He picked her up himself, and the way he did it wasn’t how you would normally pick soone up to move them. It took longer and was more planned than that.
He held her in his arms and looked around the room at the scorch marks, smoke, and closed faces of the people in the passage. Rex was most interested in the look on his face.
It wasn’t grief, well, not yet. But it was sothing that preceded grief: the state of a person who had just learned that the world they were operating in had a different set of rules than the ones they thought they knew.
Apollo had fought beasts. He had fought reincarnators, hostile ones, people with plans and systems, and people who had been given power and decided to use it without the limits that were supposed to co with it.
This was the first ti soone had found his exact weakness, planned to exploit it, and followed through.
Rex read this with the sa care he had given everything else and put it in the file for the protagonist: he just found out that the ga he thought he was playing has different rules. This is the mont that makes soone stronger or breaks sothing important in them.
He would closely monitor the situation.
’Do I have to do everything myself here...?’
’This mont right here is the reason why I wouldn’t trust anyone with my plans.’
’And it seems like I could still go in for the kill later on, but for now... she’s weakened, and that’s what I needed.’
...
Above, in the main chamber, Apollo had not yet finished the boss.
He was still fighting it when the burst went off, and the shockwave sent him sideways. For the twenty or so minutes between the burst and the arrival of Kaelira’s group from the southwest passage.
The apex creature had been standing in the middle of the chamber, watching the situation with the intelligence that Rex had tagged early and the patience of sothing that didn’t feel ti pressure the way living things did.
When Apollo ca back into the main room with Kaelira in his arms and set her down against the far wall where the other adventurers were gathered, the creature could tell that sothing was different about him when he stood up and turned back toward the center of the room.
Rex also saw it.
Apollo let out a breath.
It was a slow, deliberate release of breath that was more about control than breathing. He made a conscious choice to stop maintaining sothing he had been maintaining for a long ti. His shoulders dropped a little bit. His hands opened.
Then the Apostle of Life’s blessing kicked in, and Rex saw it work at full power for the first ti.
’Oh...? Here we go...’
’At least I get to see sothing amusing from here...’
He had known, academically, that Apostle powers were categorically different from reincarnator system abilities. They were neither purchased nor accumulated, and were not the result of strategic bonding or deliberate accumulation.
They were a god’s direct investnt in a specific person, and what that produced in Apollo Brightsoul looked, from the outside, like the sun deciding to be sowhere specific.
The light was not blinding. It exceeded the intensity of blinding light, surpassing the point where the eye could perceive it as light and entering a realm that the body interpreted differently.
The warmth that ca from the wrong direction, which was every direction simultaneously, and a pressure that was not physical but that Rex’s emotional insight read as sothing close to awe.
Everyone in the room felt it. Rex wrote down how he felt and then put it away.
Apollo walked toward the top creature, and the creature was smart enough to know what it was seeing and acted accordingly. It wasn’t fear like biological creatures feel, but sothing like it: the realization of a force that was too strong for it to handle.
It still attacked because its intelligence had a limit, and below that limit was instinct, which told it to fight.
Apollo walked through the fight.
Without having to avoid or stop. The creature’s main attack, which had been sending trained fighters flying across the room all day, hit Apollo’s front shoulder.
However, it didn’t do anything useful because the force behind what Apollo was carrying was now completely different from the force behind the creature’s physical attacks.
What ca next wasn’t a fight in the usual sense. Apollo was thodically taking sothing out of the world, and the light around him made it so that everyone in the room could see every detail of it.
Rex paid close attention to what he was watching because he wanted to use it.
The Apostle of Life’s full work was not limitless. He could tell by the way Apollo moved, how quickly the divine source was being used up, and how the quality of the light changed a little bit in the last thirty seconds of the fight as the most intense part of the burst began to fade.
Full apostle activation was not sustainable indefinitely.
But it was devastating in the short term.
The apex creature had lived in this chamber for an unknown number of years and had stopped three groups of adventurers in the last four days. It stopped existing two minutes after Apollo was fully activated.
After he was done, the light went back to normal, and Apollo stood in the middle of the room, breathing heavily, and turned.
Rex looked at the Southwest Passage, where the constructs had co from. There were no signs of Lilith’s work there, just cold air.
They had left through the burst’s cover, just like they had planned. A thorough scan found no sign, no body, and no trace of shadow magic.
Just a second room with burn marks and whatever people thought they ant.
’They manage to run away without having to fully accomplish their mission...’
’Fuck them... I’m going to think through this again myself...’
’It’s going to be a one-man job.’
Apollo looked at the space where his undead constructs had been fighting twenty minutes ago and found nothing.
Rex watched him look and saw that the conclusions he was coming to weren’t quite right because the evidence for them wasn’t complete. He filed the incompleteness away as exactly what he wanted.
’Mystery,’ he thought. ’No answers...’
’Only the fact that soone found her specifically, in a dungeon, on the first day she publicly demonstrated a new vulnerability.’
’That’s the kind of mystery that occupies a person.’
For a long ti, Apollo didn’t say anything. The group around him was taking care of the adventurers who had been rescued, checking their injuries, and planning the climb back up through the dungeon levels to the surface.
Elizabeth was moving through the space with the sa efficiency as soone who was carefully putting their feelings about what had happened in this room into a compartnt that would be opened later in private.
Rex watched her too. The set of her mouth.
The specific quality of control in her movents. Elizabeth Von Starlight, who had brought her class into a dungeon and was leaving it with a student who had been carried out.
He filed her separately from Apollo and marked her as sothing to revisit.
Rex takes another long look at Kaelira and then thinks of another plan. ’She’s tough alright... I can see the reason why they can’t finish this.’
’But for now... making his harem weaken like that isn’t a pretty bad idea after all.’
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