Chapter 398: 398. It Seems Like I Really Need To Dig Deep Down With Their Information

When the object hit the primordial energy boundary, it was fascinating to see that, instead of bouncing off like elemental forces do, this physical object hit the boundary and pushed some of its force through it.

Although it did not fully transmit the impact, it was enough to knock Kael forward and disrupt his concentration on the stoneworking.

Kael stumbled, caught himself, and turned.

"What the fuck...?!"

Rex was already thinking about what that meant. Physical objects worked differently from energy-based attacks.

The telekinesis directing the boulder was system-granted, but the boulder itself was just stone, and the stone’s mass and momentum existed independent of his system. The boundary deflected the telekinetic direction partially but couldn’t prevent the physical object from carrying momentum forward on its own.

’Oh, I see how it is... that was a fucking useful information I just found.’ He stored it and looked at the rest of the room. ’Only attacks from this world worked, huh?’

The chamber exuded a chaotic atmosphere that neither favored the group nor the Legion. Kregg had successfully managed to handle Apollo and Mireya without sustaining any damage.

Virella was being contained by Alexander and Elizabeth.

Meanwhile, Varek and Seris were engaged in a stalemate with Nerith and Aisella.

Kael had turned away from Talyra and was now directing a look of offended dignity at Rex, an expression that clearly indicated discontent over being struck by a rock.

"You’re going to regret doing that to me!" Kael shouted. "It won’t work for the second time!"

Rex put his hands in his pockets.

"Well, let’s just see," he said pleasantly. "Come."

He drew his sword that he created using Earthen Authority when Kael was eight meters away.

’I want to use my gauntlets, but I remember that I can’t show it to them here...’

The blade emerged smoothly and unhurriedly, while Rex positioned it in a low guard. This stance, technically the opening position of a dueling form, might appear to onlookers as merely holding a weapon while contemplating his next move.

His free hand rested at his side, fingers slightly spread. He had shaped an elemental working in his palm that was entirely invisible, producing neither light nor heat. However, one of his original frequencies—a complex creation he had made using basic logical principles—vibrated at a level that didn’t fit into any of the current categories of magic.

Kael’s opening was a stone-compression working, the same kind of technique he’d used to try to attack Talyra’s, but directed at Rex’s feet, attempting to lock his footing and then applying pressure upward through the floor. It was a functional opening against someone who relied on mobile combat; if you can’t move your feet, your sword reach becomes your only option.

Rex stepped left at the exact moment the worker reached his position, not because he’d read the worker’s formation cues but because foresight had shown him the outcome two seconds before it materialized, and in the space Kael had expected him to be in, there was nothing.

He was already inside Kael’s medium range by the time Kael completed his follow-up, and the sword came up in a half-rotation that was aimed at Kael’s off-sword arm at the wrist.

Kael pulled his arm back, and Rex’s blade passed through air. He threw a short palm strike with his free hand, earthen hardening applied to the impact surface, and Rex caught it on the flat of his sword and turned it into the chamber floor, which removed Kael’s footing briefly and gave Rex the half-second to close another meter.

Then they found themselves in close quarters, where the sword became a liability at that distance, prompting Rex to drop it into his left hand while his right hand moved to engage.

Martial arts at full potential was not a complicated thing to describe from the outside. From the outside, it looked like someone was hitting another person in a way that was faster and more precise than normal.

From Rex’s perspective, which he gained through the complete instinctive integration that the skill provided, martial arts was a continuous reading of weight, balance, and structural vulnerability, with every block, strike, and redirect flowing directly from the actions of the body in front of him rather than from any planned sequence.

The art of combat was reactive and practiced at the highest level. In the first six seconds of close-range engagement, Rex gleaned specific insights about Kael: he was trained not as a primary fighter but rather as a secondary one.

Kael had learned unarmed combat to support his magical abilities, rather than as his main focus. While his defensive responses were competent, they followed a pattern, which meant Rex could exploit this by attacking the pattern itself instead of targeting Kael directly.

Rex broke his balance twice with footwork; the second time badly enough that Kael’s defensive structure opened and Rex drove three consecutive strikes into the torso, the last one with the earthen authority working behind it that he kept at low output because he genuinely needed Kael functional for approximately thirty more seconds.

BAM!

The impact cracked at least one rib. The breath that came out of Kael when it landed was the involuntary, compressed gasp of someone who has been hit in a place that the body cannot perform through.

’Earthen Authority works, huh...? Well, it still counts as native because I didn’t achieve it, but I stole it.’

Rex had his arm across Kael’s throat before Kael had finished processing what had happened; his forearm pressed into Kael’s carotid, and he leaned in close to Kael’s ear, speaking at a volume that carried no further than six centimeters.

"Gelion Amorphis," Rex said. "I want to know his exact role in your operation."

"You have about four seconds before I fucking kill you... right here... right now..."

"And I’m not soft like them..."

Kael made a sound.

"It seems like you need to die slowly," Rex said.

"Contact," Kael said, his voice rough from the arm at his throat. "We don’t control him...!"

"He wanted what we wanted... and that’s the Key, the access pathway..."

"He provided interior intelligence, we provided surface disruption." A short, pained breath. "He’s not Legion, but he was one of the reincarnators that the Legion chose to work with."

"How about the logistics?" Rex said.

"He routed the second-stratum team’s surface presence through our east approach network..."

"We didn’t know what they were... just that they weren’t reincarnators."

"Final question," Rex said. "Who’s the one in charge of this legion?"

Kael was quiet for exactly half a second too long.

"Useless piece of shit."

Rex released his grip on Kael’s forearm, stepped aside, and then struck the already-cracked rib section with his elbow. The impact was precise and controlled, delivering about sixty percent of the force he was capable of.

Kael collapsed. "GUGGGHHH!"

"That’s it... you’re fucking dead."

Rex reached for Kael’s collar, right hand closing to finish it, and that was when Apollo made a sound from across the chamber.

"AGGGGHHHHHH!"

It was not a shout of combat, nor was it a cry of fear. Instead, it was an involuntary, sharp sound, the kind made by someone struck with unexpected and significant pain.

This sound cut through every other noise in the chamber, carrying a quality that indicated a shift had occurred, one that had not been part of the engagement until this moment.

Rex let go of Kael and looked.

Kregg stood with his right hand extended. The ring on his third finger was active in a way Rex had not observed before, emitting a frequency that his energy perception registered as extraction-type: drawing rather than pushing and reaching into Apollo’s designation rather than attacking his body.

Apollo was on one knee.

Rex stood still and assessed.

Kregg said to the chamber at large, "That’s enough."

He spoke with the patience of someone who had been waiting for the engagement to reach this point and was not surprised by any aspect of it.

Apollo’s second knee came down to the floor as the ring’s pull intensified fractionally. His hands were pressed against the stone, his body fighting the extraction without any visible mechanism to fight it with.

His face had the tight, controlled expression of someone managing severe sustained pain rather than yielding to it, but yielding was the direction things were moving.

"LET HIM GO!" Mireya launched herself towards Kregg without waiting.

Kregg extended his free hand without turning to look at her. Two columns of stone shot up from the floor and closed around Mireya’s legs, pulling her into the ground up to the knee before she could redirect her momentum.

Mireya went down hard, using one arm to catch herself, but the stone held her in place.

"Nope," Kregg said simply while he grabbed the Key to the Underlayer.

And then he walked towards Apollo and took hold of him by the back of his collar, lifting him with one arm with the ease of someone who had done this before and felt no need to make it theatrical.

Apollo hung there, the ring’s extraction field keeping his designation fully suppressed, his eyes open but completely unfocused, the light affinity that Rex had catalogued as capable of destroying an entire room of undead constructs stripped down to nothing.

Kregg surveyed the chamber around him, taking in Rex, Elizabeth, and the rest of the group.

"I’ll also need the others," he said.

He wasn’t speaking to any one person. He was informing the room.

"There’s a gathering being organized, and the Apostle of Life is not the only designation the Balance Keeper wants to assess directly." He looked at Elizabeth, who still had both grimoires in hand. "You’ll find the remaining reincarnators in your party are already being collected."

’The Balance Keeper...?’ Rex thought.

"The Keeper already sent five additional members up at the start of this engagement."

"They know the extraction routes from the surface approach study we’ve conducted over the past two years." He paused briefly. "Your Nightwing soldier and the others recovered in the second level are also accounted for."

"Veylor as well."