The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!

BAAAAAMMMMMMM!

It hit the first barrier.

The barrier absorbed the projection as barriers typically do with standard elemental workings: it pushed back slightly, then held firm.

Rex adjusted the internal frequency structure of the projection and sent a second one.

This second projection successfully passed through the first barrier.

Lilith observed the spot where the first barrier had been and then shifted her gaze to the second barrier, where the projection had come to a halt.

"It didn’t take it," she said. "It went through."

Rex explained, "The first barrier was different. The second barrier has an absorption pattern that varies."

"Try it out on the second."

He changed the frequency architecture again, spent two seconds on the new design, and sent a third projection. It got through the second barrier.

"W-wait—" Lilith started.

Rex was already creating the fourth.

This one was not a compression projection. He built it with a layered internal structure, two compound elements running in parallel at different frequencies, one that read as thermal and one that read as nothing the absorption pattern had a profile for, and sent it to the third barrier.

It split on contact. The thermal half was absorbed. The other half went through and hit the fourth barrier from the inside.

The fourth barrier made a sound like it was reconsidering its choices, as if it were unsure about its purpose in the situation.

"MASTER." Lilith’s voice had moved up several registers. "That one came from the WRONG SIDE—"

"Interesting," Rex said, making a note.

He constructed the next one with three distinct layers.

The first was a standard kinetic front, designed to be recognized by the absorption pattern and initiate processing.

The second layer was frequency-shifted, intended to mimic something adjacent to gravitational forces.

The third component operated at a frequency he had devised from scratch just thirty seconds earlier, and it lacked any catalog entry in the known taxonomy.

He sent it at the third barrier, which had not recovered from the previous exchange.

The kinetic layer struck and was absorbed. The gravitational-adjacent layer disrupted the absorption pattern for about half a second.

During that brief window, the third layer passed through without resistance, impacting Lilith’s second barrier from within, simultaneously with a standard projection he launched from the outside.

Both barriers made the sound.

"I’M BEING ATTACKED FROM EVERYWHERE!" Lilith scrambled backward, her wings flaring out instinctively, her tail going rigid. "This isn’t a test...! This is an EXECUTION—"

"Stay in your fucking position or you’ll get hurt for real," Rex said.

"I AM in position, BUT...! The position is just very BAD RIGHT NOW—"

The fifth working he built was quieter. A single-frequency projection was designed to mimic ambient environmental noise until it crossed the barrier’s detection threshold.

He had adjusted it to mimic the natural light given off by fungi in the Underlayer at a frequency that was close enough for the barrier to see it as background noise instead of a danger.

It cleared all four barriers without any resistance.

"AHHHH! NOOOO—"

It paused just two centimeters from Lilith’s nose.

"H-Huh...?" She gazed at it.

It stayed in the air, calm, small, and completely unaffected.

"O-Ohh..." Lilith exhaled, in the voice of someone who had just understood something they wished they hadn’t. "O-Okay... That’s... I’m uh... fine."

Rex let it fade.

"The thermal-kinetic compound takes two seconds to build," he said, glancing at his hands. "The ambient-mimicry frequency requires four."

"The triple-layer takes six."

He looked at the space where Lilith’s barriers were reassembling themselves with what seemed like personal grievance.

"The ambient one is the most useful," he said. "Once the build time is below two seconds, it works against anything that uses passive absorption as a defense layer."

Lilith stepped back from the testing area, looking like someone who had just revealed something they were uncertain about sharing.

She asked, "How quickly can you change it?"

"Right now, it’s two to four seconds per layer," Rex said. "That’s too slow for battle."

He looked at his hands.

"But the idea is right," he said. "The time it takes to redesign goes down with more practice."

"Once it gets below one second, every barrier type in the known catalog becomes permeable."

He let the projections fade away.

"That’s—" Lilith began.

"Going to need practice," Rex said. "Which I don’t have time for tonight."

Lilith looked at her four barriers, which had finished reassembling and were now doing the magical equivalent of standing very still and hoping not to be noticed again.

"Next time," she said carefully, "can we use someone else as the target?"

Rex started walking toward Castle Nocturna.

"No," he said.

"HEHHH!?"

"Anyway, for now..." He said, "...the next time someone tries to use resonance absorption against me, the result will be different."

"I’m getting closer to becoming the peak of the world, even in the underlayer."

Lilith regarded him from two steps back, her expression mirroring the one she wore when she had added something to the "reasons to stay on Rex’s good side" file, and trying not to mess up his plans again.

She fell back into step beside him, and together they continued toward the castle.

...

When Rex walked in, Mordecai was in the receiving hall. His face showed that he had been waiting for someone for a long time, and that person had come from a direction that meant big things were about to happen.

He glanced at Rex. He gave Lilith a look. He turned around to look at Rex.

"O-Ohh, good... you guys are okay, but..." Mordecai said, and he was already sweating a lot. "Where’s... Gelion...?"

"Cooperating," Rex said. "He’ll be working with Pavellia on the monitoring network audit for the next week. After that, we’ll discuss what happens with the second-stratum contact situation."

Mordecai blinked.

"You didn’t—" He stopped.

"No," Rex said, which answered the question Mordecai had been trying to ask.

Mordecai’s shoulders came down from the position they had been in.

Rex walked past him to the main chair’s position and turned around. He looked at the hall as if it were a structure he was about to change.

"Starting now..."

"... I want you to give me full authority over the operational decisions of this kingdom," Rex said. "I only need that from now on, and I’m bringing it up now rather than waiting for a disagreement on something important, only for you to discover it then."

Mordecai opened his mouth, but Rex stopped him.

"Not ceremonial authority," Rex said. "Not the kind that gets consulted and then overridden because your council has opinions."

"It’s more like... the actual kind. When I make a decision about an operation that affects the underlayer’s security posture, it takes effect."

Mordecai looked at him.

"You’re asking me to cede control of my own kingdom," Mordecai said.

"I’m telling you that I already have it," Rex said. "What I’m offering is for that to happen with your cooperation rather than despite it."

The distinction was specific, and Mordecai understood it, which was one of the things Rex had found genuinely useful about Mordecai over the course of their working relationship. He was not intelligent in the way that Pavellia was intelligent, but he understood power dynamics with the instinct of someone who had been navigating them for his entire adult life.

Mordecai asked, "What will happen to the kingdom?"

"Oh, trust me, it’ll operate better," Rex said. "You stop losing security reviews because the people who were in charge of them were moved four years ago."

"You stop having council meetings about geological events that are really infiltration operations."

"You also stop letting independent actors build intelligence networks inside your monitoring infrastructure.

He paused.

"And when the surface eventually has the conversation about the underlayer’s existence, which is going to happen, the entity they’re talking to is one that has functional governance and operational credibility."

Mordecai stared at him for a long time.

"You could have just taken it," Mordecai said. "Especially after what happened tonight... there’s nothing I could have done."

"I know," Rex said. "I’m not taking it, but I’m just going to run it."

"There’s a difference, and the difference is relevant for what comes next."

Mordecai looked at his hands.

"The gacha system," Mordecai said finally. "You want me to pull more deliberately."

"I want you to pull with the specific intent of addressing the gaps identified in the security review," Rex stated. "Focus not on combat units but on expertise—analysts, administrators, and specialists in areas where the Underlayer currently lacks capability."

"It’s easy to say it, but..." Mordecai said, "The system pull mechanic is random, and I can’t just get what I want."

"Just pull more," Rex told him. "Volume makes up for randomness over time."

Mordecai looked like he had just finished a deal and was realizing that the terms weren’t as terrible as they could have been.

"Okay... I got it, but..." Mordecai said, "...what about the Key to the Underlayer?"

"I’m going to destroy it," Rex said. "That takes the retrieval mission off everyone’s table and removes the dimensional stability concern entirely."

Mordecai stared at him. "If you destroy it—"

"The surface team finds nothing worth reporting," Rex said. "The second-stratum contact window has to proceed differently, which Gelion is going to help redesign."

"And the Underlayer’s dimensional boundary stabilizes on its own over the course of six months without any intervention."

He stared at Mordecai.

Rex said, "That’s better than any other outcome right now."