The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!

He looked at all three of them. Talyra and Aisella were gazing at Nerith with the full, focused warmth of people who recognized the significance of the moment and committed to being present for it.

Nerith returned their gaze, wearing the expression of someone who had expected the ground to remain steady and was surprised to find solid footing. Any complicated activity had been halted by the amber leaves.

They were simply warm.

Then the three of them stared at Rex.

"Anything else to say, nonchalant man?" Talyra said pleasantly.

Rex studied them for a moment. Then he turned back to the window, watching the scrub of the plateau move past, and he thought about the Key to the Underlayer and Elizabeth Von Starlight and the geography of the northwest tributary canyon approach.

"No comment about it," he replied.

"That’s what we thought," said Aisella, and resumed her conversation with Nerith.

"Just continue your talk, and don’t hope that I’ll answer."

...

The carriages deposited them where the plateau path gave out and the ridge started, too steep and rough for wheels. The economical manner of Rex’s carriage driver was to stop, set his brake, and point forward and then upward in a way that was not to be misunderstood.

Elizabeth was already out and reading the landscape ahead by the time Rex climbed out of the first carriage. A ridge tributary path could be seen running off northwest toward higher ground, eventually dropping down into the canyon system as a shallow depression in the scrub.

The morning was bright now, the sky clear, and the air with the particular freshness of high places, a faint mineral tang that Rex always associated with the nearness of limestone.

"Six hours," Elizabeth informed the group. "We’ll be moving quickly, only stopping to engage with our surroundings."

"No unnecessary breaks."

Talyra glanced at the path ahead, then down at her feet, and back to the trail, her expression suggesting she was grappling with an unwelcome calculation.

"S-Six hours," she repeated.

"Six hours," Elizabeth. "It could be six to seven hours, too."

"This will be a pain in the ass!" Talyra ruffled her hair.

Talyra looked at Aisella with great significance. Aisella patted her arm in sympathy.

"The faster we walk," Apollo said reasonably, "the fewer hours it is."

"That’s technically true," said Talyra, "and also deeply unhelpful as a comment."

She slung the bow case on her back and started to walk with the resigned energy of someone who has accepted a nasty reality and is determined to push through it at speed so it will be over sooner. "Then let’s go."

"Six hours is manageable," said Alexander, pulling on his pack. "We’ve done worse in the field."

"Some of us have done worse in the field," said Talyra. "But in the end... I’m an archer."

"Archers walk."

"Archers walk considerably less enthusiastically than people who apparently enjoy it."

Iris had already started up the path without waiting for the rest of the exchange. Mireya followed a moment after just for Rex to watch them and then looked at the path ahead and started walking.

The first hour and a half was straightforward. The terrain was good, visibility was reasonable, and the gradient was demanding yet manageable.

He used this time to observe Elizabeth as she moved at speed, noting how she balanced her focus between the immediate path ahead and the broader landscape. She and Alexander moved in sync, never overtly coordinating, but fitting into adjacent positions with the effortless grace of individuals who had spent significant time working together in the field.

Alexander was attentive to her, Rex noted, in a way that was both genuine and slightly performative, which was interesting. It was not a performance for Elizabeth’s sake.

This behavior was habitual, the type that becomes ingrained when someone has practiced it long enough that they no longer realize they are doing it. Rex called this a useful entry point and proceeded.

At one point Elizabeth slowed to check a stone formation at the edge of the path, and Alexander stopped with her, one hand resting on his pack strap, looking at the same thing she was looking at.

"Weathering pattern," he said.

"Yes." Elizabeth studied it for another two seconds. "The limestone layer is shallower here than Durvan’s survey indicated."

"It means the floor of the tributary is closer to the subsurface network."

"Structurally relevant?"

"Possibly. I want Nerith to read the sediment compression when we reach the tributary mouth."

"I heard that," said Nerith, from four steps back.

"Good," said Elizabeth, and they kept walking.

Rex filed this and kept his own pace.

Monsters came in the second hour, just after they crossed a dry streambed that had left the tributary floor broad and stone-paved, making walking easy but observation of the surrounding scrub harder.

They were a breed Rex had never encountered in this particular region before because of their bulky, four legs with overlapping scale-like plates on their dorsal aspect and a jaw structure that hinted at both biting and grinding as primary attack vectors.

From the scrub, on both sides of the path, they emerged in groups of three and four, a coordinated behavior that suggested some sort of pack intelligence, even if they didn’t look particularly intelligent.

"Territorial monsters," Nerith said beside him, reading the approach pattern through whatever nature-channel information she was getting from the scrub around them. "There is a nest system in the limestone under the scrub layer."

"We are at the edge of their range."

"How many?" asked Elizabeth, already opening her grimoires.

"For now I can only feel thirty of them, but it could be more. I can’t get an exact count through the plates."

"Right," said Elizabeth, looking at the group with a professional calm that Rex genuinely admired. "Spread out."

"Don’t let them flank us."

"Nerith, can you provide a channel signal if more enemies approach from the north?"

"I can try. The signal’s different here, but I’ll manage."

"Close enough."

"Iris," said Alexander, and Iris had already moved to the northern edge of the path without being told, daggers half-drawn.

"I see the scrub," she said.

"Apollo, stay center," said Elizabeth. "Don’t use the full activation unless something goes wrong."

"Got it, Miss," said Apollo.

Then there was the long engagement that Rex found so instructive, because it was so unplanned. In a training environment or a structured expedition sequence, combat tended to demonstrate what people were capable of.

It showed what people are really like when they are under constant stress in a territorial monster attack on a narrow trail.

For the first six minutes straight, Elizabeth ran both grimoires. The dual working he’d seen before wasn’t a controlled demonstration here, but it was a full tactical system, the primary grimoire putting out sustained area-suppression workings that kept the pack’s flanking movement restricted and the secondary grimoire putting out individual targeted strikes with precision that required constant adjustment as the pack’s positioning shifted.

She moved during the casting, which was technically a difficult thing to do and which most grimoire users avoided, as it disrupted the casting posture. But Elizabeth had clearly solved the problem at some point in her career, for her workings maintained their coherence even when she was stepping sideways over uneven ground.

Rex watched and thought, ’Elizabeth has been doing this for a long time, longer than her age would suggest, and she has solved problems that most mages her age haven’t even encountered yet.’

’That was actually good information.’

Alexander used his fire and wind in close coordination, the wind compression giving his fire workings a reach and penetration that pure fire magic did not have.

Rex found his task technically interesting because he was reading Elizabeth’s coverage gaps before they formed, positioning himself to fill them, which meant he was tracking her spell structure in real-time and predicting where the next gap would open.

That was either amazing spatial awareness or the result of knowing how she worked well enough to anticipate her patterns. Probably both.

"Left side’s thinning," Alexander called out during a brief lull in the approach of the second cluster.

"I have it," said Elizabeth, without looking at him.

"I know you have it, sugar plum."

"Then don’t call it out."

"Just a force of habit."

Elizabeth’s secondary grimoire put out a working that redirected the left flank’s lead creature into its own cluster, and the thing went down in a pile of its own kind, and she said, "There," not to Alexander specifically.

To no one in particular. But Alexander nodded as if she had addressed him directly, a detail that Rex also took note of.

Mireya worked the ice at the right flank with a precision that was better than it looked in sparring, which meant the sparring version was deliberately restrained. Rex noted this without surprise.

Most people who were good at something had a version they showed in controlled environments and a version they used when the situation required it. Mireya’s ice held a line of three creatures for nearly ninety seconds, which was longer than the Academy-standard technique would have managed.

"She’s compressing the lattice from the base," said Aisella, beside Rex, in a low tone that was neither quite talking to him nor quite talking to herself.

She was watching Mireya’s form with a healer’s interest in how someone was using their body. "That’s her own adjustment and not standard."

"She modified it herself?" Rex asked, equally low.

"I think so, but she never said it was."

"But that’s not how it’s taught."