Chapter 407: 407. This Ice Bitch Is Going To Get Punished Because Of The Way She Glazed

Mireya glanced once more at the canyon floor, taking in Kregg, Virella, and the seven unnamed members scattered between the canyon walls.

"You keep saying Apollo wouldn’t have done this," Rex said. "You’re right..."

"Apollo also wouldn’t have come into this canyon alone and gotten ten Legion members to release three captives," Rex laughed. "You want to hold the comparison all the way through or only the parts that work for your argument."

"He would have found another way," Mireya said, but it was quieter than the previous statements and had less behind it.

"Tell me what the other way was," Rex said. "Specifically."

"You’ve had five minutes, and you’re smart."

"Tell me the sequence of events that gets Apollo and Veylor out of this canyon alive without producing this canyon floor."

Mireya opened her mouth and then didn’t say anything.

Rex waited.

"I don’t know..." She said, "That doesn’t mean it didn’t exist."

"It means you can’t identify it," Rex said. "This is what matters for the decision I was making in real time."

"It means I’m not a strategic genius who calculated every option in thirty seconds," Mireya said. "It doesn’t mean there wasn’t a better option. But it just means you didn’t look for it, because you didn’t want to."

Rex considered this. It was actually closer to accurate than most of what she’d been saying, which he respected.

"You might be right about that," he said.

Mireya blinked. That was not the response she had been preparing for.

"W-what...?"

"I said you might be right," Rex said. "There may have been an option I didn’t look for."

"I didn’t look for it, and you’re accurate that I didn’t want to." He looked at her evenly. "That changes nothing about what I told you earlier."

"The outcomes are what they are. But you’re right that the choice to not look was a choice."

Mireya stared at him, appearing to recalibrate her thoughts as the conversation ventured into unexpected territory. This indicated she was processing the unforeseen implications of his remarks about choice and perception.

"Then why are you telling me that?" she said.

"Because you’re perceptive and you’re going to be around people I interact with for the foreseeable future," Rex said. "And people who are perceptive and frustrated make poor decisions when they think they’re being managed."

"So I’m not managing you, but I’m telling you what’s accurate."

Mireya was quiet.

"You’re doing it right now," she said. "That’s managing me."

"Maybe," Rex said. "The difference between managing and being honest about the situation is in the intent, and you don’t have access to my intent, so you’re working from what I give you."

"That’s always been true," he paused. "It’s true of everyone you’ve ever dealt with."

Mireya looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone who wants to find the flaw in an argument and cannot immediately locate it.

"Apollo is still a better person than you," she said.

"I know," Rex said.

"That matters."

"To you," Rex said. "Yes, it does."

"And not to you."

Rex said nothing to that. The canyon was quiet around them, with late afternoon light moving across the upper walls and shadows growing longer, indicating that time was running out to get three unconscious people to the carriage point before dark.

"I’m still going to tell Elizabeth what I saw," Mireya said, her voice quieter than before. It carried the weight of a thought she seemed to be sharing more with herself than with him.

"Well, suit yourself with that," Rex said. "It’s not going to be worth it anyway."

’I’m going to fucking punish her after all of this...’ Rex clenched his fists. ’Even if she’s going to try and tell Elizabeth about it...’

Rex kept the key tucked away in his pocket, already scheming about how to bring Elizabeth to her knees before him.

"And you’re not worried about that...?" Mireya frowned. "You really are weird, and now... I really can’t fully trust you at all."

"I told you what you’re working with," Rex said. "Worry is a separate question from accuracy."

Mireya regarded him with the distinct expression of someone weighing the decision to either press on or let the matter drop. Rex could perceive her thought process unfolding in real time, and the outcome became evident in the way her shoulders shifted—a subtle settling that signified not defeat, but an acknowledgment of a barrier she was unwilling to breach that day. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"You could have let them go," she repeated, her tone devoid of argument—merely a statement.

’Fucking hell... this is just repeating now!’

"I don’t know how many times you’re going to repeat that," Rex said.

"You’re not going to tell me why you really didn’t."

"No," Rex said. "I’m not."

She held his gaze for another moment.

Then she said, "If I ever find a reason to prove what happened here, I will."

Rex looked at her steadily. "I know," he said, and then, with the same even tone he used for everything, "you should know that you’re standing in a canyon surrounded by Legion dead, three unconscious people, and no witnesses."

"Elizabeth is aware that you returned separately. Alexander is also aware that you returned separately." He let the silence linger for precisely two seconds. "If you were discovered here, Mireya, the conclusion everyone would draw is that the Legion captured you before you could escape."

Mireya went still.

Rex kept his voice exactly where it had been throughout the conversation, not hard, not threatening in any conventional register, just precise.

"Y-You... don’t tell me..." Mireya starts to get scared when her body suddenly shivers.

"I’m not telling you what I’ll do," he said. "I’m telling you what the situation is."

"The same way I’ve been telling you what the situation is this entire conversation." He looked at her. "You want to find a reason to prove what happened here."

"You have every right to look. But while you’re looking, be accurate about where you’re standing and who’s standing next to you and what the people you trust have access to and what they don’t."

Mireya said nothing. She was looking at him with the expression of someone who has just felt the actual shape of a thing they had previously understood only in outline.

"That..." she said quietly, "...was a threat!"

"It was accurate information," Rex said. "What you do with it is your decision."

He held her gaze for one more second. "Same as before."

The canyon held the silence between them.

He turned toward Apollo and Veylor and the expedition member still unconscious on the canyon floor.

"Are you going to wait here and let them worry?" Rex asked. "Let’s just leave this place now."

"Can you walk?" Rex said.

She looked at her legs. "Yes."

"Then I need your help carrying three unconscious people up a canyon."

Mireya was quiet for a long moment, observing the canyon floor. She glanced at Kregg and Virella, along with the seven unnamed members in the positions they had ended up in.

Then, her gaze shifted to Apollo, who was breathing steadily, suggesting he would wake up in less than an hour. Finally, she looked at Veylor, who was the reason Iris had managed to hold herself together through three days of turmoil and who was alive because Rex had bravely come through the earthen passage to confront ten Legion members alone.

’He’s right... I need to forget about this...’

’This is my fault because I came here and almost got myself killed because of the Legion...’ Mireya bites her lips. ’But still... Rex is someone that can’t be trusted at all."

’I know that he saved my life, but I don’t want to be saved in that kind of way... it’s wrong...’

’I just need to wait for my chance to punish him so that he deserves at least some punishment for what he just caused.’

She pushed herself upright, using the canyon wall for support.

"Right," she said, her voice low and lacking conviction. "Right. Let’s do that."

Rex crouched beside Apollo, checked his pulse and his breathing, and assessed the ring’s extraction field. Without Kregg’s ring operational, the suppression on Apollo’s designation had been running on residual energy since the canyon engagement began, and the residual was depleting.

Apollo would wake up on his own within the hour. Rex left him where he was and looked at the key in his hand, turning it once, feeling the dimensional material’s specific density against his palm.

’I can use dream manipulation to execute my plan to fucking punish that ice bitch...’ Rex thought. ’Yeah... I think that’s the key to making her do everything he wants for Apollo’s safety because she’s such a glazer toward him.’

He put it in his inside jacket pocket, next to the ring and the document.

...

Alexander approached the canyon’s upper area, moving at a pace between a jog and a run, indicating to Rex that he had detected the signal through the stone vibration transmitted by the earthen authority and had come as quickly as the terrain would allow.

He arrived at the canyon floor with his hands already raised and his elemental workings already half-formed, and then he took in the scene and let them settle.

Rex stood at the canyon floor, the key tucked in his pocket, surrounded by three unconscious reincarnators positioned haphazardly around him. Mireya was on her feet, but she was clearly favoring her left side due to the electrical discharge.

No Legion members were visible in any direction because they had already walked far away from the dead bodies.

Alexander looked at all of this in a sequence that tracked from the most urgent priority to the least, and when he’d finished the sequence, he looked at Rex.

"Thank god... both of you are safe." Alexander exhaled. "What happened?"

"Where are the Legions?!"