Chapter 772: 772. They Try To Run Away? No Worries... The Lustful Villain Can Manage That!

The air was still screaming.

The sonic boom from the dragon’s final, pulverized descent was still rippling through the atmosphere, a low-frequency roar, RRRRR UUUUMMMMM, that felt like it was trying to shake the very marrow from Ignivara’s bones.

Ignivara was airborne before the message from Celestina’s communication crystal had even finished vibrating against her skin. The signal was a jagged, frantic burst of the Legion’s high-priority field withdrawal code.

It wasn’t a suggestion; it was a command that screamed, "NOW. LEAVE. SURVIVE."

She didn’t look back. She couldn’t.

If she looked back at the plaza, she would see the carnage. She would see the colossal, steaming mountain of dragon meat settling into the ruins of the city, and she would see the terrifying, godlike silhouette of the man who had just rewritten the laws of physics.

FLAP FLAP FLAP FLAP!

Her massive, leathery wings beat the air with violent, desperate force, the sheer muscle output of her half-dragon physiology pushing her toward the sky’s limit. She was a streak of fire and scales against the bruised, smoke-choked sky, her lungs burning as she pushed past the rooftop level of Aethelgard.

"Withdrawal! Get to the perimeter!" she hissed into her comms, her voice cracking with the adrenaline of a near-death experience. "The target is neutralized! The dragon is down! Gods, it’s actually down!"

Below her, the world was a chaotic hellscape of dust and screaming.

Zane was running.

Apollo had pinned him in a crushing, suffocating grip until only thirty seconds ago. The earthquake protocol had hit its second, most violent phase: a tectonic shudder, KRA KOOOOM!, that had turned the very ground into a liquid, unstable mess.

The sheer instability had forced Apollo’s grip to slip, and Zane had seized that microsecond of displacement to wrench himself free.

He was sprinting toward the outer perimeter, his boots slamming into the cracked earth—THUD, THUD, THUD— but he wasn’t just running. He was using the Void Working.

The space in front of him didn’t just move; it folded. He was eating the distance, stepping through pockets of compressed space that allowed him to cover hundreds of meters in a few frantic, lung-bursting strides.

"Celestina! Do you copy?!" Zane roared into his headset, his voice strained by the effort of maintaining the spatial folds. "The plaza is a graveyard! The dragon’s dead, but the city is falling apart!"

"I’m heading for the eastern tree line! The agricultural edge! DO YOU COPY?!"

In his ear, the static was deafening, a chaotic mess of radio interference and the distant, muffled cries of panicked citizens.

"Zane! Move!" Celestina’s voice finally broke through, frantic and thin. "The structural integrity of the northern sector is failing!"

"Get out of the impact zone! The extraction point is green, but you have to move now!"

"I’m moving! Just... just get the transport ready!" Zane yelled, his eyes darting wildly as he dodged a falling slab of masonry that slammed into the street beside him.

CRASH! SHHHH!

Ignivara angled her body, tilting her wings to catch a thermal as she banked hard toward the eastern edge.

The tree line. The rendezvous.

She could see it through the haze of smoke: a dark, jagged line of green against the burning orange of the horizon.

She felt the communication crystal in her jacket pocket grow hot, pulsing with Celestina’s desperate attempt to re-establish a stable link. Ignivara reached for it, her left hand sweeping back with the practiced, instinctive grace of a veteran aerial combatant.

She didn’t even need to look; her mind was already calculating the wind shear, the distance to the tree line, and the optimal descent angle.

She managed to get one single, frantic word into the connection before the world went silent.

"Zane"

The signal didn’t just fade; it was devoured.

A sudden, violent surge of spatial distortion ripped through the air, a sound like a giant sheet of silk being torn in half: RRRRR IIIIIP! The communication crystal’s signal was swallowed whole by a massive, localized eruption of Void Working.

It wasn’t Zane’s void working. He was on the ground, a hundred meters below her, a frantic speck of motion in the dust.

Ignivara froze in midair, her wings stalling for a terrifying heartbeat. The air around her began to warp, the light bending and twisting in a sickening, kaleidoscopic swirl. A pressure, heavy and absolute, began to descend from the heavens.

The sky didn’t just darken; it felt like it collapsed.

Slowly, her neck craning with a sense of impending dread, she looked up. A cold, primal terror, the kind that makes the blood turn to ice in the veins, surged through her.

She then saw someone...

It wasn’t the tremor. It wasn’t the mountain-shattering force of the geological authority that had just leveled the city.

This was something far more intimate and infinitely more terrifying. It was...

...the Lustful Villain.

He was hovering directly above her, a silent, predatory god silhouetted against the smoke. He wore the mask, the legendary, unreadable visage of the Underlayer, the public persona of Lord Xerollion.

The mask offered no eyes to meet, no mouth to smile, just a flat, porcelain void that gave nothing away. It was a face that stripped away the humanity of whoever looked at it, leaving only the raw, naked sensation of being hunted.

"No..." Ignivara whispered, her voice trembling, the scales on her neck bristling. "Not him... Not now..."

She banked hard, her wings snapping shut to pivot her body in a desperate, instinctive attempt to lose him.

WHIP CRACK!

He followed. He didn’t flap.

He didn’t use the wind. He didn’t obey the laws of aerodynamics that her half-dragon biology demanded.

He simply moved, drifting through the air with a sickening, effortless grace, as if gravity were merely a suggestion he chose to ignore. He was a predator cutting through water.

Below, Zane burst through the treeline, his lungs screaming, his boots skidding in the dirt.

SKREEEE!

He had reached the extraction point, but he stopped dead. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.

He looked up, and the color drained from his face, leaving him a ghostly pale.

"Ignivara..." Zane choked out, his voice barely a whimper. "Get out of there! GET OUT!"

The lustful villain looked down at them. He had chosen his altitude with a terrifying, calculated precision.

He was high enough to force them to crane their necks, making them feel small and vulnerable, yet close enough that they could see every microscopic, haunting detail of the mask. He wasn’t just there; he had positioned himself to be seen.

He was a centerpiece of impending doom.

"One of you needs to tell me." Rex’s voice drifted down from behind the mask.

It was calm. Too calm.

It was the voice of a man discussing the weather while standing in the middle of a massacre. "Where Solmordia is..."

Zane gripped the hilt of his weapon, his knuckles white, his legs shaking despite his best efforts. "Damn it..."

"You... you’re not going to get that from either of us!" he yelled, his voice cracking with a mixture of defiance and sheer, unadulterated dread.

"I am going to get it from one of you," Rex replied, the tone remaining chillingly level. "The question is simply which one... and how long it takes."

The tension snapped.

"Eat this!" Ignivara screamed, her terror turning into a frantic, violent desperation.

She thrust her hands forward, unleashing a massive, superheated blast of working air.

FROOOOOOOM!

A lance of shimmering, white-hot compressed air tore through the sky toward him.

Rex didn’t flinch. With a casual flick of his wrist, he intercepted the blast, his Elemental Mastery twisting the air into a searing vortex of fire.

WHOOOOOOSH!

He didn’t just block it; he modified it. He took her heat and amplified it, turning her own attack into a roaring, intensified sun of flame, and hurled it back at her.

The heat hit Ignivara like a physical hammer.

SHHHHHHH!

Her skin hissed, and the smell of singed scales filled the air. She gritted her teeth, her biological heat resistance working overtime to keep her internal organs from boiling in her own veins.

She barely managed to absorb the impact, her wings fluttering wildly to stabilize her, before she banked hard to the left to avoid a second strike.

"You are deploying your biological heat resistance," Rex observed, his voice tracking her arc with the precision of a radar system. He wasn’t even breathing hard. "The half-dragon’s thermal tolerance is significantly above the human baseline."

"Tell me... what is the upper threshold?"

Ignivara swerved through a cloud of smoke, her eyes blazing with fury and fear.

"It’s above anything you can generate!" she spat back, her voice strained from the heat.

"I generated the elemental discharge that took down your dragon," Rex countered, his presence looming over her like a shadow of death. "That discharge registered at approximately four times the thermal output of your full-form fire."

"I am asking because I want to know where the threshold is..."

He paused, and for a moment, the air felt heavy enough to crush them both.

"...before I find it empirically."

"And believe me, Ignivara... finding it empirically will be much, much less comfortable for you."