Chapter 740: 740. I Took the Fight to the Heavens Because the Plaza Had Enough Corpses

Ignivara’s gaze drifted away from Rex, sweeping across the devastation of the plaza. She saw Morwenna, pinned to the cracked earth by the invisible, crushing weight of gravity; she saw Valentina, still on her knees, her breathing ragged and her spirit visibly frayed by the sheer violence of the morning.

The air was thick with the metallic tang of blood and the ozone of spent magical energy.

"Tremor did this," Ignivara said, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous register.

"Tremor did most of it," Rex agreed, his tone as matter-of-fact as a man describing the weather.

Ignivara turned back to him.

Her eyes were narrowed, her intellect working at a fever pitch. She spoke with the terrifying precision of a grandmaster calculating a move that could either win the game or end in a bloody stalemate.

"You are telling me," she began, her voice measured, "that the Forbidden Earthen Apostle arrived on this island, conducted a sustained, high-intensity offensive against the Academy and its surrounding districts, and the result is that the situation is less favorable for us than it would have been if Tremor had never set foot here at all?"

"The Underlayer’s reincarnator network was the very infrastructure your operation depended on," Rex countered, stepping into her space, his eyes flashing with a cold, analytical light. "Tremor’s governance transition didn’t just cause chaos; it systematically destabilized the foundation of your strike."

"The people who were supposed to coordinate with your dragon? They are fractured and fighting for survival."

"The relay network meant to amplify the dragon’s devastation is operating at a mere thirty percent capacity."

"You arrived to find the work half done, Ignivara, but it was the wrong half."

"Or," Zane’s voice cut through the air, sharp and cynical, "Tremor and the Legion were always destined to collide on this island at this exact moment."

"Maybe whatever Tremor is actually pulling the strings on benefits from the Legion’s presence just as much as it benefits from everything else that has bled out on this plaza this morning."

A heavy, suffocating silence descended upon the plaza. It was the kind of silence that precedes a thunderclap, where the only sound is the distant, guttural roar of the dragon and the wet, rhythmic gasps of the wounded.

Rex turned his head slowly. He looked at Zane with that same unreadable, mask-like expression he had worn since the interception.

Then he looked at Ignivara, and finally, his gaze drifted to the far edge of the plaza, where Tremor’s form lay a broken, bloodied testament to the day’s brutality.

"That," Rex said, the word carrying the weight of a man acknowledging a profound and dangerous complexity, "is a very interesting theory."

"It is not a theory," Zane snapped, his eyes burning with a desperate need for clarity. "It is a question!"

"Then the answer," Rex said, his voice dropping into a calm, devastatingly honest register, "is that I do not know what Tremor was truly trying to accomplish."

"I know what the Underlayer was aiming for."

"I know what Celestina’s endgame looks like. And I know that the people in this plaza were simply trying to survive the nightmare."

"What I do not know," he said, turning his gaze back to Zane, "is whether all those disparate forces were inadvertently working toward the same catastrophic end without a single one of them knowing it."

"Coordination without communication is a rare phenomenon, Zane... It is possible... but it is nearly impossible to prove in the heat of a slaughter."

He spoke with the earnest, detached quality of a scholar solving a complex equation, a performance so seamless that it felt entirely genuine. Zane stared at him, his jaw tight, his expression a cocktail of suspicion and helpless realization.

He knew Rex was performing; he knew the manipulation was happening in real time, but Rex was so damn good at it that there was no way to catch the lie before it became the truth.

Rex broke the gaze, his mind already shifting back to the immediate survival of his circle.

"Aisella," he called out, his voice more direct this time.

He saw her standing at the gate, her posture hesitant, the look of someone who had walked into the middle of a high-stakes war council and was struggling to find her footing. "Apollo first!"

"Prioritize his restoration above all else. The rest of the plaza is secondary; handle them in whatever order your remaining reserves allow."

He turned his head slightly toward Apollo, offering a conversational, almost casual remark that felt jarringly out of place amidst the carnage.

"She knows what she is doing," he said, nodding toward Aisella. "The one I am not entirely sure about... is him."

Zane’s expression shifted into something complicated, a mixture of wounded pride, suspicion, and a flicker of genuine, terrifying uncertainty.

"Zane," Ignivara said, her voice steady despite the tension, her eyes never leaving Rex’s profile. "Do not let Apollo recover."

"Keep the pressure on. If he stabilizes, the chaos wins."

Rex didn’t wait for a reply. He was already moving, his body a blur of controlled, lethal intent, stepping back into the fray as the world around him prepared to scream once more.

...

The sky above Aethelgard was a chaotic, bruised canvas of orange and ash, a violent backdrop for a conversation about the Legion’s operational history. But the fight had dictated the venue; in aerial engagements with opponents of this caliber, the battlefield is not a chosen ground but a mathematical necessity.

They went where the geometry of their power demanded, soaring upward into the thinning air where the stakes were as high as the altitude.

Rex had forced the fight into the heavens because the plaza below was a graveyard of the wounded and the weary people; he had no intention of turning into collateral damage in a full output exchange with a half-dragon. Ignivara had followed him with predatory instinct, her golden eyes locked on his, because the sky was her true domain.

The first twenty seconds of their ascent had proven a terrifying truth: she was exponentially more lethal in the air than she had been perched upon the dragon’s back.

She was swift. It wasn’t the artificial, sweeping speed of wind-affinity users nor the jagged, instantaneous displacement of teleportation.

It was something far more visceral: the raw, terrifying speed of a creature designed for the sky. The wings that had erupted from her back at the start of the engagement weren’t a theatrical display of transformation; they were the fundamental expression of a physiology that had been mastered since her first breath.

Rex met her in the void. He applied his gravity manipulation to his own body, stripping away his weight to achieve a state of zero G, and used the elemental mastery’s wind to provide the directional thrust.

His movement was more fluid and versatile than her wing-based flight, allowing for sudden, jarring shifts in vector, even if he lacked her sheer, sustained velocity.

They danced a lethal ballet of momentum and violence.

"You were in the Underlayer," Rex shouted, his voice cutting through the whistling wind as they cleared the highest rooftops and established a combat range. "Not for Zane’s fourteen months... but yours was shorter."

"You left before the communication blackout."

Ignivara didn’t answer with words.

She lunged. From fifteen meters away, she unleashed a compressed, screaming column of superheated air.

The projectile tore through the atmosphere with a roar like a jet engine. Rex reacted instantly, weaving his fire mastery into a defensive shield that caught the thermal blast, absorbing the brunt of the heat before he redirected the energy back at her at a razor-sharp, modified angle.

Ignivara didn’t flinch. She rolled through the air with the effortless, instinctive precision of a seasoned predator, the heat of the reflected blast singeing the tips of her hair as she corrected her trajectory.

"How?" she demanded, her voice flat, devoid of the shock a normal person would feel at being read so easily.

"Your energy signature," Rex replied, his eyes tracking her every micro-movement. He surged forward, his body a streak of controlled motion. "The Underlayer’s ambient frequencies leave a specific, indelible residue in the geological layer of a person’s aura."

"It’s a spiritual fingerprint..."

"It isn’t permanent; it fades after approximately six months of surface exposure, but it’s unmistakable."

She came at him again, a blur of gold and fury. Her wing strike was a heavy, bone-crushing blow aimed at his ribs.

Rex dived, the air shrieking past his ears, and as her wing swept through the space he had just occupied, he lashed out. Using his telekinesis, he snared her extended wrist mid-swing.

With a violent, calculated jerk, he used the momentum of her own strike to wrench her off her intended angle, forcing her into a spiraling, uncontrolled descent.

"Yours is at the four-month mark," Rex yelled over the roar of the wind, his gaze piercing through the clouds. "You left exactly four months ago."

"The same moment Zane went silent."