"You didn’t just ’travel’ through there!" Zane roared, the sudden volume making Apollo flinch. "You slaughtered a Legion senior operative and brought back his designation token like it was a goddamn souvenir from a fucking field trip!"

Rex’s eyes narrowed, just a fraction. The politeness didn’t vanish, but a layer of steel slid beneath it.

"I brought it back because it was evidence..."

"I handed it over to the relevant Academy authorities. What those bureaucratic bastards chose to do with it after that was not my fucking responsibility."

Zane took a step forward, his hand twitching toward the hilt of his weapon, his entire aura screaming of a man ready to draw blood.

"You are describing this," he said, each word a slow, deliberate strike, "as though it were an administrative decision."

"As if you were just filing paperwork instead of tearing a man’s throat out!"

"It was an administrative decision, from my perspective," Rex snapped back, the first real crack of heat appearing in his voice. "I encountered a dangerous, high-threat situation."

"I addressed it with the necessary level of violence, and I reported it through the appropriate, official channels."

"If you have a problem with how the Academy handled the follow-up, or how they chose to bury the truth, then you’re talking to the wrong goddamn person."

Apollo watched the exchange, his head spinning. He looked at Rex, then at Zane, then at the carnage around them, feeling a profound sense of vertigo.

He was looking at Rex with the specific, haunted expression of someone watching a familiar tragedy unfold, the kind of look a man gives when he realizes the person he thought he knew was merely a beautifully constructed mask for something much more dangerous. He couldn’t decide if he was impressed by Rex’s sheer, unshakeable audacity or deeply, viscerally unsettled by the coldness of it.

The tension in the air was a physical thing, a tightening cord that threatened to snap and lash everyone present.

Then, the sky seemed to descend.

Ignivara dropped from the dragon’s back. She didn’t fall; she plummeted with a terrifying, controlled grace.

Her half-dragon physiology absorbed the violent kinetic energy of the descent, her muscles tensing and releasing with a precision that would have shattered a human’s legs upon impact. She landed in the center of the ruined plaza with a heavy, muffled thud, a small cloud of dust and pulverized stone blooming around her feet.

She was shorter than the legends suggested, her presence far more compact and concentrated. Her white hair was cut to a sharp, jaw-length bob that framed a face of predatory stillness.

The small, curved horns at her temples were elegant but lethal, the unmistakable markers of her lineage. But it was her eyes that froze the blood in Apollo’s veins—flat, golden orbs that didn’t just look at Rex; they scanned him, dissected him, and filed his existence away into a mental ledger of threats.

She was performing a triple-layered combat assessment in real time: reading his stance, measuring his energy output, and calculating his lethality. And the results were clearly unanimous.

"The Legion of Anti-Reincarnators," Rex said, cutting through the silence before she could utter a single word.

His voice had lost its polite, student-like veneer. It had shifted into something sharper, an edge of steel sliding into the conversation, the tone of a man who had just realized a predator had entered his territory.

"You didn’t exactly receive an invitation to Aethelgard."

"Celestina sent us," Ignivara replied, and her voice was a low, resonant hum that seemed to vibrate through the very ground.

"Celestina," Rex repeated.

He let the name hang in the air, heavy and laden with a subtext that made Apollo’s skin crawl. He spoke the name with the weary familiarity of a man who knew the woman’s secrets all too well, a man who was deciding exactly how much of that dangerous knowledge he was willing to reveal.

"Celestina does not own Aethelgard. She doesn’t even own this island, or the underlayer beneath it, nor the reincarnators currently living in any of those fucking places."

"She owns the operation that has been systematically eliminating reincarnators for thirty years," Ignivara countered.

Her voice wasn’t loud, but it possessed a terrifying, singular clarity that commanded the entire plaza. "And in a single, blood-soaked night, you decimated every contact she had in the Underlayer."

"You slaughtered fifteen of our finest operatives..."

"You left a trail of corpses and broken bones that the earth can barely swallow."

She took a step toward him, her golden eyes narrowing. There was no hot, screaming rage in her gaze; instead, there was something much colder and more permanent, a grief that had been distilled, processed, and forged into a singular, lethal purpose.

"You didn’t just kill them, Rex Rexilion," she whispered, the words cutting deeper than any blade. "You sent a message with their deaths..."

"You let one man escape, specifically so he could crawl back to her and tell her what you are."

She stood her ground, a small figure against the backdrop of a dying world, her eyes locking onto his with the finality of a death sentence.

"I am the message back," she said.

Rex fell into a silence that was heavy, suffocating, and entirely artificial. To Apollo, it looked like the silence of a man reeling from a devastating accusation.

To Zane, it looked like the silence of a predator waiting for the perfect moment to strike. But in reality, it was the silence of a grandmaster looking at a chessboard, calculating which lie would be the most structurally sound to build his defense upon.

He wasn’t processing the news; he was selecting the most convincing way to dismantle it.

"Fifteen, huh..." Rex finally said, his voice a masterpiece of casual, slightly weary recollection.

He didn’t look like a mass murderer; he looked like a student trying to remember a footnote from a history lecture. "I am aware of thirteen..."

"The other two were reported as standard underlayer collateral in the governance transition logs... a tragic, if statistically expected, byproduct of the upheaval."

Ignivara’s golden eyes didn’t flicker, but the air around her seemed to grow colder, the temperature dropping as her focus tightened like a closing vise.

"You read the governance transition logs," she stated, her voice laced with a new, razor-sharp suspicion.

"I read everything the Underlayer produced during the transition period," Rex countered easily.

He let a small, sheepish shrug settle into his shoulders, a calculated movement designed to make him appear vulnerable, even a little bit nerdy. "Information is the only currency that doesn’t devalue in a crisis. It seemed... relevant."

"You read the internal, classified operational records of an organization you were not affiliated with," Ignivara pressed, her hand hovering near the hilt of her weapon, her very presence a coiled spring of lethal intent.

Rex let out a soft, almost amused huff of breath, the kind of sound a person makes when a friend makes an absurdly exaggerated claim.

"Someone was in the underlayer during the transition period, and he escaped but ended up dying in my hands with all the information I needed," he said, his tone possessing that maddeningly mild quality of someone making a minor technical correction.

And what Rex just said, of course, was a full-blown lie because he’s trying to be the manipulative man he is right now. "The records were part of the ambient informational environment..."

"Honestly, Ignivara, it would have been more difficult to avoid reading them than to actually sit down and study them."

"They were everywhere."

He cast a quick, subtle glance toward Apollo, a look of feigned confusion, as if he were wondering why everyone was suddenly treating him like a criminal. It was a masterstroke of manipulation; by appearing slightly overwhelmed by the accusation, he made Apollo feel a protective instinct, a desire to defend his friend against these "aggressive" outsiders.

"You were not in the Underlayer during the transition," Zane interrupted.

His voice was a low, vibrating growl, cutting through Rex’s performance like a serrated blade. Zane wasn’t buying the act.

He was watching the microexpressions, the way Rex’s eyes didn’t quite match the softness of his voice. "The transit logs for the academy students place you in the upper tiers the entire time."

"Oh? So you do know about that, huh? Well, I was near enough," Rex said, his voice remaining unshakably calm, a smooth stone in a rushing river. "The borders are porous."

"A student can slip through a mountain pass or a service tunnel without the entire world noticing..."

"To say I wasn’t there is an exaggeration; to say I was a permanent resident is a fallacy."

"That is not the same fucking thing!" Zane snapped, stepping into Rex’s personal space, his shadow looming large and threatening. "Being ’near’ a massacre and being the one holding the bloody knife are two very different realities, Rex!"