The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 149. I Interrupted the Demon Lord’s Council Meeting to Complain

Chapter 149: 149. I Interrupted the Demon Lord’s Council Meeting to Complain

Rex stared at her for a second. The city’s lights were starting to come on behind him as the sky changed from late afternoon to early evening.

The light out here was clear and unfiltered, which made everything look exactly as it was.

"Get the fuck... up," he told her with a cold voice. "Kneeling doesn’t help me forget the failure you’ve caused."

She got up right away, and she had the same look on her face as when she wasn’t trying to hide her feelings for his sake. She was just there with what she was really feeling, which, in this case, was a mix of guilt and something more complicated that Rex’s Emotional Insight read as self-directed anger.

Rex crossed his arms. "Speak."

"T-The floor preparation worked..." She said, "And... the isolation also worked!"

"The constructs created exactly the chaos you needed... but... the only thing that didn’t work was the maids finishing what they started."

"Exactly," Rex said. "How does it feel, actually?"

"You all probably feel like some kind of useless frauds who CAN’T do ONE SIMPLE FUCKING JOB!" Rex said, with his tone rising higher and higher.

Lilith flinched and quickly reasoned. "S-She was... stronger than any of us thought!"

"Much-much stronger...! At the output level, she was able to keep up coherent attacks through the last phase of that engagement, and she was running on something other than energy reserves."

The berserker class in this scenario could endure for such an extended period under these circumstances, and she possesses the resolve to remain alive despite all this time...!

"I know what she was running on," Rex said. "That’s a separate fucking problem."

"What I need from you right now is to take me to Mordecai because I’d rather report your actions to your fucking boss."

Lilith blinked. "R-Right now?"

"Right now."

"Well... I’m sorry to tell you this, but... he’s in the middle of the evening council." Lilith covered her eyes. "It’s that time for the weekly operational—"

"I don’t fucking care!" Rex stepped on the ground harder. "You’ll take me to him now!"

She looked at him for one more second, trying to discern if there was any possibility for negotiation in his expression, but found nothing useful and nodded. "Yes, Master... I’ll open the channel now." 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

...

It took the same seventeen seconds to teleport to the Underlayer as it always did, which was the exact amount of time it took for the depth and dimensional step involved. When it was over, Rex was in the antechamber of Castle Nocturna, and the city of Erebus’s Rest was glowing through the windows in its underground bioluminescent glow.

Lilith was beside him. She announced their arrival to the guard at the inner door with the authority of someone who had clearance and had used it enough times that the guard did not question the timing, only recorded it.

The throne room was occupied.

Mordecai was in the middle of a sentence when the doors opened. He was standing near a map table with three of his council members around him and Cassandra to his right.

When Rex walked in, he looked up with the look of someone who hadn’t expected this and was quickly deciding whether to be angry or worried.

Rex didn’t give him a chance to choose between the two.

"Sorry to barge in at such a bad time, but I’m here to discuss something important," Rex said as he walked slowly across the throne room floor to the map table, as if he owned the space. "We need to talk about what they didn’t get done today."

Mordecai’s expression settled into something careful. His council members were silent, reading the room.

Cassandra’s gaze shifted from Rex to Lilith and back, reflecting the focused attention she applied to anything that entered this room with an unannounced agenda.

"Do you even have any respect right now?" Cassandra asked, but Mordecai stopped her with just a raise of a hand.

Mordecai said. "Tell me."

Rex stopped on the near side of the map table and looked at Mordecai through it.

"I gave them a plan," Rex said. "A complete one."

"Target identification, timing, positioning, environmental preparation, a constructed distraction with sufficient scale to cover the operation’s window, and a backup extraction route."

He laid it out evenly, not raising his voice, because raising his voice was for people who needed volume to carry weight. "Everything depended on your maids finishing one job in a safe, private place against a single target who was already tired from a long fight."

He stopped so that Mordecai could feel the exact size of what he was about to say.

"She lived through it..."

The throne room was so quiet that it felt like everyone was holding their breath.

"T-That’s impossible... I sent my best available unit from my Gacha system too," Mordecai said.

His voice had a slightly defensive tone, as if he knew that being defensive wasn’t the right tone but couldn’t find the right one fast enough. "There must have been an error."

"You sent a unit that didn’t know what the target’s actual output ceiling was." Rex said, "An Inferno Berserker at full activation is not the same as an Inferno Berserker in regular combat."

The assessment your maids were working from was based on observed classroom behavior and one monster expedition."

"Neither of those sources tells you what that class does when the person running it decides that surviving is a secondary priority."

"She prioritized the signal over staying alive," Cassandra said from Mordecai’s right.

Her voice was precise and not particularly sympathetic to either side of the conversation. "That kind of thing is difficult to plan around."

"It is," Rex said, looking at Cassandra for just long enough to agree, "which is why the backup plan for a target that fights past their survival instinct should have been a numbers advantage big enough to beat any output level, not three maids and a ring of standard constructs."

He looked back at Mordecai. "The operation failed because your assets weren’t ready for the person they were sent against."

"That’s an intelligence failure, and it’s the fault of the people who gave the intelligence assessment." He let that sink in. "In this case, the fault lies with the four maids who reported back prior to the mission."

Mordecai turned to look at Lilith, and then Lilith stared at the floor, feeling disappointed for herself. Three feet of stone to her left was the exact spot where demons and monsters looked when they knew a certain conversation was going to land on them.

Mordecai’s face changed into something that Rex recognized as the shape of institutional anger getting ready to choose a target.

"Cassandra," he said.

Cassandra understood the instruction without needing it repeated. "As you wish, my lord."

She turned toward Lilith with the particular quality of movement that came from someone for whom violence was a natural language, not theatrical, but the most efficient way to express a certain category of message.

"No," said Rex.

Mordecai stared at him.

Rex said, "They do deserve consequences, but executing your intelligence assets for a failed mission teaches your remaining assets to underreport uncertainty rather than eliminate their own failure rate."

"You want them to be able to accurately assess targets." He kept his voice calm. "If you kill them for an inaccurate assessment, you get maids who lie to you instead of accurate maids."

Mordecai was quiet, and Rex could see that he was thinking about it and coming to the right conclusion, even though it felt like he was losing something.

"What do you propose instead?" Mordecai asked.

"I want repayment for the failure," Rex replied, meeting his gaze. "I want something useful, not their lives."

"Name it."

"Your dead soldiers," Rex stated.

The silence that came after that statement was different from the one that came before it.

Cassandra’s expression changed, and it was the first time Rex had seen it change in a way that wasn’t about assessment or tactical response. It was something older and more personal than either of those things.

"Our dead soldiers...?!"

"The demon burial grounds are sacred," she said, and her voice was even, but there was a heaviness in the evenness that wasn’t there when she spoke normally. "The warriors buried there died while serving the Demon Lord’s house!"

"What you’re suggesting is a desecration."

"It’s more like..." Rex said, "I’m suggesting a deployment."

Cassandra said in a high tone, "There is no difference about it!"

Rex stared at her. "There IS a big difference."

"A desecration takes something away from a place and makes it less valuable. What I’m suggesting doesn’t make them less valuable; it gives them a purpose they don’t have anymore." He let the pause grow. "They’re already dead, Cassandra."

"Remembering them in their current state instead of leaving them in the ground doesn’t change the honor they had in life."

"You don’t know anything about what demons owe their dead," she said. Her voice was not angry, but it was close enough to it that the distance was small.

"I get that your side lost the attack on Aethelgard and a lot of your troops," Rex said. "I know that Mordecai’s gacha system gives out ten pulls every day, so it will take months of good luck to make up for even a small part of the losses."

"I also know that the Apostle gathering is tomorrow and that the people who go to it are there to plan how to find and destroy this city." He looked directly at Cassandra. "I’m giving you a way to get back what you lost, but not with new soldiers."

"Instead, I’m giving you soldiers who are already trained, experienced, and dead, so they can’t be killed again that easily."