The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 170. The Plan Just Got a Lot More Expensive and Perfect with The New Skill
"There is a problem you haven’t thought of yet," she said.
Rex said, "Tell me."
"The problem isn’t what you do," Lustia said. "The problem is what Rex Rexilion is seen doing while you do it."
She turned her head and looked at him directly. "You have built a character."
"Rex Rexilion is an innocent and reliable person in the surface world."
"He has a face, a social record, relationships, and an expected presence in specific places. The moment he disappears from all of those places at once, he becomes a question someone will eventually ask out loud."
Rex said nothing. He waited.
"The Undead Bringer has no face," she said. "The Lustful Villain has no academy student record."
"Those are advantages, but they remain advantages only if Rex Rexilion is too visible and too busy to embody either role." She tilted her head slightly. "You can’t be in two places at once."
"Not with your own body."
Rex said, "But with something else...?"
Lustia smiled, which was rare enough that he always noticed it. It wasn’t warm, exactly.
It was the expression of someone who had been waiting for a student to finish a sentence correctly.
"Yup... Something else," she agreed.
She flicked two fingers, and the skill briefing materialized in his interface.
"It is called ’Avatar Creation,’" she said. "And before you read the summary, I want you to understand that I’m not presenting this to you as a convenience."
"I’m presenting it as a structural requirement." Her voice carried genuine emphasis, not merely for effect. "The operation you are planning is too extensive and prolonged to execute without a version of Rex Rexilion that people can see, touch, and interact with while the real Rex Rexilion is engaged in activities that cannot be visibly observed." 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮
"How long have you known about this skill?" Rex said.
"Long enough," Lustia said. "I use it when I want to dive into your world."
"Why tell me this now?"
She picked the peach back up. "Because now’s the perfect time when you need it," she said. "Earlier would have been a waste anyway."
"You weren’t ready to use it correctly, and a skill like this used incorrectly is worse than not having it at all."
"An avatar that behaves wrong is a liability, and also... An avatar deployed before its operator understands the operational stakes is a walking confession."
Rex looked at her.
"Read the briefing," she said. "I’ll answer what the briefing doesn’t."
He read through it while she talked.
The skill did exactly what the name said it would: it made a full, independent avatar of Rex Rexilion that was not a projection or an illusion but a self-sustaining construct made from his own energy signature and animated by a small part of his ongoing awareness.
The avatar looked, moved, talked, and acted like him. People who knew Rex Rexilion knew that it had the same social presence as he did.
It went to class, answered questions, kept up relationships, and took care of all the small talk that his real body would have done when he needed to be somewhere else.
As long as Rex kept the baseline energy channel between him and the avatar open, the avatar could stay alive for as long as he wanted. Once Rex set it up for the first time, his Energy Manipulation was able to operate it without any conscious thought.
"Holy fucking shit..." Rex looked up from the briefing and said, "This is the answer to the problem I was going to have."
"When The Undead Bringer attacks Aethelgard, Rex Rexilion needs to be clearly seen in Aethelgard."
"This is perfect...! Fucking perfect!" Rex smiled.
"Visible, present, appropriately horrified, and doing the right things," Lustia said. "Standing next to Apollo in the crisis response formation, showing concern at the right times, and helping the defense in the same way that Rex Rexilion would."
"While I’m working as The Undead Bringer outside the city," Rex said.
"Or as the Lustful Villain in the Underlayer," Lustia said. "Or anywhere else the situation calls for it."
"The avatar isn’t a passive stand-in; it’s an active representation that runs on your behavioral patterns with enough accuracy to pass any normal social scrutiny."
Rex expressed his disbelief. "How much is it?"
"Five thousand energy points," Lustia said with a smirk. "Which you don’t have right now."
Rex did the math. After a few days of activity, his current balance was in the low hundreds. The Diana maximum bond had added a thousand, which brought his total to just under two thousand.
Five thousand was more than twice what he had.
"It’s even more expensive than the scam infinite regeneration." Rex crossed his arms, and then an idea already came to him.
He said, "Talyra and Aisella."
Lustia looked at him like someone who knew this was going to happen and had been patient while he got there.
"They are both close to fifty." Rex said, "Talyra is at forty-four, and Aisella is at fifty-two."
"Getting both to their maximum gives you two thousand base points and—"
"Two thousand base, plus whatever multiplier applies to the circumstances in which you achieve them." Lustia said, "The numbers move a lot in your favor if you can get a two-way multiplier on either achievement."
"It seems like I really need to have a threesome with both of them to immediately get the desire energy I needed," Rex said, not quite to Lustia but loud enough for her to hear.
Lustia made a noise that resembled a laugh but was not quite one. "I’m going to let you figure out the details on your own," she said. "I believe in your method as always."
"One more question," Rex said.
"You can give me two more if you want," she said.
"Nah, it’s just one this time."
"It’s about Apollo..." Rex said, "The Apostle of Life’s full activation."
"I saw it in the dungeon, and I need to know what I’m actually dealing with, not the operational estimate I formed from watching it for two minutes."
Lustia was quiet for a longer time than usual, and Rex thought the length of the pause said something important about the answer.
"The Apostle of Life designation is the most combat-capable of the Apostle classes in raw output," she said, and her tone had shifted to the careful register she used when she was measuring what to tell him. "The divine connection to the Goddess of Life doesn’t only heal..."
"It reverses entropy in a localized area, which at full activation means that what Apollo projects is not simply light and force but the active unmaking of decay, damage, and entropy within his operational radius."
"I get it now..." Rex said, "That’s why it fucking killed the apex creature right away."
"That’s why anything biological that works on damage-based mechanics will fail in his full activation radius," Lustia said. "Your Infinite Regeneration wouldn’t be affected because regeneration is an acceleration of natural biological processes, not a decay-based mechanic."
"However, your necromantic constructs within that radius would be destroyed because they are powered by necrotic energy, which is fundamentally entropic."
Rex thought about this. "His constructs."
"Three hundred and twelve," Lustia said. "If Apollo were to achieve full activation in proximity to your undead army, the army would not survive the duration of the activation."
"Duration," Rex said.
"Full activation is not sustainable beyond approximately four minutes at his current designation level," Lustia said. "The divine channel has a draw limit that scales with the Apostle’s development."
"Apollo is young as Apostles go, and his channel draw capacity is not yet at the level where he can sustain full activation indefinitely."
"Four minutes," Rex said. "So, that’s how long I need to last, right?"
"At current development," Lustia said. "It will grow."
"But not in the time frame you’re working in right now."
Rex added four minutes to the list of variables he was keeping for Apollo. He wrote that the main operational conclusion was that the undead army should never be deployed within Apollo’s potential activation radius unless the engagement is meant to last less than four minutes or to separate Apollo from the army before activation happens.
"Alright, that’s it then." Rex said, "That’s what I needed."
"I know," Lustia said.
With effortless grace, she rose from the throne. She set the peach scraps aside and looked at him with the warmest expression she permitted herself during these discussions.
"I really want to appreciate your development so far..."
"You really started everything from zero, and now you’re here... but still not enough to dominate even a continent."
"I’m still trying to do better," Rex crossed his arms. "And no need to rush things... I enjoy the process, especially seeing their suffering reactions."
"You’ve done well," she said. "You have five maximum bonds, a skill library that would be illegal in every jurisdiction aware of it, and an undead army currently dormant beneath the world..."
"And a plan that is considerably more sophisticated than anything currently running in this world’s threat landscape."
She reached out with one hand and flicked two fingers forward. It was a small gesture, but it was clear that something was about to happen.
"It’s time to wake up."
"Don’t forget to also wake your new maximum bond partner," she said. "And don’t waste the morning because something amazing is about to happen in the academy."
Lustia held Rex’s cheek and then gave him a gentle farewell kiss on the lips until the domain changed.
"Good luck..."
"...my dear apostle."
