Cassandra had the sa look on her face that she always did before she attacked.
Rex’s face stayed exactly where it was, and he already could predict what was going to happen next.
Cassandra moved.
There was no warning or buildup, just the sound of both blades clearing their sheaths in the sa half-second and the fact that she crossed the distance between them faster than soone her size should have.
The first strike ca at a diagonal from Rex’s left shoulder down toward his hip, and the second was already in motion before the first finished, a lateral cut aid at the side of his neck with the kind of chanical precision that didn’t need anger behind it to be dangerous.
Rex was already moving before either blade arrived.
He stepped back and to the right with the exact amount of clearance needed and nothing more, because Foresight gave him the minimum required geotry to avoid being cut, rather than extra comfort room.
The first blade passed close enough that he felt the displaced air against his collarbone. The second ca after it and caught nothing but the space where he’d just been standing.
Cassandra didn’t stop trying to recalibrate.
She turned the montum of the second swing into a forward step and brought her right blade back around in a tight arc toward his midsection, adjusting the angle mid-swing with the kind of mid-combat correction that took years to develop into muscle mory.
She was skilled enough that she didn’t need to see where she was aiming, only where he was, and she was always watching where he was.
Rex let the arc finish its path two inches from his stomach and used the mont she needed to recover her guard to step inside her reach.
She responded by extending her reach once more, causing a sudden backward displacent and covering it with a spray of condensed dark energy from her left palm.
It wasn’t a full cast. It was interference, ant to force him to deal with sothing while she reset, which was the correct instinct against a target who kept surviving her angles.
Rex raised one hand, and the dark energy split around him in two clean arcs before dissipating against the stone floor on either side, each fragnt redirected with just enough telekinetic pressure to change its path without absorbing the force directly.
He didn’t put more effort into it than it required. Cassandra saw that, and he could tell from the way her jaw set that she understood what it ant about how much of his attention she was actually taking up.
She switched approaches then, which was the right thing to do. The fire ca next, not the decorative kind that announced itself with a lot of light and heat before it hit but a compressed channel of it pulled from both blades that she drove forward like a solid thing, dense and fast and aid directly at his chest with enough mass behind it that deflecting it would cost him real effort or real space.
Rex chose space.
He went sideways and let the fire column pass him and hit the far wall of the throne room, where it spread across the stone in a way that illuminated the whole chamber in intense orange light for a few seconds.
The council mbers had already moved back from the map table. Mordecai had not moved at all, which said sothing about either his confidence in Cassandra or his interest in seeing how this resolved.
Cassandra closed the distance again with both blades raised, and this ti she combined the approach with a second dark energy cast, not fired at him but seeded into the floor ahead of her own feet to erupt upward at the angle she calculated he’d step toward.
It was a trap layered inside an attack, and it was genuinely well-constructed, the kind of thing that worked against targets who thought in straight lines.
’Heh... if this Demon Queen can’t even give a single scratch, then it’s already resolved for everything this world has...’
’A bunch of useless fucking frauds.’
Rex had already seen it coming in the way Foresight frad the next two seconds. He didn’t step into it.
He stepped backward instead, letting her close the distance fully, and when she was inside her own optimal striking range, he used both hands and pushed outward with a telekinetic field centered on her body, not a single directed force but an expanding pressure that caught her from multiple angles simultaneously.
It wasn’t painful. That was the point of it.
Cassandra left the ground entirely and traveled backward across the throne room floor until she hit the wall between two of the tall windows, where she stopped with enough controlled force that the stone cracked in a spider pattern behind her shoulders but didn’t cave inward.
Her blades were still in her hands. She hadn’t dropped them, but the position she was in, pressed flat against the wall at chest height with her feet off the floor and her arms held wide by the sa field that caught her, was not a position that had a dignified na.
"There’s no use challenging like that..."
"What I wanted is clear... or would you rather join the dead and beco the undead to serve ?" Rex smirked.
Rex lowered his hands. The field maintained its position, keeping her at eye level with everyone in the room.
The throne room was quiet again. The fire on the far wall had already started to die down on its own.
"I want to make sothing clear," Rex said, and he said it at a normal volu because the room was quiet enough that normal volu was plenty.
He wasn’t looking at Cassandra anymore, but he looked back at Mordecai. "I didn’t co here to fight anyone or to prove my point."
"I ca here to report a failure and propose sothing that actually solves your problem."
He gestured very slightly with two fingers, and the field holding Cassandra released, letting her drop back to the floor. She landed cleanly because she was the kind of person who landed smoothly, and she straightened imdiately and kept both blades out, but she didn’t move toward him again.
She was watching him the way soone watches sothing they’ve recategorized.
"The dead soldiers," Rex continued, as if the last ninety seconds hadn’t happened at all, "are already yours."
"I know that doesn’t change anything, and you’re not giving anything up."
"You’re only letting sothing you already have do sothing useful again, even if it’s dead."
Mordecai looked at him for a long mont before he looked at Cassandra, who had finally lowered one of her blades, though not because she’d decided to agree with anything, only because holding both raised was starting to look more like theater than readiness.
"And you can raise them..." Mordecai said slowly. It wasn’t quite a question.
"Not the way you’re thinking," Rex said. "They won’t co back wrong, and they won’t lose what they were."
"That’s the part your traditions are actually protecting against, and I’m not asking you to compromise it."
"What I’m asking is different, and if you want to know the specifics, I’ll explain them, but I’d rather do that in a room that doesn’t have scorch marks on the walls."
Cassandra held both of her blades, but then Mordecai said, "Cassandra."
She stared at her lord. The exchange was short and quiet, and there were no words spoken.
At the end, Cassandra took a step back and stood in a way that showed she was standing down against her will.
And to Rex’s surprise. He saw the desire level notification.
[CASSANDRA VEXMOOR: DESIRE LEVEL — 38/100 → 49/100]
He filed it and didn’t show any emotion, but he thought. ’That humiliation of a fight raised her desire level, huh...?’
’Don’t fucking tell she’s another masochist...’
"Alright, Lustful Villain. There’s no need to fight or argue anymore." Mordecai said, "I’ll show you the graveyard."
...
The demon burial grounds of Erebus’s Rest were in the lowest part of the underground city, below the market levels and the residential tiers. They were in a carved chamber that had been expanded over the years to hold the bodies of everyone who had died in a conflict that the demon civilization had survived.
The bioluminescent fungi here were different from those in the upper city. They were lower, paler, and emitted softer, more diffused light.
This made it hard to tell how far away things were.
The graves were not marked in the sa way that surface cultures did. The markers were carved symbols instead of nas, and the burials got denser as they went deeper into the chamber.
Older conflicts were buried beneath more recent ones, so there were more bodies.
Mordecai led Rex through the sections in silence, which Rex preferred over having soone discuss the importance of their surroundings.
He knew how important it was. He just thought about it differently than Mordecai did, and he didn’t think it was necessary to explain the difference.
They stopped in a part of the chamber that was near the eastern wall and separated from the main burial area by a low natural stone ridge that had been built into the layout instead of being taken out. The graves here were older, and the carved markers had more detailed symbols that showed rank instead of just identity.
Mordecai said, "The last Demon King is here," and his voice had the sound of soone naming sothing heavy.
"Kael Vrael," Mordecai held onto his body. "For this body’s history... you can say he’s my grandfather."
"He died four hundred years ago during the first Apostle purge, when the Apostle of Life at the ti led a campaign into the Underlayer itself." He stopped. "We eventually pushed the Apostles back..."
"...but not before they caused significant damage."
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