The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 218. I Was Still Laughing While My Ribs Were Hurting (Like I Said, Worth It)
Apollo moved at the speed of light, and Rex didn’t catch him until he was already there.
The first hit was fire—not thrown, but pressed. Apollo’s palm was flat against Rex’s chest, and the heat surged inward instead of outward, the kind that wasn’t concerned about armor or fields or anything designed to block distant attacks.
Rex’s field spiked. Apollo was already in motion.
The second strike was physical. An elbow to the side of Rex’s jaw, angled upward, the kind of blow that didn’t require magic because the geometry was already perfect.
Rex’s head snapped back. His field stuttered for precisely the duration Apollo had calculated.
In that moment—the pulse.
It erupted from Apollo’s free hand, low and aimed at the center of Rex’s stance rather than his body. The shockwave didn’t push him back; it pushed the ground out from under him, presenting a different problem entirely, one Rex’s field was unprepared for.
Rex hit the rubble.
Apollo stood over him before the dust had settled.
Apollo didn’t give him the land back.
This time, the fire came first. It was wide and wall-shaped, creating an impenetrable barrier. Rex unleashed it across his entire field at once, and the load warnings shifted from cautionary alerts to dire realities.
Before the flames cleared, Apollo had already made his move.
His fist struck Rex in the chest. Then the light emerged—not as a beam, but as a cage with six points encircling Rex’s body, all collapsing inward simultaneously.
It wasn’t designed to be sharp, but its purpose was to fold the field in on itself, forcing Rex to grapple with his own power rather than with Apollo for the next half second.
And, of course, half a second was all it took.
A pulse detonated right beneath Rex’s feet. Then, before the first pulse had dissipated, another one struck the same spot.
The second pulse collided with the shockwave of the first, resulting in something nameless yet unmistakable in its effect on anything caught within it.
Rex got up with a smirk, and then Apollo directed the light and pulled him back down. He didn’t simply fall, but he was yanked, faster than gravity could act, into a column of fire that had been poised at ground level since the cage descended.
The blow that followed was nearly an afterthought—almost. Apollo propelled it with his shoulder, as one does when transitioning from performance to conclusion.
Rex collided with the wall on the other side.
The force was strong, and it really made Rex feel satisfied, where all he could do was just laugh it all out.
"I’m fucking impressed by what you did to me..." Rex walked out of the building and into the street behind it.
He then went through the narrow space between two houses and stopped against a part of the wall that had fallen down during the undead attack. The surface he hit was made up of uneven stone blocks that gave way a little on impact.
This spread the force and kept the worst of the structural damage from happening, but the force was still very strong.
Rex remained seated in the debris for a moment, processing the situation. "You actually fucking hurt me..."
His left ribs weren’t working right. A cut above his left eye was making blood flow into it.
Two fingers on his right hand had been bent at angles that fingertips don’t stay at unless something was wrong with the structural parts. The Infinite Regeneration was fixing everything, but it would take about twenty seconds to fix the ribs and less time to fix everything else, but it wasn’t instant.
Rex sat amidst the rubble of the fallen wall, acutely aware of his injuries. It was a strange satisfaction, the kind that comes when everything unfolds according to plan.
He kept laughing in a low, real voice that started to sound like Xavier’s because Rex knew it was time to reveal his identity.
He slowly got up. "But sadly... it’s still not enough to put me down just like that."
"You need more rage, and I’ll gladly help with that."
The ribs were working at about sixty percent and getting better, and his eye had already recovered. And what’s even better is that his fingers were getting straighter.
He walked out of the rubble and onto the street, then back toward the plaza opening. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖
Apollo stood in the narrow space between the two buildings, observing as Rex rose to his feet. As Rex advanced, Apollo’s expression shifted to one of shock, as if he had just witnessed something that completely contradicted his strategy for this confrontation.
"I think you deserve a real reward for giving me the first pain I felt in years..." Rex then reached up and took off the skull mask.
The skull mask cracked at the brow line during the many impacts due to Apollo’s combination of blows, and the subsequent fall through the building finished the job. The pieces landed on the street.
And with that... Apollo could see the real identity of the Undead Bringer.
It was Xavier Xenworth’s face that was hidden behind Aethelgard’s lamp posts and the fire from the undead attack that was happening in the streets behind them.
Apollo stopped moving with a shocked expression. "No... it couldn’t be..."
His activation was still going on, and his hands were still ready for a fight. The heat distortion in the air around him still showed what his system was doing.
None of that mattered because the person who would have used those things to make decisions could no longer do so.
"No! This is fucking impossible," said Apollo. "Xavier...! There’s no way you..."
The word had no meaning apart from its shape.
Rex stepped over the rubble and stood in the street, four meters from Apollo. The Infinite Regeneration was finishing its work on the ribs, and the blood was cleaned from his eye.
Xavier Xenworth’s face was illuminated by the flames of a city in chaos. Apollo Brightsoul gazed at him, tears streaming down his cheeks.
"Xavier," he said again.
This time, the name had questions underneath it, the kind of questions that have too many possible answers and can’t be answered until the person asking them is sure that the question is about what they think it is.
Rex let it sit for a while.
Then, in a quiet voice that sounded like Xavier’s, he said, "Surprised to see me, Apollo?"
And the longer the silence lasted, the heavier it became.
Apollo looked at Rex like someone who was trying to do something their system wasn’t set up to do: figure out how what you see fits with everything you know about who this person is and make sense of it.
"You’re..." Apollo began, then stopped, and began again. "You’re still alive, but why...?"
"Evidently," Rex said, still in Xavier’s voice.
"We thought—there was nobody, but the forensic read on the energy signature—Elizabeth said the termination was clean, and I—" He cut himself off. "I buried the thought of you."
"I spent three days—" He stopped again.
Rex watched him work through it and didn’t try to speed it up or stop it because it was going exactly how he wanted it to, and he already loved seeing his conflicted expression. "People do change, huh?"
The clock continued to run due to Apollo’s ongoing activation, but the information conveyed by Xavier’s expression completely halted the combat impulse that had been driving Rex for the last eight minutes. This information was more valuable than any tactical advantage Rex could have gained.
"Why?" Apollo asked, and the way he said it made it clear that he needed the answer not for tactical reasons but for basic understanding. "Xavier, please tell me, why would you do all of this?!"
"You killed someone important to me, and you’re just acting like all of this is normal?!"
Rex made him wait three more seconds.
"Answer me, Xavier!" Apollo shouted.
"Mordecai found me before Elizabeth’s team did," Rex said, in the voice and manner of Xavier Xenworth, as Rex had studied him, precise and analytical and careful about the sequence in which information was presented. "I was in a compromised state..."
"He had resources, and he made an offer that I had the choice of accepting or not surviving."
"He... made you an offer...?" Apollo’s voice was flat.
"Yes... a great offer indeed," Rex agreed. "I want to be clear that I knew what I was agreeing to."
"It wasn’t coercion; I made a conscious choice about who I am as a reincarnator capable of obtaining anything I desire."
"Isn’t that supposed to be true for all of us? Reincarnators who are special and can do anything!"
