The primary spire of Mordecai’s kingdom rose above the main structure, reaching the ceiling of the Underlayer’s upper level, where the stone curved overhead in a do shape ford by geological processes that had been carved and reinforced over centuries.
From this height, the city spread out below in a pattern indicative of a settlent built by people who had lived underground long enough for it to feel like ho.
Rex stood on the upper platform of the spire, exuding the quiet composure of soone poised to take action without displaying any anticipation.
To his left was Lilith, while Pavellia occupied his right, her projection activated and prepared at a low setting, awaiting his signal.
Gelion was behind him, held by Lilith’s containnt working, alert and aware and doing the specific thing that people did when they understood they were at the end of a sequence rather than in the middle.
The amplification sphere rested in Rex’s left hand. This demon-crafted device was spherical, roughly the size of a fist, and its surface radiated warmth, suggesting it was designed to carry voice rather than rely transmit it.
Below, the kingdom was going about its business. Two hundred thousand lives followed the patterns they had established over decades, creating the specific rhythm of a civilization that had found its routine and settled into it.
In approximately three minutes, the routine was going to encounter sothing new.
Lilith looked at the kingdom below and then at Rex. "You know..."
"They’ve never seen the Lustful Villain form before," she said. "I an... not all of them."
"The ones in the lower districts only know the na, especially after what you did, a little chaos fighting against Gelion."
"They’ll know more after tonight," Rex said. "And I’ll make sure of it."
"What do you want them to feel?" she said, and it was not a strategic question.
It was rather a genuine and curious one, from soone who understood the difference between a speech that inford and a speech that changed sothing in the people who heard it.
Rex looked down at the two hundred thousand lights below. "You see..."
"I want them to understand what they are," he said. "And I want the eleven to understand what they’re about to lose."
Lilith nodded once and said nothing else.
’I’m pretty sure I don’t need to ask further because I already know what the answer is...’
’I just need to show my devotion and try to not fail again so that I can finally get his one hundred percent respect again!’
Pavellia looked at him with the evaluating attention she gave to everything she was about to execute. "Lustful Villain."
"The projection will hold for as long as you need it," she said. "I’ve anchored it to the spire’s geological base."
"The amplification range covers the full kingdom, including the sub-levels."
"How deep is it?" Rex said.
"Let’s see... ah! It’s about the fourth sub-level," she said. "The acoustics down there are difficult, but the sphere’s working compensates."
"Everyone in this kingdom will hear you."
Rex looked at the kingdom for a mont longer. He considered the structure of his upcoming speech, focusing on its overall frawork rather than the specific words, including what points needed to be introduced first, what should co last, and where the emphasis should be placed to ensure the entire ssage was coherent.
"Are you ready?" Pavellia said. "I’m about to unleash it."
"Go," Rex said.
Her working expanded outward from the top of the spire, a visible light that moved through the Underlayer’s upper air in the way that light moved through fog, filling the space and projecting the figure at its source outward across the city’s visible sky.
He saw himself appear in the projection, the Lustful Villain’s mask and coat visible above the city in the amplified display, the scale of it making the figure sothing that could be seen from every corner of the settlent that viewed the upper air.
’Huh... neat... with this everyone could see .’
He lifted the sphere.
And then he said:
"People of the Underlayer."
His voice projected through the sphere and the amplification system simultaneously, filling the city with a quality that allowed it to reach the back of every room without the need to shout.
"You have lived in this place for a long ti," he said. "You have built sothing here."
"Under the stone and below the surface, in a space that was not designed to hold you and was not given to you by any divine authority."
"You have built a kingdom, a city, and a civilization and a future that was not guaranteed to exist."
"I am not going to insult that by calling it survival."
"It is more than survival... It is will..."
"The Underlayer exists because you chose to make it exist and continued choosing that, generation by generation, against a surface world that preferred not to know you were here."
He let this settle.
"Today the Underlayer faces sothing it has not faced clearly before," Rex said. "Not a surface threat from above, not a geological concern below, but an internal one!"
"There are people in this kingdom who were placed here by an organization that wants the Underlayer to be a resource to be used rather than a civilization to be respected!"
"An organization called the Legion of Anti-Reincarnators, whose purpose is the elimination of every person carrying a system-granted ability or the ones that are reincarnated in this world, regardless of whether that person has chosen the Underlayer as their ho or the surface as their allegiance."
"The Legion does not distinguish between the reincarnator who ca here because they had nowhere else to go and the one who ca as an agent..."
’To the Legion... both... are targets."
"To ," Rex said, "the distinction matters."
"What I am about to begin in this kingdom is not a purge," he said. "It is a clarification."
"It is the process of understanding who in this kingdom is here because they chose to be and who is here because they were sent to report back to people who wish you harm."
He paused, and when he continued, his voice shifted to a quieter register that carried further.
"Let tell you about the organization that has been operating inside your walls."
"The Legion of Anti-Reincarnators was founded thirty years ago by a woman who decided that the presence of reincarnators in this world was a violation of the natural order!"
"She built her organization slowly, carefully, over three decades, in a kingdom that does not appear on any map that you have access to!"
"She recruited people who had lost sothing to reincarnators, people with genuine grievances and real pain, and she gave their pain a direction and a purpose and a thodology."
"Forty-three reincarnators eliminated, and that is their count!"
"That is the number they are proud of!"
"They are not proud of the collateral!"
"They are not counting the people in the cities those reincarnators protected who died after the protection was removed!"
"They are not counting the communities that collapsed when the person holding them together was taken out of the equation!"
"They are counting the eliminations because the eliminations are the part that fits their story."
"Their story is that reincarnators are a corruption... a foreign presence in a world that did not ask for them."
"People who arrived with knowledge and systems and abilities that native inhabitants do not have access to and who use that advantage to accumulate power at the expense of everyone around them."
"That story has truth in it," Rex said. "I am not going to stand here and tell you it doesn’t."
"There are reincarnators who have done exactly what the Legion describes."
"There are reincarnators who arrived in this world and treated it as a ga, as a resource, as a place where the rules they had lived by no longer applied and therefore no rules applied at all."
"Those people exist... and the Legion is not entirely wrong about them."
"What the Legion is wrong about," he said, "is the conclusion they drew from that truth."
"The conclusion they drew is that the solution is elimination!"
"That if you remove the reincarnators, you remove the problem!"
"That the world returns to whatever it was before the first reincarnator arrived and everyone is better for it."
"That conclusion is the reasoning of people who have decided that a category of being is the problem rather than the choices of individuals within that category!"
"It is the reasoning that has been used to justify every organized atrocity in the history of every world that has ever had one!"
"You identify the category. You dehumanize the category. You tell everyone that the category is the source of the harm!"
"And then you remove the category and call it justice."
"The Legion calls it balance."
"I call it what it is."
He let the silence hold for a mont before he continued.
"The people they placed in this city were not soldiers... and they were not warriors other than they were intelligence assets."
’People trained to be useful, to build trust, to embed themselves inside your infrastructure and your community and your council, and to send information about your vulnerabilities back to a woman in an unmapped kingdom who was deciding how to use you!"
"For fourteen months, at minimum, this kingdom has been feeding intelligence to an organization that considers everyone in it a target."
"Fourteen months of your monitoring network, your reincarnator population, your strategic vulnerabilities, and your defensive gaps!"
"It’s also been fourteen months of having your ho mapped by individuals who smiled at you in the corridor, attended your etings, shared your als, and then returned to their rooms to docunt everything they observed."
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