What followed did not require effort in the same way that solving a difficult problem does.

It needed to be done quickly, precisely, and without the calculation he used in the presence of witnesses.

The foresight worked three seconds ahead all the time, figuring out the best position for each target while considering all the others at the same time, and he moved through the group in the order that made the most sense, which was not the order their formation was meant to protect against.

He used his hands. The sword stayed at his side because the unnamed Legion members were not opponents who required a blade.

Martial arts at full potential with earthen authority’s structural enhancement layered underneath, and each impact delivered force at a register that the human body was not designed to absorb.

He was precise about it. There was no anger in his actions, only the satisfaction of hoping to achieve many kills.

He carefully found each weak spot in the structure and applied force in the right direction and with the right amount to get the result he wanted.

One.

Then two.

Then three.

The fourth tried to create a stone barrier between himself and Rex, but Rex dismantled it with a single telekinetic pulse and continued. The fifth attempted to create a canyon space between them, but Rex crossed the distance before the space fully established itself.

The blood that reached the canyon walls flowed upward instead of downward, a specific consequence of the applied force and the trajectories involved. It then reached the upper sections of the canyon walls, where it began to run down through the moss and mineral staining, creating thin, dark lines.

It dripped from the overhangs in small drops that fell onto the dust of the canyon floor. The light filtering through the canyon’s upper opening illuminated those drops as they descended, briefly turning them red.

The five named Legion members stood at the center of the canyon, watching the dark lines appear on the stone above them. Kregg. Virella. Kael. Varek. Seris.

This moment marked the first time Rex had observed a genuine disruption in their composure since the engagement had begun.

Rex landed in front of them.

He had gathered what remained of the five unnamed members and dropped them onto the canyon floor, placing them between himself and the five named members with no particular ceremony.

They landed on the stone, making a sound that suggested mass and the force of being dropped from a standing height, and they lay there in the dust. The blood spread outward from each of them, mingling with the dark mineral earth.

Kregg glanced at the others before turning his gaze to Rex.

"Y-You are..."

"How did you..."

"What a fucking joke..." Rex used water magic on his bloodstained clothes. "I was hoping for some entertainment, but seeing their blood spilled everywhere wasn’t enough."

Virella’s sword hand tightened.

"Your move," Rex said pleasantly.

Kael moved first because Kael had not yet finished his calculation and was operating on the assumption that what had just happened to his five colleagues had been accomplished through abilities the primordial boundary would still deflect.

He released a stone compression working at Rex’s feet.

Rex was two meters to the right of where he’d been standing when the working arrived. The teleportation had displaced him in the time between Kael initiating and delivering, and the stone compression hit the empty canyon floor and produced nothing.

Rex was already behind Kael.

He drew Kael’s sword from its sheath at his hip with his right hand while simultaneously using his left hand to deliver a quick strike to the base of Kael’s skull. The strike employed earthen hardening at a fraction of its full output, enough to completely disorient him.

BAAMMM!

He stepped back before Kael’s legs could determine their next move, and Kael collapsed in the distinctive manner of someone whose neural processing has been abruptly interrupted mid-instruction.

Varek and Seris came in together, which was the right decision. They targeted him from angles that required addressing two simultaneous threats, and Varek was already forming a working between his hands as Seris closed the distance with a dense, layered fire construction that was considerably more precise than most fire users worked at.

Rex hurled Kael’s sword at Varek.

Not the flat edge. The point of the sword traveled with the speed that full-output telekinesis could generate, which was significantly greater than the velocity of a weapon thrown using only physical momentum.

It crossed the space between them in the time it took Varek to raise his hands for a defensive working, and it arrived before the defensive working was complete.

SLASSSHH!

Varek’s head dropped, followed by the collapse of his body.

Seris had already committed to her fire construction, which was dense, layered, and crafted with the specific precision Rex had observed in the chamber. It was a well-constructed formation.

Absorbing it would have been challenging if Rex’s defensive structure functioned like typical system-granted defenses.

But... he didn’t need to.

Rex let the working reach him. Instead of deflecting or absorbing it, he read the frequency structure as it arrived. Elemental Mastery processed the layered construction in the half-second between contact and impact.

He then produced the same construction in reverse at the point of contact, inverting the frequency signature. The incoming working encountered an exact negative of itself and canceled at the source rather than propagating through.

The explosion that should have affected Rex’s left side instead produced a short, sharp compression wave expanding outward equally in all directions. Seris took the same force she had sent at Rex, reflected back at equal magnitude from close range.

She hit the canyon wall.

Miraculously, she was alive. Rex had confirmed that the working contained no trace of the original frequency before he inverted it, which was the crucial check.

She was against the wall and not getting up quickly, but she was breathing.

Rex stood in the canyon with the empty scabbard and looked at Kregg and Virella.

But then...

The sound of boots on ice came from the upper-left section of the canyon wall, and Rex looked up.

Mireya had constructed an ice slide extending from the upper lip of the canyon entrance down to the floor, sloping at a sharp forty-degree angle. She descended rapidly, her sword drawn and her frost field activated.

As she reached the canyon floor, her momentum carried her into a landing crouch, creating a burst of ice crystals that scattered across the mineral dust.

’What the fuck is she doing here...?!’

She stood up and took in the scene.

Rex stood among the five unnamed Legion members, positioned across the canyon floor. Kael, Varek, and Seris lay in arrangements formed during the last thirty seconds.

Blood stained the canyon walls, trickling down through the moss. Apollo remained unconscious where the Legion had carried him. Veylor, the third reincarnator, was also present.

She looked at all of it for several seconds without saying anything.

Then she looked at Rex.

"You... did all of this...?" she said.

"Yeah," Rex said.

"By yourself...?"

"I don’t know. Who do you think did it?"

"Anyway, the ones by the wall are still alive," he said.

She looked at the wall and then back at Rex, and the frost in her sword hand flickered twice with the rhythm of someone recalibrating their physical state from one preparation to another.

Kregg moved when they were having a conversation.

He covered the distance to Mireya in three steps, and Mireya’s attention was still on Rex, still in the recalibration, and Kregg arrived behind her before the sword came back up.

His left arm went across her collarbones from behind, and his right hand pressed flat against the canyon floor, and the stone closed over her feet and ankles in the upward-locking grip of someone who understood geological work at a level that required no preparation time.

"Agghh—"

’Useless bitch.’

Mireya was pinned. Her sword was in her hand, but the angle was unfavorable; every option from that position involved addressing Kregg’s arm as the primary obstacle, and there was no way to resolve it from where she was.

"Urrggghhh...! Let go...!!!" Mireya tried to resist.

Kregg looked at Rex across the five meters between them.

"Stop what you’re doing right now," he said. "Or this girl gets it!"

His voice had changed. It still maintained the same flat precision he had used in the chamber, but beneath that surface, something new was present—an awareness unique to someone who had witnessed a situation unfold in an unexpected direction.

Now, instead of executing a plan, he was managing an outcome.

Rex stood with his hands at his sides and looked at him.

He looked at Apollo, still unconscious, the ring’s extraction field keeping him under at a maintenance level, his chest moving in the even rhythm of someone deeply under rather than injured.

He glanced at Veylor and then shifted his gaze to the third reincarnator.

None of them were waking up.

"Most reincarnators," Kregg said, using a tone reminiscent of someone revisiting a previously made argument they strongly believe in, "are, at their core, still human beings."

"They came from a world with conscience, where they protect people and refrain from actions that come at too high a cost." His grip on Mireya remained firm, but his gaze was fixed solely on Rex. "I witnessed you enter this canyon and perform the actions you just did, and I am warning you now that..."

"The Balance Keeper is not an opponent you want to face."