Chapter 404: 404. I Thought He’s Going To Give Me A Good Fight, But He Gave Up Too Fast

Rex released the lock. Kregg reached into his outfit and produced a folded document sealed with a mark Rex didn’t recognize, pressed wax over something geometric and precise. He held it out, not toward Rex directly but toward the ground between them, at arm’s length.

Rex let go of Virella and used telekinesis to take the document from the distance. Virella stepped away from him, swiftly, and put herself between Kregg and Rex with her six broken fingers held carefully against her body.

Rex looked at the seal. Then he broke it and unfolded the document.

The script was clean and formal, the kind of hand that indicated extensive education and deliberate practice, and the content was not long. He read it in approximately forty seconds, and during those forty seconds several things clicked into place that had been adjacent to each other without connection.

’Why the hell would she be stupid enough to send a document like this...?’

The document was a compact of service, structured as Kregg had described—a terminal arrangement. It outlined the specific duties to be performed and the compensation terms, which included extended operational latitude.

At the end of the document was a clause phrased with the precision of a legal instrument but conveying something straightforward. This clause specified the conditions under which the compact would be considered fulfilled.

One condition was a natural conclusion, ambiguous enough to be interpreted in various ways. The other was direct: an operational compromise that would expose the Balance Keeper’s identity or location.

Kregg had just met the second condition.

He understood the implications of providing Rex with the name. He had handed Rex the document, fully cognizant of its significance.

Rex looked up from the document at Kregg.

Kregg looked at him like someone who had made a decision and was dealing with its consequences.

"She’ll know," Kregg said. "She has methods of monitoring compliance with the compact."

"The moment the name left my mouth, the clock started." He spoke with the calmness of someone who had already come to terms with his decision before voicing it. "I don’t have a long time after this..."

Rex looked at the document. Then he looked at the ring on Kregg’s hand, the extraction ring that had put Apollo on his knees, and he looked at it with the full attention of his energy perception working at maximum resolution.

The ring was complex, just as it said in the document. Not just a basic tool for binding or suppression, but a complicated device with multiple layers of advanced technology, featuring a fundamental frequency at its center and a magical application on the surface that enabled the extraction to work.

However, it is only effective for reincarnators.

It had been crafted by someone with both primordial energy access and high conventional magical skill.

He looked at Kregg.

"I’m going to take the ring," Rex said.

Kregg glanced at the ring, then at Virella. After a moment, he removed the ring and extended it.

Rex, using telekinesis, took the ring and placed it in his pocket. ’I can use this ring as one of my plans to steal that bum’s final bitch for trying to get in my way by being a burden...’

"Get out of this canyon," Rex said to Kregg. "You and her."

"Use whatever time you have for whatever you want to use it for."

Kregg looked at him, and Rex could see that this was not the outcome Kregg had expected the conversation to arrive at. Something in his posture shifted, a fraction of the sustained tension leaving his shoulders.

"You’re... letting us go?" Kregg said.

"I have what I need," Rex said. "You’ve become temporarily—"

He was already moving before the sentence finished.

The teleportation put him directly behind Virella in the half-second that both Kregg and Virella had spent processing the word "temporarily" as though it were the preface to something benign, and Rex drove his right fist into her back with the full earthen authority enhancement behind it, not as a strike but as a penetrating force, the kind of output that operated at geological scale.

His fist went through her.

STAB!

The sound it made was not loud. It was the brief, dense sound of something crossing a threshold it was not designed to cross, and then Rex’s knuckles were visible on the other side of her sternum, and the canyon was very quiet for approximately one second.

"A-Aggghhh...!"

Virella looked down at the thing that had appeared in front of her chest. Her hands came up by reflex, both of them, the broken fingers and the unbroken ones, and she touched the back of his hand with her fingertips in a gesture that had no practical function.

"BLEERGGGH!" Virella spat a significant amount of blood from her mouth.

Rex withdrew his arm.

Virella glanced at Kregg one last time. "K...Kregg..." and then she collapsed.

Kregg remained motionless throughout the ordeal. He observed it in a tense silence, as if time had paused in a vast canyon.

The expression on his face was no longer the calculated, professional demeanor of the man who had stood in the chamber while Apollo unleashed his fury. That composure had vanished.

Instead, what replaced it was something far more basic and profoundly disturbing—the look of a person who has just witnessed something they were utterly unprepared for, despite all the contingencies they had anticipated.

"Do you think I would let both of you live just like that...?" Rex grinned. "Let me make it fast by killing you before her."

"Vi... Virella," he said and then screamed. "No...! Oh god, NOOO!!!"

Rex stood between Kregg and her body, looking across the five meters that separated them.

"You said she was going to kill you anyway," Rex said. "Well, turns out, she was right."

"I was always going to do this, and the only question was the order." Rex then laughed. "Both of you are stupid enough to not at least give me some challenge."

"YOU FUCKING BASTARDDDD!!!" Kregg screamed and let out a lot of shockwaves that moved Rex’s hair. "I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOUUUUU!!!"

Kregg’s hands came up, and the primordial energy built between them with a speed that was different from anything Rex had seen him use in the chamber: no measured pacing, no tactical positioning, just output at whatever rate the grief and the rage were driving it.

The working struck Rex across the chest, forcing him back three steps. This was the first time any of Kregg’s primordial-based attacks had achieved such an effect.

Rex recognized the reason for this: the primordial frequency, operating at full emotional output, functioned differently than the controlled application Kregg had employed throughout the day. It was broader and denser, impacting Rex’s system-granted defenses with a weight they had not encountered in this form before.

Kregg closed the distance while Rex was still reading the impact.

Kregg was fast when he chose not to be slow, and Rex realized that everything in the chamber had been a result of deliberate restraint, indicating he had only seen a small portion of Kregg’s abilities when he stopped managing his output.

Kregg approached with both hands, and the primordial energy surrounding his strikes allowed them to bypass the physical impact boundary created by Rex’s earthen authority, with each hit landing at a specific frequency that Rex’s body’s defense structures were not calibrated to respond to.

"I SHOULD’VE KILLED YOU WHEN I GOT THE CHANCE!"

Rex took the first three. "Oh yeah?! Try me then!"

He let them land because he needed the full frequency signature before he could work with it, and foresight mapped the fourth coming a fraction of a second before it arrived, and he stepped into it rather than away from it, closing the distance between them to the range where Kregg’s reach became a liability rather than an asset.

At this range, Rex’s original frequencies were the relevant tool. He had created them from logical first principles using Elemental Magic Creation, which meant they existed outside any resonance profile the primordial energy base had been calibrated against.

He formed two of them in his left hand and pressed them flat against Kregg’s midsection at close contact range.

The frequencies found Kregg’s primordial energy base and began running a cancellation sequence against its core resonance, the same principle he had used against Seris’s fire working earlier in the canyon, an inverted mirror held against the source signal at point of contact.

Kregg felt the disruption. Rex observed the specific reaction of someone whose primary power was suddenly facing interference at its core rather than its surface, causing the output to waver. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Rex hit him with his right hand in the same moment the wavering happened, earthen authority behind it, and Kregg went back four meters and hit the canyon wall.

He pushed off the wall immediately, which Rex had expected, and came back in with a sustained primordial output that was no longer targeting Rex’s body but the stone around them, attempting to reshape the canyon floor to restrict Rex’s movement options the way he had restricted Mireya’s earlier.

Rex sensed what Kregg was trying to do with the earth before it was complete and sent a counter-force through the ground that changed Kregg’s reshaping to go down instead of up. The floor stayed flat.

"S-Stop...!" Kregg said.

He was still moving, still driving pressure forward, but the word had come out of a different register from his combat output. "I’ll... I’ll tell you everything else I know!"

"Giving up that fast already?!" Rex laughed. "What a fucking joke!"

"Where’s all the bravado you’ve shown me earlier when I kill that fucking bitch, huh?!"