “She’s lucky to survive that because I wasn’t the one that executed my plan on my own other than those useless maid demons I’ve ordered.”

“I knew it… this is Mordecai’s doing….” Apollo takes a deep breath to calm himself down.

Rex didn’t say anything after that because the right answer was silence, which was behind the skull mask and Xavier’s face. It didn’t confirm or deny anything, and Apollo’s analysis had nothing to work with.

“I can’t believe you would do something as cowardly as that,” Apollo continued, orienting himself to the specific nature of this opponent while keeping his activation ready but not yet deployed.

He was buying time, which was the right thing to do in his position, and he was using it correctly.

Rex had four minutes of activation to worry about. He had known that for weeks.

Four minutes was more than enough time to do what he had come here to do, provided the first sixty seconds went the way the Foresight was currently showing him they would.

He raised his right hand.

“Enough talk… let’s fight!”

The fire he had taken from the reincarnator in the market district came up in it, clean and controlled, with the same temperature and color signature as its original system’s output, and he threw it.

“Not so fast…!” Apollo made a move.

The fire column hit the fountain and displaced a considerable volume of water sideways, and Apollo was already in a different position, moving with the controlled speed of someone who had been training since adolescence.

“Fire…” he said, updating his threat model. “It seems like you’re not Mordecai’s standard deployment.”

He stepped forward, and the speed he brought with him was real. It wasn’t the lightning-fast speed that made it impossible to track, but it was the speed of someone who had trained in physical combat to the point where it was different from either magic or brute force.

Rex allowed him to close the distance to about fifteen meters before activating the telekinesis mode he had been secretly developing.

It was neither the precision mode, the throw, nor the lift.

Instead, it was the gravitational mode.

Instead of selecting a target and pushing or pulling in a specific direction, Rex applied a uniform downward pressure over Apollo’s entire body, compressing the space he occupied toward the ground with a distributed force that had no particular direction to resist and no specific source to push back against.

The principle was straightforward enough in theory.

What it produced in practice was something that someone with Apollo’s level of system support experienced as a sudden and complete change in the physics of their situation.

Apollo stopped moving in the middle of a stride.

He didn’t fall down right away. His body fought the pressure like a fighter who had been trained to do so.

His legs pushed against a force that adjusted the pressure, adding it to the base level instead of yielding to it. He stood there for three seconds, partly bent, with both hands on the ground as he looked for something to hold on to.

“W-What the…?! This power… it’s too strong…!” Apollo gritted his teeth. “Don’t tell me… it’s related to a gravity…!”

Then the stone hit his knee.

He pressed both arms against the pavement and drove upward; the output from his system was real, allowing him to gain about four inches before the gravitational mode absorbed his effort and translated it into additional downward force.

Apollo looked at the ground and breathed through it with the calmness of someone who wasn’t going to let the physical situation affect his mental state.

“This is nothing…!!!”

“Oh yeah? Try this then.” Rex snapped his finger to put on more force.

“AARRGH…!” Apollo’s voice came out raw, and he lost the calm he had been keeping.

The sound of real physical pain pushed past the point where it could be controlled and turned into anything that sounded like performance.

He was taken by the paving stones.

“Try not to break your bones while the pressure is slowly crushing your body…” Rex smirked.

He hit hard, and the breath left him. He pressed both palms flat against the ground and pushed with all his might, but it wasn’t enough to move the weight above him because there was no weight above him to push against.

There was only pressure with no direction, no source, and no fixed point to leverage.

Rex stood over him and watched with the interest of someone whose theory had been proven right in a real fight and found it more satisfying than he had thought it would be.

“I’ll give you five seconds before your bones are crushed into pieces…” Rex showed his five fingers. “So try to impress me by making yourself free from that pressure…”

“One…”

“Two…”

“GRRGGGGGHHH…!!!” Apollo strained with all his might to push against the ground, but the pressure only intensified.

“Three—”

On the third second, the Foresight showed him what he had positioned this engagement to produce, and the plaza’s eastern approach delivered it on schedule.

She approached at a speed that made the street lamps reveal only fragments of light around her moving form. The twin blades she wielded were already active, charged with the full power of her system.

They arced and crackled against the stone surfaces nearby, creating a cascade of blue-white light that briefly illuminated the fountain and the surrounding facades in sharp relief.

Rex already knew who she was. “Zeraphyra Voltaris…”

“Finally… something I could use to provoke this bum into a rage or perhaps crush his mental state…”

Zeraphyra moved like lightning does in a closed space: not straight, but along the path of least resistance. She changed her path in real time, using the speed her system gave her to make that change happen all at once instead of one after the other.

It seemed like every step was the end of one decision and the start of three more at the same time.

She was very quick.

And Rex knew it. He had been watching Apollo’s harem for weeks, paying close attention to each member’s unique skills and abilities, just like he would have done with anything he would have to fight or seduce.

He had identified Zeraphyra as the one requiring the most preparation before they could engage in battle. She was quick, capable of wielding two weapons simultaneously, and possessed electric-class speed that rendered the Foresight window’s useful margin extremely narrow.

His foresight told him where she was going two seconds before she got there.

The first sword came in a horizontal arc at shoulder height. Rex countered it with a telekinesis field he had positioned as a rigid plane in her path, redirecting the blade’s angle instead of blocking it, allowing the strike’s force to go wide.

She was already adapting, the type of fighter who didn’t fully commit to the success of one attack before launching into the next. The second blade was low, swift, and aimed at the leg position she had calculated Rex would shift to after redirecting the first.

’Heh… interesting move…’

Instead of moving down, Rex went up.

Telekinesis propelled him three meters straight above the arc of the sword. From that vantage point, he employed Energy Manipulation, infiltrating her system in the same manner he had with the fire user in the market district.

He detected the electrical signature within the operating channel and swiftly replicated its architecture before she could even grasp what was occurring.

“I’ve got you!”

[ENERGY MANIPULATION — LIGHTNING AFFINITY COPIED]

[LIGHTNING MAGIC ACCESS: TEMPORARY, DEGRADING OVER ~5 HOURS]

Zeraphyra looked up at him from the plaza floor with the look of someone who was ready for a three-dimensional engagement. Rex looked down at her with both fire and lightning running through his hands and felt the specific satisfaction of a fight that had gone exactly as planned.

He came back down.

“It’s finally nice to meet one of Apollo’s harem…” Rex said. “And I know that you alone are not enough to save him!”

Zeraphyra’s face grew hard, and she stood up, her eyes narrowing with determination. “Don’t underestimate me…”

“You don’t know how strong unity can be,” she said, her voice steady as she gathered her strength to prove him wrong.

“Oh yeah…?” Rex brought his fists, one engulfed in fire and the other crackling with lightning, together, creating a powerful elemental reaction.

The ground shook under them, and the air crackled with energy, showing how strong he was. But she stood her ground, her willpower giving her a strength of her own that was ready to face the storm he had set loose.

“Let’s just prove it right now…!” He flew towards Zeraphyra.

The way Rex fought when he wasn’t holding back was different from the way Rex fought when there were people watching who needed to believe he was on their side. The controlled, efficient, surgical quality he showed in practice combat was absent.

What replaced it was the version of his ability he had been developing in private and had no need to conceal tonight.

Zeraphyra was fast. He acknowledged it without reservation, because acknowledging it was the only approach that didn’t cost him something real.

The Foresight was almost at its useful limit because she was so fast. The two-second advance read dropped to one and a half for her fastest combinations.

He used telekinesis to make his body reach farther than it could on its own, which made his reaction time closer to the speed of her attacks.

Fire shot from his left hand, fully channeled, aimed not directly at Zeraphyra but at the ground two meters in front of her. This created a wall of heat that forced her to change direction instead of charging straight ahead.

Lightning burst from his right hand, following her new trajectory and predicting the angle at which her speed would carry her. The impact was anything but clean; her movement was erratic.

Nonetheless, it struck the outer edge of her right shoulder, producing a sharp, percussive crack of high-voltage contact at close range.

She spun through it, which was the right thing to do. The spin’s momentum helped to release some of the charge, and the blade that came out of the spin was on the inside of the Foresight window’s edge.

He took it.

BAMMMM!!!

Zeraphyra was shocked to see that Rex hadn’t taken any damage at all.

“W-What…?!”

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