The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 193. I Sent Five Undead Demons and Also Made Lunch

Chapter 193: 193. I Sent Five Undead Demons and Also Made Lunch

Meanwhile...

Rex put on the gauntlets at the beach.

He did it carefully, sliding each one on like someone who knew how to treat something that would respond to how it was handled.

The fit was perfect, like things that were made to be worn instead of just carried. The dark volcanic rock plates bent at the joints in a way that made it clear that the person who designed the articulation knew both the material and how a working hand moved.

"Alright," he said quietly to no one. "Let’s see what you actually are."

The thirty seconds of focused intent went by without any drama. Rex just had thirty seconds to hold on to his goal and let the system do what the notification said it would.

When the integration confirmed itself, he felt what he thought was the specific feeling of a second awareness coming online alongside the first.

Not identical to his existing capabilities or competing with them, it was simply present as its own distinct register—like a second voice joining a conversation that it had always been part of but had not yet been invited to enter.

He was quiet for a moment.

"...Oh," he said.

Not surprised. Just precise. The way someone says "oh" when they expected something to be good and discovered that "good" had been an underestimate.

The Earthen Affinity made itself known right away and in a clear way: the volcanic rock shelf under his feet became clear to him in a way that it hadn’t been a moment before. It was not just a surface; it was a system with depth, composition, and a history of how eight hundred years of pressure and temperature changed its structure.

The fault lines in the cliff face above the sealed cave entrance were readable as clearly as text.

Rex looked at the cliff for a long moment.

"Eight hundred and forty years," he said, reading the compression layers the way someone else might read a page. "Give or take a decade."

He tilted his head slightly. "The sealed entrance is newer..."

"Someone chose this specific face because the fault pattern would absorb the stress without collapsing inward." He paused. "Smart."

He filed it.

"Alright..." He turned to the rock wall beside the camp. "Let’s put these babies up for a quick test to see how good they are."

He raised one hand and focused.

The wall moved.

The movement was not violent, nor did it resemble something that was forced to happen. It moved in a controlled way, like something that had always been able to move but was now getting the right instructions.

A section of it rearranged itself into a shape that Rex had been thinking of while he reached out his hand.

It wasn’t a random mass. It was something that looked like it was built to fit.

Rex held the shape for three seconds, studying it.

"Huh." A small sound, almost appreciative. "Not bad at all."

"The response lag is about half what I expected from volcanic composite, and the density compensation is automatic." He looked at his hand. "You’re already accounting for the mineral variance... that’s not nothing."

He moved it back, and the wall was there again.

He spent twenty minutes running experiments with the focus of someone building a working model rather than exploring for enjoyment. He spoke to himself throughout, not loudly, just enough to keep his assessments from staying only in his head.

"Half scale first," he said and built a construct.

He watched the animated core function at the intersection of the compaction points.

"The load distribution shifts toward the dominant compaction node when the mass exceeds—" he paused, measuring, "—roughly four times body weight."

"That’s the threshold... fucking useful."

He dissolved it once he had gathered what he needed.

"Energy draw is clean," he said. "Separate reserve..."

"The Mark’s pool is completely untouched." He flexed the gauntlet fingers once, feeling the articulation. "Whoever designed this understood that a secondary system cannibalizing your primary reserve mid-engagement isn’t a tool."

"It’s a fucking liability indeed."

The Geological Foresight passive was already running without him having to think about it, and the island’s interior was becoming a spatial map in the background of his awareness—separate from and added to his existing foresight.

Rex was quiet for a moment, just standing there with the island reading itself into the edges of his consciousness.

"This changes the extraction calculus for the Northern Shelf," he said. "This also affects the approach to the second dungeon entrance, assuming one exists." 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

He looked at the gauntlets for a long moment.

"That’s enough for now."

Rex took them off.

He held them in one hand and looked at them with the kind of focus he only gave to things that were going to be part of a bigger calculation. The bigger calculation was already in progress.

"The committee is going to want you as evidence," he said to the gauntlets.

"That’s the correct official version of what happens next." He turned them over once. "It’s not what’s going to happen."

He took Mordecai’s small communication sphere from his field pack. He had set it up before leaving Aethelgard so that it would route through the Underlayer’s secondary relay instead of the standard Apostle Network lines.

"Elizabeth gets the documentation," he said, working through it aloud in the way he sometimes did when the plan had enough moving pieces that he wanted to hear it in sequence. "The biological samples, the construct fragments from the guardian chamber..."

"That package produces a score no other group on this trip is going to approach." A brief pause. "The gauntlets go somewhere else."

He opened the relay.

Five undead demons, detachment level. One specific instruction each.

He sent the message into the burial grounds’ dormant pocket, and then he put the sphere away and looked at the sealed cave entrance for a moment, reading the fault lines one more time now that he knew what he was looking at.

"Eight hundred and forty years," he said again, quieter this time.

Then he gave them the instruction about his next genius plan.

Thereafter, he put the communication sphere back where it belonged, sat down on the beach with the gauntlets in his lap, and thought about what tomorrow would be like.

It was the third day, the last day, and the day that would decide whether the next phase of everything went as planned.

Desire levels at eighty-eight and ninety-three. Talyra was twelve points away from the maximum, while Aisella was seven points away.

Talyra first, Rex thought, but then he changed his mind and said Aisella first because Aisella was at ninety-three, and seven points was a shorter distance than twelve. But the kind of event that pushed someone the last seven points toward maximum was not a smaller event than the kind that pushed someone the last twelve.

Both needed the same type of trigger.

The threat to life that he dealt with was perceived as real by them, even though they had every reason to believe it was genuine.

He looked out at the ocean and thought about the five undead demons that were currently making their way through the island’s underwater approaches. He also thought about the instructions he had given each of them and the exact time that would make the third day count.

The fish were not going to be overcooked. He began lunch with the speed of someone who had finished thinking about the big things and was now doing the little things that needed to be done.

...

When Talyra and Aisella got back from the waterfall, they smelled like clean water and looked like people who had been in a cold pool for longer than was strictly necessary but hadn’t complained about it.

Aisella looked at the lunch Rex had made with an expression that indicated things were better than she had expected.

"Nice~! You didn’t let the fish overcook," Talyra said, and she was really happy. "You’re also a reliable chef, huh?"

"I told you I wouldn’t," Rex said.

And then they had lunch together.

The second evening arrived in the same manner as the first, slowly, with the ocean contributing to the atmosphere, while the fire at the center of the camp served the same purpose as it had the previous night: to make the surrounding darkness feel like a choice rather than an inevitability.

Rex sat next to both of them in a way that was natural after two days of working together in a small space. It wasn’t planned proximity.

It was just that people were close enough to each other that they knew the space between them wasn’t a boundary to be respected but a distance to be closed if necessary, and it was necessary right now.

Aisella’s shoulder was now against his arm, which marked a change from the first day and a half of the trip when her shoulder had only been within her own space. Rex noticed the change but didn’t say anything about it.

Talyra was on the other side of Rex, discussing the pack elder’s behavior and its implications for the species’ intelligence ceiling. It was a good conversation about a really interesting topic, and Rex let it be both of those things.

At one point, he spoke to them about the geological map of the island that the Earthen Affinity was forming in his mind without his conscious awareness. He explained it in a way that connected with their existing knowledge.

This was sufficient for Aisella to grasp how it worked and for Talyra to comprehend what it meant. Both Aisella and Talyra listened with the kind of attention that he had come to appreciate in each of them.

They understood concepts at the same pace as the words being spoken, which most people couldn’t do.

The stars were the same ones as the night before. The ocean was still the same.

The group lay back on the rock shelf and looked at the stars. The conversation faded into the comfortable silence of people who had run out of things to say and were just there, and Rex let himself be there too.

He lay in the dark with the geological map of the island playing quietly in the background of his mind and thought about the next day. Both of them fell asleep before he did, as usual.

’They really lowered their guard around me...’

’I want to do it, but let’s just save it for tomorrow...’