The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!-Chapter 180. I Took Off My Shirt. And Science Was Temporarily Paused.

Chapter 180: 180. I Took Off My Shirt. And Science Was Temporarily Paused.

He still hadn’t made up his mind if that was a problem.

Talyra was still standing on the rocks. She expertly gripped the draw of her bow, as if she had made the decision to wait for further information.

As the elder and the other creatures ran into the trees, she slowly let go of the tension and lowered her bow without letting go of the arrow.

She turned to Rex.

"That... was..." she said and couldn’t finish the word.

Rex looked at her back. "What was?"

"That thing you just did," she said, sounding like someone who had decided to talk about what they had just seen and was figuring out how to. "All of them at once...!"

"That was—"

"Telekinesis in a lot of situations," Rex said. "Well, let’s just say I’ve improved it slightly."

"You weren’t moving and doing that in the dungeon," Talyra said, with the accuracy of someone who had been watching Rex closely for the past week and had seen how other people fought.

"I was managing the dungeon engagement," Rex said. "This is different."

Aisella asked from behind him, "How different?"

"Probably not much of a difference."

He turned around. At some point during the engagement, she had moved without him knowing where she was.

Now, she was crouching at the edge of the tree line where the elder had been, looking at something in the dark volcanic sand.

"Prints," she said without looking up from what she was looking at. "The pattern is bilateral and symmetric, which means that whatever this is, it developed bipedalism on its own, without any help from anything in the standard catalog."

She stood up. "And to answer my own question, Rex, I think the difference is that you weren’t trying to hold yourself back just now."

"It seems like you have your own reason for doing that, but I respect it..."

She had that look on her face that she always had when she knew she had said the right thing.

[TALYRA SKYDANCER: DESIRE LEVEL — 44/100 → 58/100]

[AISELLA MOONBLOOM: DESIRE LEVEL — 52/100 → 63/100]

Rex read both notifications with the peripheral calm he brought to system data and said, "We should establish a perimeter before we set up the camp."

"I want to know the area before we put anything in it... just to make sure no more creatures come to mess with us."

Talyra looked at the line of trees, then at Rex, and then back at the line of trees.

"Also," she said, "you should know that I am going to ask you about that at some point, and I expect a real answer."

Rex said, "Alright, alright, I’ll give you one," which was technically true because he would give her some kind of answer.

Whether it was complete was a separate question.

Talyra seemed to be in a state of contentment that was different from her usual forward energy. This feeling was a quieter presence beneath her usual energy.

She said, "Okay," in a way that made it clear she had decided that for now, okay was enough.

...

It took about ninety minutes for three people with standard supplies to set up the base camp, which was what Elizabeth’s field guide said it would take. Rex then used telekinesis to speed up the parts of the construction process that were hard work but not skill work by about forty percent.

Talyra and Aisella observed this with expressions that reflected a newfound calm. They had moved past the initial phase of "this is strange" and entered the next phase of "I am reconsidering what is normal for this person," which felt like a more comfortable place to be.

The camp was on a natural rock shelf that protected them from the wind on the inland side and gave them a higher view of the coast and the cave openings.

Rex built two sleeping shelters and one shared space for supplies and preparation that was bigger than it needed to be because the assessment criteria rewarded research quality, and research quality needed a place to work.

It was warm in the late morning, with the kind of heat that came from the sun reflecting off dark volcanic rock and the trees blocking the wind before it reached the shore.

Rex pulled a palm frond from the grove at the camp’s east edge, directed the work of processing it with the casual application of telekinesis that he was starting to feel, on this island, like simply how things were done, and produced a pair of coconuts from the upper section of the same tree while he was there.

He put them down next to Aisella, who was writing notes on a research sheet at the camp’s work surface.

She stared at the coconuts. Then at him.

"You weren’t going to ask," he noticed the way she was looking at him.

"I was going to ask," she said.

"You were going to wait until I wasn’t looking and then figure it out yourself, right?" He laughed.

Aisella thought about this for a moment, her face showing that she was telling the truth.

"Yes," she said. "But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have asked at some point..."

Rex opened one with a flat-edged tool from the field kit and put it in front of her. Then he looked at the temperature and his own shirt and decided that the temperature won.

"Phew... it’s getting hot in here," Rex looked at the girls. "Do you two mind if I take off my shirt?"

"Well, if you’re brave enough..." Aisella replied while writing on her note.

Talyra replied with a laugh. "This is the beach, Rexy~! Just take off your shirt and enjoy it while having another tan, even though your body is already tanned enough."

"Alright then..."

He took the shirt off and put it on the corner of the supply crate. By the time they were done building the shelter, the sun on the volcanic rock had reached a steady thirty-two degrees, so the shirt was doing more harm than good at this point.

The sound Talyra made was very small and very involuntary and was immediately covered by her making a completely different sound that was supposed to be the sound of someone noticing something in the treeline.

Rex did not look at her directly, and it seems like one of his plans worked.

"Yeah... this is it; any woman would savor my perfect physique like this, and they couldn’t deny it in their minds."

Aisella’s pen made a slight hesitation in the stroke it had been in the middle of completing, which was invisible to anyone who was not watching for it.

Rex was keeping an eye out for it.

He picked up the second coconut, took a drink, and put it back down with the ease of someone who didn’t know what effect he was having and was too hot to care about a shirt.

The effect on his companions, for the record, was what a body produced when it had been through infinite regeneration-assisted healing for several weeks and had a baseline metabolic efficiency that sat significantly above the normal human range.

The practical result of this was a build that was not the theatrical kind of muscular that came from deliberate cultivation but the functional kind that came from a body allocating resources exactly where they were needed and not wasting them anywhere.

It seems that Talyra had noticed this in great detail.

Rex let the fact that the girls were looking at him go without saying anything about it. Saying something would mean that one of them had to admit that they were looking at him, and that admission was worth more being put off than being dealt with right away.

He sat down across from Aisella at the work surface and asked, "What do the notes say about the distribution of the creature population?"

"The elder went northeast. If the nesting behavior follows the usual pack structure, most of the population will be inland from that direction."

Aisella shifted her focus from the portion of her attention that had been directed elsewhere, which was smaller than Talyra’s, but still present, and she looked at the resource profile.

She said, "The profile marks the northeastern quadrant as having the highest estimated biodiversity," with the professional precision of someone who had just returned to work and was being very thorough about it.

"Which makes sense because that’s where the cave system’s water source connects in that direction."

Rex said, "That’s also where the entrance to the dungeon is, according to the survey markers."

"Tomorrow," Aisella said.

"Tomorrow," Rex repeated.

"We’re going to do the shore survey and collect surface resources today."