The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!

Rex thought about what the streets they walked through showed him.

The creatures they passed moved with a certain caution upon seeing him. It was a studied way of avoiding direct acknowledgment, distinct from the way people on the street often overlook things.

They knew who had been in the yard. News of the fight with Gelion had spread, and the sight of Rex walking through the Underlayer’s central district with Lilith by his side—his Lustful Villain’s mask glinting in the fungal light—had circulated through the Underlayer’s social network at a speed typical for significant events.

A cluster of voices started up behind him, at a distance calculated to be respectful.

"That’s him."

"I know that’s him. I was there. I watched him throw Gelion through the courtyard wall."

"Which wall."

"The outer one."

A pause.

"...the stone one."

"Yes, the stone one."

Another voice, which was lower in tone, belonged to a creature with a wider chest than the first two. "He’s surface-trained..."

"You can see it in how he walks... he still did that to a primordial-class slime."

"Gelion isn’t just any slime."

"I know he isn’t just any slime. That’s what I’m saying."

A fourth voice, a woman’s, carefully cut in and said, "He’s with the succubus."

"The one from Lilith’s line. Which means he has connections to the fourth district and probably the monitoring sector."

"He rearranged Mordecai’s guard setup too. I heard that from someone who works the inner gate."

"So he has connections to the first district as well."

"He has connections everywhere, is what you’re saying."

"I’m saying he walked in from the surface not that long ago, and now the second-stratum retrieval team is standing down, and Gelion is sitting in a chair somewhere."

There’s silence between them for a moment.

"Is that good or bad for us?"

"I don’t know yet."

"It’s good," the wide-chest voice said. "The monitoring network hasn’t been updated in sixty years."

"Gelion’s been running the same three interfaces unsecured since before my youngest was born. If this surface person actually fixes that—"

"If."

"Yes, if."

The female voice spoke again, her tone quieter now. "He didn’t kill Gelion."

"So?"

"He could have done it. Everyone in that courtyard is aware he has the ability. Yet, he chose not to."

Another pause, longer than the others.

"That’s either very good," she said, "or it means he’s saving it for something."

Rex kept walking, ignoring all of those words.

Lilith said, "They’re afraid of you," and the way she said it made it sound like she was someone who had been in this situation for a while and was providing him accurate information instead of an opinion about the information.

"Good to hear it," Rex replied. "It’s better that way."

Lilith gave him a look.

"This place runs on strength," Rex said. "Not the performance of strength, but the actual thing."

"They had a performance of strength for a while, and what they had was a council that held meetings about geological data and a monitoring system that hadn’t been updated in sixty years."

He looked at the street ahead of him.

"Fear of something real is better than comfort about something that isn’t working," Rex said. "They’ll figure out whether to trust the real thing after they’ve had some time to see what it does."

’Anyway... time for me to choose that free skill.’

He had the free skill selection open in the back of his mind and was going through the catalog with the part of his mind that wasn’t focused on the street, the briefing notes, and the expedition that was about to start in a few hours.

The catalog was large, and the free selection was the kind of choice that deserved to be made with full information rather than the first thing that seemed useful.

He had been running the assessment with two criteria: what the encounter with Gelion’s slime forces had revealed about the limits of his current toolkit and what the expedition into the canyon system tomorrow was going to require.

Gelion’s primordial-class working had done something that no other working he had encountered had done before, which was to penetrate his telekinetic field through frequency resonance rather than force. The field had adapted, and the adaptation had been sufficient, but the specific vulnerability it had exposed was real.

The Elemental Mastery’s ability to analyze frequencies in real time and make a tuned counter was what had closed that hole. The technique worked once, against one opponent, in a long fight that gave him time to come up with the counter.

In a faster engagement or when facing multiple opponents of the same primordial-class type, the time margin would be nonexistent.

He required a solution that functioned without relying on time.

After an extensive search, he finally located what he needed on his fourth review of the catalog.

[ELEMENTAL MAGIC CREATION — FULL POTENTIAL]

[DESCRIPTION: GRANTS THE ABILITY TO DESIGN, CONSTRUCT, AND DEPLOY ENTIRELY ORIGINAL ELEMENTAL MAGIC CONFIGURATIONS.]

[WORKING IN CONJUNCTION WITH ELEMENTAL MASTERY, PERMITS THE CREATION OF COMPOUND ELEMENTAL FORMS THAT DO NOT EXIST IN ANY CURRENT TAXONOMY.]

[INCLUDES: NOVEL COMPOUND ELEMENT SYNTHESIS, FREQUENCY ARCHITECTURE DESIGN, ELEMENTAL INTERACTION MODELING AT MOLECULAR AND DIMENSIONAL SCALE.]

[NOTE: THE COMBINATION OF ELEMENTAL MASTERY AND ELEMENTAL MAGIC CREATION PRODUCES A CAPABILITY SET THAT IS NOT BOUNDED BY ANY EXISTING MAGICAL FRAMEWORK.]

[PRACTICAL CEILING: NONE CURRENTLY DOCUMENTED.]

Rex thought about this information for a moment.

The combination with the Elemental Mastery was the most important part.

’Gelion’s working got through because it had a resonance profile that matched the field’s internal structure... it’s like a key that fits because someone handed you the mold.’

He had complete control over every known element thanks to the Mastery. The Creation gave him the power to make elements and configurations that weren’t already in any known taxonomy.

The issue with every known element lies in the term "known."

’Every entity in the Underlayer old enough to have a primordial-class working has spent centuries cataloguing frequency profiles...’

’They absorb, they analyze, they counter... and the whole system assumes that the person throwing the working is pulling from a finite library.’

’But...’

’What happens when the library doesn’t exist yet...’

What this meant for the frequency vulnerability that Gelion had discovered was that he could create a functional device operating at a frequency not listed in any known catalog.

’Not a counter... not a workaround... but it’s something that has never had a resonance profile because it has never existed before the moment it’s thrown.’

’No one can’t absorb something you’ve never seen, and you can’t tune a counter to a frequency you can’t measure.’ Rex held his chin. ’The absorption strategy that made Gelion comfortable in that courtyard only works if the opponent is drawing from a catalog.’

’Take away the catalog.’

This meant that any opponent who tried to counter his attacks by using absorption or resonance analysis would be looking at something they had never seen before.

The edge in preparation time was taken away.

’Aight, that’s good shit indeed.’

’I don’t see WHY NOT to pick it.’

He picked it.

[ELEMENTAL MAGIC CREATION — FULL POTENTIAL — ACQUIRED]

The acquisition arrived in the same layered way the Elemental Mastery had, integrating rather than installing. He felt the design space open up in his awareness, the specific sense of capacity expanding in a direction that had not previously been accessible, allowing him to explore new possibilities and creative solutions that he had not considered before.

He said, "Lilith."

"Yes, Master?" Lilith looked at him with her tail starting to wave around curiously.

"I want to try something with you."

"HEH!?" Lilith was shocked hearing that, and she already anticipated this moment and knew what Rex was going to do. "Uhmmm... wait... I’m not that ready yet to do it..."

"I’m not sure if you can... be as rough with me as you were with that slime queen," Lilith said, her expression shy. "I’m afraid I might get knocked out too quickly..."

"Stop daydreaming, you fool." Rex flicked her forehead. "I’m going to do some testing for my new skills."

"You’ll be my target."

"E-Ehh!?"

When he said that, she looked at him with the readiness that was natural for her.

Rex asked, "How many barrier layers can you keep going at the same time?"

"Six in the field," she said. "The seventh starts to break down the second while I’m still moving."

"Put up four," Rex said. "Now."

She did exactly what Rex said by making four layers of barrier from her dark magic. "Alright... m-make sure to go gentle on me, okay?"

"I think I’ve been punished enough, you know..."

They were standing in an open area between two of the Underlayer’s smaller streets. This flat area was used for work that needed space.

Lilith’s barriers went up quickly, like a combat succubus who had been doing barrier work since she could think for herself. Four concentric fields, each a different color in the underlayer’s ambient light, were layered around her at two-meter intervals.

Rex stared at them.

He contemplated frequency architecture, a term from the catalog that described the design process he had now mastered. He reflected on what Gelion’s primordial-class frequency had accomplished and what it had failed to achieve.

It had entered through resonance.

A functioning circuit operating at a frequency without a resonance profile would lack the same entry point.

"Get ready..."

He created one.

It took him four seconds to build, which was longer than usual. The result was a small projection, no larger than his fist, slowly moving through the space between him and Lilith’s barrier.

"W-whoa... I don’t think this is a great idea to test it on me, even though I already have my barrier ready."

"This is the last of your punishment, so brace yourself for a huge impact from my magic!"