The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!

Alexander lifted his head.

"Get up," Rex said, and his voice was entirely flat.

Alexander got up.

"SHUT THE FUCK UPP!!!" He shouted and launched everything at once this time.

All three elements were unleashed simultaneously, lacking coordination or a structured timing. It was the desperate tactic of someone who had exhausted their technique, resorting to sheer volume instead.

Rex’s ability to see what was coming helped him take advantage of the openings that always happen when multiple elements are used at once, since physics makes it impossible to cover every area perfectly. He emerged from the other side still in motion.

He struck Alexander four times in rapid succession.

First, the jaw. Then, the solar plexus. Next, the nerve point on the inside of the knee. Finally, the back of the shoulder—hard enough to rotate the entire arm and disrupt the flow of air.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

Alexander went down again.

Rex stood back.

He looked at Alexander on the ground, at the state of the training field, at the burning pieces of vine, and at the displacement marks in the soil.

"You’re strong," Rex said. "Genuinely."

"If I weren’t what I am, this would have been a real fight."

Alexander said nothing, breathing through his nose.

"But you walked in here thinking I was a variable you already understood," Rex said. "And you kept thinking that even after the first exchange told you otherwise."

"That’s not a technique problem, more like a thinking problem."

Rex looked at him for a moment.

"The expedition is going to have things in it that don’t respond the way you expect them to either," Rex said. "Think about that."

He stepped back.

Rex thought, "For now, I’ll let him take those three losses because the real loss will be when I steal his fiancé..."

Alexander’s arms were free. He looked at the marks on his forearms.

They weren’t damaged marks. They were simply the marks left by an object that had been gripping his forearms very tightly.

Then he looked at Rex with the look of someone who had reached the end of a very specific road and was standing at the end of it.

"Dammit... dammit...! DAMMMITTTT!!!"

"That’s enough," Elizabeth said.

At some point during the final blow that Rex delivered, Elizabeth had entered the training ground and positioned herself equidistant between the two, a stance typically taken when one is ending a confrontation rather than observing it.

Her voice sounded the same as it did when she wasn’t providing a suggestion.

She looked at Alexander. "Just stop it for now, honey."

Rex looked at the training ground and thought about how much dirt he had used and whether the groundskeeping staff would be able to take care of the vine growth before the morning session the next day.

He decided it wasn’t his problem and put it down.

"But, sweetheart, I..."

Elizabeth shook her head. "You’ve done good enough, honey, and... it’s just that Rex has proved that he’s worthy of being chosen as the honor student by Lady Valentina herself."

"You should’ve known that by now."

"I..." Alexander lowered his head. "I understand..."

"You don’t need to win every spar, you know." Elizabeth held his head. "You’re still my strong man."

Rex felt disgusted hearing that, and then he could see Alexander starts to get all doting on her. ’Oh yeah... I’m going to fucking enjoy stealing from him, and I need good manipulation on this one.’

...

Elizabeth’s healing work was efficient, executed with the skill of someone who had performed it so many times that the process itself became nearly invisible. She attended to Alexander’s entire body with the concentration of someone focused on completing a task rather than on her own feelings.

Alexander sat on the low bench at the edge of the training ground and worked with the kind of person who was accepting something they needed without admitting that they needed it.

Rex came over. "That was a good fight, and sorry if my talk gets on your nerve."

"I like my opponent to be motivated." Rex smiled, and behind it was a sly smile.

He offered his hand.

Alexander looked at Rex’s hand, then at Rex himself, and finally at the entire training ground, which bore the marks of two large-scale elemental exchanges.

"Rexilion..."

He grabbed the hand.

Rex pulled him up as if he had done it before and not as if he were showing that he could.

Alexander said, "You’re not a normal elemental practitioner, and I know that wasn’t mere luck anymore."

"Glad to hear you finally admit it," Rex said. "Being ignorant is weakness, especially for you."

"I know... I’m sorry. Force of habit." And then Alexander whispered at him. "I want to make my fiance proud of me, that’s all."

"I get it."

"So... about the structural reading," Alexander said. "The subsurface navigation."

"The architecture of the interior gap in the vine deployment is unclear," he said. "Those aren’t the kinds of things someone who has read the archive and practiced would do."

"Then..." Rex asked, "...what are they exactly?"

Alexander looked at him like someone who had been working toward a conclusion and was now there.

"Something else," he said, and the way he said it made it sound like he had accepted that he wasn’t going to get the whole answer and was choosing to keep the partial one instead of pushing for the full one.

Rex thought it was better than most of Alexander’s mornings.

Rex said, "For what it’s worth, your multi-element convergence is the best I’ve seen from someone who isn’t an apostle nor a reincarnator."

Alexander gave him a surprised look.

"The timing of the coordination is great." Rex said, "Most people who run three elements lose about 15% of the output precision at the integration point."

"But it seems like you don’t lose any precision at all."

Alexander said, "I’ve been running it for six years."

"Yeah, that’s why I said it minutes ago because..." Rex said, "...it shows."

They stood at the bench for a moment, like two people who had just had a big conversation and were now there to deal with the aftermath.

"You won’t be a problem on the expedition, Rexilion," Alexander said.

Rex took this as the closest thing he could get to an acknowledgement and accepted it as such.

"Neither will you," Rex thought. "You’re going to be my test subject for the expedition, so consider yourself useful."

Elizabeth had been watching this conversation from three meters away with the look of someone who was ready to deal with something that didn’t need to be dealt with.

"Alright, that’s settled then."

"I want everyone inside," she said to the people who had gathered at the edge of the training ground. "I have maps to show you about our expedition."

...

The unmistakable quality of Elizabeth’s office indicated its intensive use, prioritizing functionality over aesthetics. The desk was broad and clear, except for the items that were currently relevant, and the map she unrolled across it when the group had gathered was large enough to occupy both ends of the desk.

Rex took a look at it.

Since arriving in this environment, he had not encountered a complete map of the world. He had constructed a model based on his observations and knowledge, but he understood that models created from partial information often contained gaps, which he referred to as "known unknowns."

In the first thirty seconds, the map filled in a lot of those gaps.

Aethelgard was in the middle of the map, as he had expected, but the specific way it was positioned in the middle was more detailed than he had anticipated. The city was on a plateau island that floated in the middle of the Convergence Waters, which the map showed as a body of ocean with no visible floor on the depth markings.

The island was about the size of an oval, and the plateau where the city was built was only a small part of the island’s total surface area. Rex had thought it was smaller than it really was.

Four landmasses were around the island, at distances ranging from forty to about two hundred kilometers.

The Valdric Sovereignty was the name given to the northern landmass. The notes said that the government was based on a military hierarchy with a lot of magic mixed in.

The annotations say that the eastern landmass was the Thornweald Collective, which was a group of druid-aligned territories.

The Sable Reaches were the southern landmass, and the map said they were only partially charted.

The Aurelian Compact was the largest network of magical institutions in the known world. It was located on the western landmass.

The Convergence Waters separated all four of them from Aethelgard. This meant that they could only get to Aethelgard by crossing the ocean or using a special type of magic that could handle open-water passage over an unfloored ocean.

Rex looked at the island that was floating and, for the first time, saw clearly why Aethelgard was a neutral capital. It wasn’t in the middle of nowhere by chance.

The decision to place it in the center was intentional, and the design has been maintained for so long that it has become an integral part of the island rather than just a completed project.

Rex said, "The island floats." Not a question, but he wanted to make sure it was on the record.

"Since before any written history," Elizabeth said, "the prevailing theory suggests that the Erosyne was created through divine intervention at the beginning."

"However, the specifics are not particularly relevant."

"Wait... Erosyne?" Rex asked.

"Erosyne is the name of the world where we live right now." Elizabeth nodded, her expression serious. "It’s a place where the boundaries between myth and reality blur, and understanding its origins could unlock secrets we’ve barely begun to explore."

"What the fuck...? It’s the first time for me to know the name of this world."