The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 297. All It Takes Is One Uppercut To Prove That It Wasn’t Luck!
Rex said. "Huh? I didn’t mean to mock you or anything."
"What I did was the right thing to do based on the information I had at the time," he said.
Rex replied, "I’m sure it was," and the way he said it was completely neutral with a little hint of sarcasm.
"Alright, that’s enough now, honey." Elizabeth put her hand on Alexander’s arm. "Rex is on the team for tomorrow."
Alexander looked at her, then at Rex again.
"Is he?" he said.
"He’s the reason I’m confident we can retrieve the artifact and bring Aurelia’s group back," Elizabeth said. "I need you both on this mission."
Alexander looked at Rex with the assessment expression, which was rerun with the additional information that Rex was going to be in the field with him.
"That’s an impressive record for a student with a lot of luck," Alexander said again, but this time it was different. "I want to see it before I trust it."
Rex stared at him.
"You want to spar," Rex said.
"Oh yeah, that’s one way to put it—sparring," Alexander confirmed.
"Alex," Elizabeth said.
"It’s a fair request," Alexander said, sounding like he knew it wasn’t a fair request but had chosen to call it that anyway. "Before you go on a mission, you check out the people you’ll be working with."
"That’s normal." Alexander then held his face. "If you don’t check them out... what if they end up being a burden?’
Rex’s eyebrow twitches. ’Oh, this fucking asshole is going to get it for sure...’
’I won’t let this slide at all.’
"I’ve seen enough of Rex’s work to be confident," Elizabeth said.
"I haven’t," Alexander said. "And I’d like to."
He looked at Rex.
"Unless," he said, "there’s a reason not to."
Rex thought about this for the exact amount of time it took him to do a full assessment of what he would gain and what he would lose.
He would gain nothing except Alexander’s updated threat assessment and a waste of his afternoon. The win was already certain, which meant the sparring had no value for Rex and significant value for Alexander, who was hoping to establish something social rather than learn anything tactical.
He would spend time, along with a small amount of energy and patience, on this specific type of encounter.
"Fine," Rex said. "Where’s the training ground?"
Rex thought. "I’m doing this because I want to humble this fucking asshole now..."
...
The Academy’s practice field appeared as a space where seriousness reigned supreme. The ground was marked with the remnants of countless real-life engagements, each executed with intense focus.
Elizabeth stood at the edge, wearing the expression of someone who had faced this scenario many times before and wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
A small crowd had gathered, as the Academy was known for its community’s interest in who was training on the field and the reasons behind it.
Rex saw Nerith in the group, along with Apollo, Mireya, and Iris, who had her arms crossed in a way that was a little different from how she usually did.
Alexander took off his outer layer and rolled his shoulders in a way that showed he had been doing this work for years and was comfortable with it.
"I can’t wait to teach you a lesson after what you just said earlier to me."
Before he let anything go, his magical signature was clear. This was the signature of someone whose output scale was so high that containment required active effort at rest. He was tough. Rex gave it to him right away.
"Rules," Elizabeth stated. "The first person unable to continue loses."
"Keep in mind that there are no lethal workings allowed and no targeting the audience."
"Got it," Alexander said and looked at Rex.
Rex nodded.
Elizabeth raised her hand. "Let the sparring..."
"...begins!" She lowered her hand.
Alexander started with three elements at the same time: fire in the middle, wind on the sides, and earth on the ground. All three were moving toward Rex’s position in a converging triangle that was meant to stop lateral movement while the primary working closed.
It was a promising opening. It was the first move of someone who had used this strategy many times and found it to work.
Rex moved to the right and let the fire go by two feet to his left. He deflected the wind on the flank upward with a counter-working that changed the force’s direction so that it was no longer parallel to its original axis.
This maneuver took the working out of the converging structure and left a gap on the left side. He then proceeded through the gap.
Rex observed that Alexander was making adjustments. The rapidity of these changes indicated that Alexander possessed genuine field experience rather than merely relying on practiced techniques.
The second wave was more complex: the fire split into three working threads that traveled along distinct paths, each designed to elicit a different response. It was presumed that Rex would either struggle to manage all three simultaneously or be forced to adopt a defensive stance.
Rex took care of all three.
He ran fire against the first thread, which met it at the midpoint and consumed both. He turned the second with ice, crystallizing the working’s internal structure at its leading edge, which caused it to lose cohesion.
He simply moved away from the third thread, which was designed to force him into a stationary position, and he had no intention of remaining still.
Alexander’s expression had changed. "No fucking way..." 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎
He was not performing confidence anymore. And now he’s starting to take this sparring serious.
"I’ll finish this right now!" Alexander shouted while casting a lot of magic.
The third wave encompassed everything Alexander had, matching the intensity of his signature move from before the engagement began.
It was impressive in a way that only truly effective actions can be: devoid of showmanship, it represented the culmination of years of dedicated development at full capacity.
Rex saw it coming with the Foresight running at its normal margin and the Elemental Mastery doing the structural analysis in the three seconds it had.
’I see everything...’
He stepped forward.
Not backward. Not sideways.
But forward... through the working’s outer edge, where the force density was lowest, using the wind element at its full ceiling to create a personal field that moved with him instead of ahead of him, taking the pressure of contact from the working’s edge without stopping his forward movement.
Alexander saw him coming and did what the situation demanded, which was to redirect his output from offense to close-range defense.
Rex went down.
Not because he was overwhelmed. The Earthen Mastery, which operates at the physical level and is a non-divine layer available for general use, provided him with a complete map of everything beneath the training ground’s surface within his immediate radius, including the specific texture and density of the compacted soil at three different depths.
He hit the ground and went through it.
He did not go through the ground entirely; instead, he passed through the two-foot layer of surface material and into the loose subsurface below. It moved sideways at the speed that Martial Arts Full Potential gave it when applied to strange shapes, covering about fifteen feet underground before angling back up.
The ground in front of Alexander moved.
Rex came up from below, right under Alexander, and hit him in the jaw with an uppercut that was as strong as someone who had been street fighting for twenty years and knew how to use every striking system ever made when they were in the best position.
The impact was clean and complete.
Alexander fell backward and down, and the manner in which he descended indicated that the system governing his consciousness had been briefly interrupted and was now restarting.
Everyone was shocked to see that Rex had been planning something brilliant.
Rex stood in the divot his emergence had created.
He crossed his arms.
He looked at Alexander, who was lying on his back with a look on his face like he was trying to figure out what had happened to make this happen.
"That’s it?" Rex asked. "I win with a trick like that?"
There wasn’t much noise at the training ground.
"You were at the left flank when I went down," Rex said, looking at no one in particular. "So I came up at the center."
"I guess you can’t call that luck other than field knowledge of the subsurface, huh?" He looked at Alexander. "If you’re going to watch your opponent, watch where they’re going, not where they are."
Alexander looked up at him from the ground, wearing the expression of someone whose initiated evaluation had unexpectedly turned into an unrequested lesson.
Elizabeth had her hands over her mouth.
Iris was watching from the edge of the field with a look that was impossible to read and completely there.
Rex looked at the training ground and thought about tomorrow’s expedition and the Key to the Underlayer and the specific shape of the problem it represented and what he was going to do about it.
He had, at minimum, tonight and one more morning to work with before everything moved to the field.
He gazed up at the sky. The sky was the exact blue of a clear Aethelgard afternoon, and it seemed indifferent to the events that had just occurred on the ground below.
"Whenever you’re ready for more," Rex said to the general courtyard and walked off the field.
"I’m right here before I leave this training ground."
